Travel Marketing in the Age of Web 2.0 & Beyond

More from PhoCusWright

During the recent conference I had the opportunity to talk to some companies that were not presenting at the Travel Innovation Summit or on Center Stage but offer innovative solutions that have already, or will in future, appear on our radar screens: Is a site that offers a trip planning tool based on personal preferences. This is the direction sites have to go as the attention clearly shifts to the process that takes place prior to the actual booking and where the experience still too often disappoints. Tripbase takes a shot at improving this. It's not perfect as the results often don't change enough when preferences are adjusted but no site I've come across so far offers the perfect solution.
Another one is Founded by former Expedia Europe executives, TVtrip provide professionally produced hotel videos which are by now an essential part of any trip decision, especially for leisure trips with an extended stay. Who wants to end up in a dump for the most precious days of the year? They are expanding rapidly across with properties across the globe and with the right partnerships to drive traffic could become a player in this segment.
The tag line of is "Empowering the frequent flyer" and expertflyer certainly delivers on that, based on a demo I received from their CEO, Chris Lopinto. This is a very useful tool for the road - or should we say Air - warriors out there who hold a gazillion frequent flyer miles and want to make the best use of them for upgrades and flights. The site has real time tracking of seat availability for miles upgrades and live seat maps so you can view which seats remain available. Of course, the data can also be accessed and viewed on mobile phones, essential when you're on the road. Looks like worth the price of admission to me, although I no longer really qualify based on my limited flying nowadays!
Last but by no means least there is they have morphed from what initially was a restaurant booking service to a technology provider for all kinds of ancillary services that provide incremental revenue to a range of companies as diverse as Amtrak, KLM, Air Canada, Mastercard and Priceline. With major companies focusing on their core business, this seems the type of solution that has a strong position in the marketplace by delivering the platform necessary to maximize customer value.
These companies are just a few more examples of how the travel industry is undergoing constant change by having innovators adding value, or eliminating friction in what still is often an inefficient market full of complexities in the access to and distribution of services to a huge audience of increasingly savvy travelers. Exciting to be part of it and observe who will be the winners in the next phase of the web.

This is a sad state of affairs

reported in this latest survey revealing that Stressed Americans Leave 460 Million Vacation Days Unused. It used to be that the Japanese were the workaholics but now they seem to have been replaced by Americans. By international comparison the amount of vacation days in the U.S. is already very low and it seems many people don't even take those in full.

It's quite a loss to the travel industry as a whole when we imagine that at least a certain percentage of these people would spend their days away from home. Not a statistic of which we should be proud!

Technorati Tags: vacation, travel, tourism

Yahoo Search Casts Lots with Semantic Web Technology

reports MarketingVOX. This is further proof of improved search becoming a reality in the not too distant future and here's a quote relevant to travel

For example, instead of searching for hotels in Miami and having to sift through results that include hotels, travel vendors and hotel deals, one could query for Miami hotels that allow pets, are five minutes from the beach and cost no more than $150 per night.

It will be interesting to observe how the travel meta-search companies will react to the major searchers offering more relevant results.

Here's part of the discussion at the ITB

Embedded Video

on the topic of journalists vs bloggers which covered a wide range of opinions expressed by the panel.  Adding to my opinion recorded in the video, I consider B2B travel blogs a valuable resource for leaders working in the travel industry, one they should use to keep abreast of what’s happening now and what will happen tomorrow on the web and how this will affect their business. As I mentioned, the purpose of this blog at least, is to add knowledge which, as Ram my fellow panelist mentioned, is different from information.

B2B bloggers come from different backgrounds that influence their opinions about travel and the issues the industry faces. This adds a layer of personal interpretation to the basic information out there one that creates value. Taken together these opinions and comments, can be utilized by people in the industry, who are often very focused on their immediate tasks and challenges facing their companies or organization. 

Bloggers mostly have personal business experience in different sectors of the industry and that is another key difference between them and more traditional trade journalists. So the issue is not one of “us vs. them” but to combine the skill sets of both for an improved overall result that adds to the overall quality of the world’s largest industry.

Tags: blogs, bloggers, travel, T-List,

Online travel satisfaction continues to decline

this study, the American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI), released today by the University of Michigan with e-commerce partner ForeSee Results is a wake-up call mostly for the online travel agencies, but if I were a travel supplier I wouldn't be too pleased about myself either.

It clearly shows that the low hanging fruit in selling travel online have by now all been picked. The pace is picking up as far as innovation and foremost improvement of the buying experience is concerned.

Consumer expectations have been raised by those other online categories, especially retail with companies like Amazon leading the way. The fact that it requires much more complex technology to sell a complete vacation online, especially one tailor made to customer requirements, than selling books, records, DVDs etc. is not relevant to the discussion, a the online shopper doesn't know or care.

What needs to happen, is a step-up in technology that allows for more personalization and a combination of the various travel tools that are out there but only address part of the total chain in travel research, planning and buying. The whole process has to become seamless and performed on one site, as is the case with online retail. The customer expects no less in travel and as we all know, a successful business depends on satisfying customers.

It's pretty much a no-brainer why!

Hotelmarketing has a long post on Why “David” Virtuoso can coexist with Goliath “Expedia” which deals anew with the much predicted demise of travel agents proclaimed a few years ago. This, of courses, has not happened as that much hyped demise was never in the cards. What nobody can deny either, is that the number of  travel agents has not only shrunk considerably, but that the "order takers" sitting a a green screen and selling the easiest to sell deal to an uneducated consumer have indeed gone the way of the dodo bird.

That Virtuoso members never were in the latter category is known by pretty much anyone who knows anything about the U.S. travel industry. It might - despite a pretty effective PR machine - not have been a known fact in the public at large and the mainstream media who now use their success as proof that nothing has changed and the equally foolish prediction is being made that the online players like Expedia and Travelocity are history.

What tends to go unreported in this discussion is the fact that any intermediary between customer and supplier that does not add value will most likely disappear in today's travel 2.0 market with total transparency and a better educated travel consumer than ever before. It doesn't matter whether you are a "David" or a "Goliath" as in this market size really doesn't matter.

Tags: travel, travel 2.0, virtuso, travel agents

Asian Hospitality over North America

Here's what is for me an off-topic post and in today's airline travel environment in the U.S. I would be hard pressed to post anything positive or memorable on my blog related to trips taken by air.

All the rarer was my extremely pleasant experience with Cathay Pacific returning to New York from Vancouver last week. Of course, being able to enjoy business class was a treat in itself, with flatbeds in a private cubicle like environment to relax in and enjoy the amenities, but what struck me most was the Asian hospitality provided by the mostly Chinese crew.  I had nearly forgotten how used I was when living in Asia years back, to be welcomed on board with a warm smile by people who genuinely seem to enjoy their job and to provide a pleasant experience to their customers in the air.

What a welcome change from what is all too often the case in these parts!

Tags: airlines, cathay pacific, service

Travolution Blog: Autumn Conference

Can meta search move beyond flights and price? raises a valid question.

Ever since the start of online travel the focus has always been on the lowest price. This was reinforced by most media stories and became the mantra, much to the detriment of online travel agencies, who after all are intermediaries, and need to make profit to survive.

With the introduction of meta search that focus became even stronger, with added transparency making price comparison total.

Paul Furner is right that there needs to be more than price in the equation as otherwise all travel risks to be commoditized even further, as has largely happened with airplane seats, not the least due to their dominant share in the overall online travel market.

What's disappointing, is that many travelers seem to no longer realize that in travel - as any other product or service - you get what you pay for!

The sooner the developments now starting to be seen on the semantic - or intelligent - web become available for use in travel the better. This type of enhanced data will very likely make meta search better and develop in the direction of adding more evaluation criteria than price.

Tags: metasearch, travel,

Humanizing the digital travel experience

is the title of a new Forrester Report that Travel Weekly's Arnie Weismann comments on. If by "humanizing" the report means to say that the clock needs to be turned back to a pre-digital travel experience, it seems to me as a non-starter. Commodity products / services such as an airline seat can no longer be sold profitably that way. We might as well feel nostalgic about the black rotary phone!

In the much discussed area of complex travel, the human element in the form of an expert travel counsellor still plays a role and will also in future, using the digital tools available to the trade as well as the public. This added value will gladly be paid for by many travelers who mostly are time, not information, starved. As long as the digital experience to research, plan and book such travel is not improved, this is where the humanizing plays out.

Now, what will happen in this context, as the technology being developed for the next phase of the web as it evolves beyond 2.0  in the next five to ten years remains to be seen. With the advent of this semantic web, data will become more intelligent and online travel technology will become more than what today is still often the cumbersome melding of legacy systems with web 2.0 mashups and user generated content, all thrown in the mix.

Will this make for a more "humanized" experience? Probably not, but the digital experience will be so much improved that it might actually feel that way.

Tags: onlinetravel, web3.0, semantic web,

Travel sites focus on conversion, as competition is set to heat up

this latest study done in the UK says. I find the title misleading, as the word "should" is missing. As in "travel sites should" focus on conversion, which I don't see thm actually doing. If they did, more of the tools generally described under the web 2.0 label for lack of a better term, would be seen on the major travel player's websites.

The figures in this report pretty much mirror what's been reported elsewhere in the past few months about the market, both in the UK, Europe and the U.S. In general, the public is using the web as the major travel research and planning tool and a great many want to use it also for booking. The reason they don't actually book there is due to a still very often disappointing customer experience. As long as that is the case, I doubt that the players are actually focusing on conversion but rather on attracting traffic.

What the online traveler actually doesn't need are dozens more new websites offering the latest cool web 2.0 inspired tools but only offering one part of the online travel buying experience. What's the use of a great hotel video website when the booking then has to take place on another site and the air booking on another one still, and then comes the car rental or train ticket and the dinner reservation, and it goes on and on - all on different sites!

No, what's needed for conversion to increase is a new and improved, comprehensive, one-stop shopping experience for the entire travel product. At the risk of repeating myself, as I've said this so many times in the past, a true dynamic packaging, multiple-component, multi-destination planning, research and buying experience is what customers deserve and want, although I haven't seen them  describing this in any major study yet.

Eventually this will happen over the next few years, as the technology keeps evolving, with data talking to data and intelligent agents doing the hard work in the background, resulting in less work by users at the front end. The age of the semantic, or intelligent web then becomes a reality. Some will call it web 3.0, which doesn't matter as long as the reality is what brings better business results.

Tags: onlinetravel, technology, semantic web, intelligent web,