Challenge 4 - Build or buy to bridge barren bookability:
For airlines and other supplier direct sales operations, this challenge is actually their biggest opportunity and potentially their greatest strength in moving to an end game in traveler inspiration in which they control.
A big reason why airline websites did not lose more sales to OTAs is that the OTAs, whilst being better at inspiration, are far from perfect. And the sites that do it well today fail to adequately bridge the gap from inspiration to booking.
I mentioned in part three that TripAdvisor is probably the closest to bridging the chasm that exists between inspiration and booking.
But as the quote below from the October 2009 PhoCusWright report Online Traffic and Conversion Report: Metasearch, Reviews and Other Nontransactional Categories shows, even Tripadvisor has a long way to go to master this challenge.
“TripAdvisor recently [2009] added flight search functionality, making it possible for travelers to conduct a search for flights from a range of airlines and multiple OTAs (including TripAdvisor’s parent Expedia). The flight search tool immediately drew significant traffic. Growing from 5.4% in March 2009 to 8.6% in June. The latter usage rate nearly matches that for hotel booking search, which increased only slightly over the past year and a half, making it unclear whether either search engine will break the 10% usage threshold in the near future.”
This barren field will one day blossom, and when it does, transactional booking sites that did not evolve will have to pay dearly for the qualified traffic delivered by the inspiration engines; and/or they will continue paying high prices to search engines for less qualified traffic.
The much better option is to seriously address the question of: How do I as a transactional site extend my reach further to the left of the Bow Tie and influence potential customers at an earlier stage?
In the words of Henry Harteveldt of Forrester, this is a “missed opportunity to capture engage and guide.” Harteveldt tells me he was amazed that to date there has been “no effort made by travel companies to make this happen".
What is currently the biggest weakness with the inspiration sites that exist today also reveals their biggest threat. Imagine Google coming into the game with Google Checkout.
[NB: Google Checkout issue also addressed in Six things Google could do next in travel]
Existing players in inspiration need to get closer to completing the booking (or at a minimum establish a strong paid referral business), and the suppliers wanting to enter this space need to think long and hard about whether inspiration is really their core competency, or whether they will have more success by bringing their strong asset of booking and fulfillment to the table in negotiating a partnership with someone already in the inspiration game today.