No marketplace is exempt from competitors that offer a better product.
Quote from Peter O’Connor, professor at Essec Business School, in an article on PhocusWire this week.
Evolution warning: Are hotel owners in danger of becoming the new taxi drivers?
Disruption (that over-used word again, and again) is a concept that has hit the travel industry for decades.
Apart from, say, the introduction of the low-cost carrier model in aviation, technology has been at the heart of most of the significant, strategic or structural changes that the industry has had to cope with since the mid-1990s.
Online travel agencies, for example, gave travelers an easy alternative to wandering down to their local retail store.
Metasearch engines took the idea even further, with access to hundreds, often thousands, of prices for those same OTAs as well as hotels, airlines, et al.
User review websites, such as TripAdvisor, took the opinions of the masses and made them - in aggregated form - as accessible to consumers as the mainstream media travel reviewer or guidebook writer.
O'Connor talks about the hotel industry is seemingly heading down the same path as the taxi sector with its attempts to stifle the ability and creativeness of new entrants.
It's a fairly downbeat assessment, but a correct one. Sectors that attempt to withstand change often find themselves on the receiving end of major upheavals to their business practices.
Some brands never recover.
But disruption is often taken out of context - it implies the end for a particular party of entire segment of the industry. Like a revolution.
This, as history shows us, is not the case. Far from it, in fact.
Offline travel agents have not suffered an extinction event. Full-service airlines are not dead, too. Hotels appear to be thriving in the face of competition to their model (from rentals) and taxis are still everywhere to be seen in cities around the world.
As always, cooler heads usually prevail. The smart executives at the top of these respective sectors of the industry have figured out how to evolve, rather than disappear.
Sure, the profits of old may no longer appease those who previously bet the family silver on the businesses and models - but that's evolution.
This is what happens in an industry that has been on an upward trajectory in terms of the volume of travelers and types of services available for, well, forever.
The smart hotel chains should perhaps resist the legal routes that are available to them and look, instead, inwardly - at their practices, customer service, branding, design, marketing, etc.
They may realize that there's more to change there than trying to stall the often unstoppable forces of change.