When Thomas Cook organized his first group outing on 5 July 1841 for his fellow Temperance devotees on the new railway – he set the stage for the way in which travel would be organized and managed.
Largely there has been little difference since then.
The nature of steamship travel created the notion of passage but with differentiated levels of service. From steerage to fourth class all the way up to first class. Again not much has changed.
Back in those days – search was via the Thomas Cook railway guide, first published in 1873. Purchase was at an authorized steamship company agent.
When travel became more of a leisure pursuit then the value of the agent became ascendant. Access to the information and the supply chain were the defining characteristics of how travel was purchased.
Then along came this commercial jet travel and the market exploded. Search was thumbing through the ABC and OAG guides.
As information is the critical component of the process of trip planning and purchase it became obvious that when the information age moved from near time to real time – then travel would change along with it.
I recall when the internet was “new”. Speaking to audiences of travel professionals from my position of first in a GDS and then in an OTA, it appeared there was a lot of distrust by the agent community.
They didn’t like it. And despite exhortations to change they clung to their old models. As we know those who did not change became road kill on Al Gore’s Information Super Highway.
As the web has become pervasive and business models have changed – in some cases been turned on their heads – we are now experiencing the changes that should be regarded as natural progression.
All aspects of the electronic good that is the trip are undergoing evolution.
Personalization and customization mean fragmentation and unbundling of the products and the way they are delivered. In the same way that the travel agent community underwent radical transformation over the last 15 years, so too must the supply chain.
And the trip as we know it.
The life cycle of a trip in the homogenized markets of North America used to be purchased almost exclusively via the GDS. Today less than 50% is purchased that way.
The hotel and car supply sales never quite achieved the penetration of the airline products via the GDS. The product was not easily homogenized in the way an airline seat can be.
Further the need for search tools (like location-based search) just didn’t work via the GDS. Even today this remains the case despite many attempts to improve the quality of the sale of the non-air product it has never been a good product to sell via the legacy GDSs.
In other markets, particularly in Europe, the value of the agent was that they could pull from different supply sources and create trip solutions for their customers. The extensive use of rail, less chain-based hotel products and then the emergence of low cost carrier travel products made the agent an important part of the mix.
However, let’s not forget that the web made the process of search WAY better.
The consumer could now look and buy outside of the GDS-centric channels of supply. And they did.
Once the consumers learned this – driven by price advantages – the now annual sale of more than 100 million air passenger trips via pure online sales should be enough to show that the market cannot be constrained.
The emergence of search – meta and real - changed things further. The consumer stopped referring to ads and effectively newspapers lost ad sales of airlines to the web.
Those of us who have served on the counter of a retail agency (yes, I actually did that) saw the transformation from the time when the common reference point was the local airline newspaper ads.
Today just as frequently retail agents (those who remain) hear – I saw it on Expedia or on Kayak.
But the unbundling/unraveling has not stopped there. The supply chain sources, notably the legacy GDSs, took for granted that once the trip was purchased via their environment, the post-trip servicing was a zero value process.
In fact, it actually cost money so nothing needed to be (or was) provided. There was some attempts such as Virtuallythere etc. The OTAs really didn’t want to know if you had a need to talk to a person or a question on your trip.
Sure you COULD talk to 1800-Expedia but it wasn’t and still isn’t that easy. [And don’t get me started on airline post-sales support]
A number of entrepreneurs saw this as an opportunity and have stepped in. Thus you now have Tripit, Traxo, Worldmate, et al now vying for your attention.
Further specialist sites like ExpertFlyer and AwardWallet are providing value to the consumer in their trip management. It cannot be a huge leap from post booking management to pre-booking management.
Would not a merger of, say, a Skyscanner and a Triporati to create a full service or near-full service for the independent traveler.
And what of the purchase process? The blurring of the line between supplier direct and intermediary is as clear as the definition of an intermediary.
Now you can buy the travel product from many sources and places. Legacy GDS, dealers, consolidators, traditional agents, online and offline. The choices are almost mind boggling. Early last year a senior executive at Sabre berated Farelogix for “actively encouraging fragmentation.”
In hindsight that outburst seems, wel,l so 1990s! (SOURCE: http://www.management.travel/news.php?cid=airline-GDS-deals-optional-services.Feb-09.19 )
So, my friends, you see that the world has been turned on its head.
I almost managed to get through this piece without once mentioning social media. I will just make one statement – the importance cannot be underestimated.
Last week – Facebook recorded more traffic than Google. A Hitwise report ending March 13 showed that Facebook surpassed Google in weekly hits – Facebook accounted for 7.07% of visits in the week ended March 13, versus 7.03% for Google. Facebook almost tripled its visits from a year earlier, compared with 9% growth at Google.
The end of the Trip as we knew it, RIP. Long live the Trip and its real connection to our lives.
When
Thomas Cook organized his first group outing on 5 July 1841 for his fellow Temperance devotees on the new railway – he set the stage for the way in which travel would be organized and managed.
Largely there has been little difference since then.
The nature of steamship travel created the notion of passage but with differentiated levels of service. From steerage to fourth class all the way up to first class. Again not much has changed.
Back in those days – search was via the Thomas Cook railway guide, first published in 1873. Purchase was at an authorized steamship company agent.
When travel became more of a leisure pursuit then the value of the agent became ascendant. Access to the information and the supply chain were the defining characteristics of how travel was purchased.
Then along came this commercial jet travel and the market exploded. Search was thumbing through the ABC and OAG guides.
As information is the critical component of the process of trip planning and purchase it became obvious that when the information age moved from near time to real time – then travel would change along with it.
I recall when the internet was “new”. Speaking to audiences of travel professionals from my position of first in a GDS and then in an OTA, it appeared there was a lot of distrust by the agent community.
They didn’t like it. And despite exhortations to change they clung to their old models. As we know those who did not change became road kill on Al Gore’s Information Super Highway.
As the web has become pervasive and business models have changed – in some cases been turned on their heads – we are now experiencing the changes that should be regarded as natural progression.
All aspects of the electronic good that is the trip are undergoing evolution.
Personalization and customization mean fragmentation and unbundling of the products and the way they are delivered. In the same way that the travel agent community underwent radical transformation over the last 15 years, so too must the supply chain.
And, the trip as we know it.
The life cycle of a trip in the homogenized markets of North America used to be purchased almost exclusively via the GDS. Today less than 50% is purchased that way.
The hotel and car supply sales never quite achieved the penetration of the airline products via the GDS. The product was not easily homogenized in the way an airline seat can be.
Further the need for search tools (like location-based search) just didn’t work via the GDS. Even today this remains the case despite many attempts to improve the quality of the sale of the non-air product it has never been a good product to sell via the legacy GDSs.
In other markets, particularly in Europe, the value of the agent was that they could pull from different supply sources and create trip solutions for their customers. The extensive use of rail, less chain-based hotel products and then the emergence of low cost carrier travel products made the agent an important part of the mix.
However, let’s not forget that the web made the process of search WAY better.
The consumer could now look and buy outside of the GDS-centric channels of supply. And they did.
Once the consumers learned this – driven by price advantages – the now annual sale of more than 100 million air passenger trips via pure online sales should be enough to show that the market cannot be constrained.
The emergence of search – meta and real - changed things further. The consumer stopped referring to ads and effectively newspapers lost ad sales of airlines to the web.
Those of us who have served on the counter of a retail agency (yes, I actually did that) saw the transformation from the time when the common reference point was the local airline newspaper ads.
Today just as frequently retail agents (those who remain) hear – I saw it on Expedia or on Kayak.
But the unbundling/unraveling has not stopped there. The supply chain sources, notably the legacy GDSs, took for granted that once the trip was purchased via their environment, the post-trip servicing was a zero value process.
In fact, it actually cost money so nothing needed to be (or was) provided. There was some attempts such as Virtuallythere etc. The OTAs really didn’t want to know if you had a need to talk to a person or a question on your trip.
Sure you COULD talk to 1800-Expedia but it wasn’t and still isn’t that easy. [And don’t get me started on airline post-sales support]
A number of entrepreneurs saw this as an opportunity and have stepped in. Thus you now have TripIt, Traxo, Worldmate et al now vying for your attention.
Further specialist sites like ExpertFlyer and AwardWallet are providing value to the consumer in their trip management. It cannot be a huge leap from post booking management to pre-booking management.
Would not a merger of, say, a Skyscanner and a Triporati to create a full service or near-full service for the independent traveler.
And what of the purchase process? The blurring of the line between supplier direct and intermediary is as clear as the definition of an intermediary.
Now you can buy the travel product from many sources and places. Legacy GDS, dealers, consolidators, traditional agents, online and offline. The choices are almost mind boggling. Early last year a senior executive at Sabre berated Farelogix for “actively encouraging fragmentation”.
In hindsight that outburst seems, well, so 1990s!
So, my friends, you see that the world has been turned on its head.
I almost managed to get through this piece without once mentioning social media. I will just make one statement – the importance cannot be underestimated.
Last week, Facebook recorded more traffic than Google. A Hitwise report ending March 13 showed that Facebook surpassed Google in weekly hits – Facebook accounted for 7.07% of visits in the week ended March 13, versus 7.03% for Google. Facebook has almost tripled its visits from a year earlier, compared with 9% growth at Google.
The end of the Trip as we knew it, RIP. Long live the Trip and its real connection to our lives.