For those of us who work in the travel reservation system software world we tend to be optimising and commoditising ideas that were first mooted in the late 1990s.
The announcement of an API hardly excites and what is going on in the social media world seems very remote.
Yet change is coming.
First some history. Reservation systems are effectively accounting systems. I can bore people with detail about how one country has certain tax regulations requiring bookings to be accounted for in different ways.
Indeed, if someone mentions US state specific tax law I might completely lose the plot (especially, for obvious reasons, as it is based on the customer address - which you only tend to find out almost at the very end of the booking process - normally after the price is quoted etc).
In a reservation system the customer record is not much more than a name, address and contact details.
So then we built better reservation systems. These held customer records as discrete entities to a booking record. If a customer happens to book several times then these are associated with the same customer record and you can see what is happening.
Hardly a massive step forwards but even this defeats most tour operator reservation system providers (and before anyone asks, yes we are not perfect on this either, it actually isn't that trivial).
Then we get dedicated travel CRM systems such as Pro Eq, now owned by Comtec.
Pro Eq changed the game. No longer was a customer record a side-effect of a booking, but a booking was a side-effect of a customer record. Hence it did a great job of understanding that it was the same customer that booked multiple times.
The system facilitates marketing based on prior customer behaviour. And it manages complaints nicely. (Incidentally, I have never understood why complaints should be handled efficiently. Surely by handling them inefficiently this gives greater incentive to stop the cause of the complaint in the first place.... but I fear I am digressing)
So now we have customer records as a side-effect of bookings and bookings as side-effects of dealing with customers.
Seems kind of logical really. Yet here comes the next step. Conversations. Yeah that social thing.
Now we work with a lot of small tour operators/activity providers. Conversations are pretty much what they do. When someone starts talking about booking with them they tend to email/phone the supplier and ask a few questions.
The supplier replies. The customer replies, etc etc - a horrible and inefficient loop, but try to remove the human from the process and you will lose bookings.
With the budgets that most small tour operators have, humans are much better at selling than the website will be.
At the large tour operator end it is different - they have very good (but sterile) websites and a call centre full of underpaid, inexperienced, staff - so of course, for them, driving people to the website is best, or least worst perhaps.
Unfortunately it is the larger companies that get to be invited to speak at conferences which leads the smaller (by choice) tour operators/activity providers to aspire to be something they really shouldn't be!
So, back to conversations. What we need is a new system (and remember these are pretty much the biggest IT investments a tour operator will make).
What we need are systems that manage conversations. Both customer and booking records are side-effects of the conversation.
Now I know this sounds odd, but imagine you are at a social event somewhere... You are happy having a conversation even if you are not totally clear who you are talking to. Hence a conversation is a separate entity to both the customer and a booking record.
Yet these conversations convert to tailor-made tour requests. These conversations create bookings. This is nothing new - small tour operators have been talking to customers for years. Social media might be new but the concept of conversations isn't.
The future of travel reservation systems is CRM - but the C now represents conversations.
This will not happen overnight but it will happen eventually. The problem is that most innovators in this space are still tied in knots delivering the ideas we as an industry had in 2002-2005...