NB: This is a guest post by Nico Crisafulli, Social Media Manager at AirTreks.
If you’ve spent any time looking to plan or purchase travel online you probably know what a noisy place it’s all become.
Well-designed, angel-funded websites are popping up like mushrooms after a rainstorm, each clamoring to deliver travel in a way you’ve never seen done before, and mostly patently failing to live up to their own hype.
What a dilemma.
Travel tech has dropped the ball
Since the rise of the “Web 2.0” there has been a significant increase in travel planning tools on the Internet, from taxi fare calculators to itinerary sharing software to automated booking engines, and at the core of each business model is the friendliest user-experience you’ve ever seen.
When you look at the sheer number of sites birthed in the last five years, and there are a lot, you begin to see an alarming trend: that the number is actually inversely proportionate to the ease in which we can get things done on the Web.
It calls to question whether there is simply too much information, too many choices, a sense of overkill that throttles your browsing esprit de corps before you even get to task. I like to call it “click fatigue”.
While the selection of resources online are numerous, hours spent in front of a computer screen does not always equal serious productivity for the end user. At least for me – the more time I spend researching the less likely I am to actually feel good about the time I’ve spent doing it. And while many sites have simplified (and beautified) the process, none have been genuinely effective in smoothing out a complicated trip’s various moving parts, and fewer still can grasp the trip as a whole, which to me is the goal.
A few of these sites claim to take away the painful, old-fashioned methods of planning travel – phone calls, back and forth emails, waiting around while actual people do things – but my experience is that travel consumers are still perfectly content to have those conversations, provided they feel it serves a purpose in the end. A slick UI simply cannot provide the sense of guardianship a human travel agent historically brings to the table.
With respect to the long-term travel niche, a pastime for which there is growing interest, the process of choosing the right place to plan and purchase is typically connected to a deep sense of soul-searching. It’s a process that gravitates toward a knowledgeable expert, as opposed to a team of bearded twenty-something developers that may or may not have any industry experience whatsoever.
Travel is an incredibly personal experience, right down to the act of buying it, and while our overly tech-saturated culture begs us to place our intimacy into the stewardship of a computer algorithm, the idea hasn’t been as quick to be adopted as some of these startups had hoped. Human-to-computer interaction just hasn’t replaced the desire for contextual human guidance, the divine spark so to speak, as part of the planning and booking process, and that doesn’t seem to want to change any time soon.
A recent NYT article stated that “in a recent test of agents versus online search engines, agents won nearly every time…on both price (the objective part of the test) and service (what you might call the essay question). In other words, the agents suggested alternate routes, gave advice on visas and just generally acted, well, more human than their computer counterparts.”
I’m calling it The Matrix Quotient: the overriding mistrust of a computer’s ability to fulfill our needs as travelers.
Perhaps once we’ve been shown that there can be no disruptions in the process, no glitches, bugs, crashes, or 503 errors, once everything works correctly 100% of the time, once the chaff has been separated, the automated booking process will begin to grow on us.
Until then the travel agent will remain uniquely relevant.
Travel tech doesn’t quite get it
As much as the social travel web is varied and diverse, there’s still an obvious disconnect between the media and the person using it. It doesn’t help that the greater majority of web-based travel startups are simply tech companies dressed up at travel services, Johnny-come-latelys created with the idea that if you build it, they will come, pawning off a shiny user-interface as a bona fide travel service.
Do we really have faith that an "if/then" JavaScript statement can provide an experience with our best interests in mind?
I feel it’s why travel consumers aren’t quite ready to go all in and embrace startups as their primary source for planning and purchasing travel. Perhaps it’s because the information is unsatisfactory. Perhaps people are inherently dubious of the choices from a Google SERP.
Maybe people just don’t trust themselves to know what to look for, or that a clear automated front-runner has yet to surface, but one thing is apparent: as enticing as it is to have automatically generated results spread out before you, their reliability remains suspect, and until the typical travel startup recognizes this, success will prove elusive.
The case for non-automation and the longevity of the human equation
Travel is a many-headed beast, something every traveler knows, and every human travel agent never fails to take into account. There’s a deeper complexity to grasp and it requires a 30,000 foot view to see it, a concept that’s extremely difficult to program into a piece of software.
But even as programmers get more adept at building tools to do the heavy lifting, they’re still missing the point. People don’t necessarily want faster, they don’t want prettier, they want better. They want personalization, as opposed to gaily accepting regurgitated lists of results produced by a dense block of source code.
To get their “better," people will remain incredibly tolerant of the time a travel agent needs to do his work, perhaps due to the fact that they know every extra minute is one more where their needs are being considered.
Gary Belsky from Time.com sums it up perfectly: “For all the benefits and opportunities of online commerce and engagement, there is great comfort to be found in actual one-on-one encounters… particularly those that offer guidance in the face of a wide open field filled with countless options.”
Hey, I’m as much of a tech lover as the next guy, and for every new site that emerges on the scene I get excited because it means we’ve taken another step toward our Eureka moment, that day when someone actually brings to the table a service that can finally and unequivocally connect all the dots.
Until then, we the travel agents will be at your service. We will be standing by.
NB: This is a guest post by Nico Crisafulli, Social Media Manager at AirTreks.
NB 2: Travel office image courtesy of Shutterstock.