NB: This is a guest post by Murray Harold, a homeworking business travel agent from Buckinghamshire, UK.
I recently read a travel website’s splurge about a system designed to fill vacant seats. It allows the integration of low cost and legacy airlines, which gives agents, consortia (who are made up of, I guess, agents) and airlines to offer “more” cheaper fares.
Looking deeper into the site’s information I found that the people involved had notable backgrounds in finance, technology and most other disciplines.
And yes, a person with “20 years travel industry experience”. Dig deeper. “After learning the ropes…” Ah! After that, one had spent most their time with airlines, GDS systems, projects, etc.
That may be travel-related but it is not travel. If someone has really spent 20 years “in travel”, we agents understand that as 20 years at the coalface - on the counter, headset on and glued to the green-screen. That’s 20 years travel experience.
Granted, we do have some clever technology these days.
In fact, some of it I find very helpful in making day-to-day bookings – Google Earth, for example, or Expedia.
The former is great for looking up hotels, relative to where my client is going for an appointment , while the latter saves an awful lot of time searching consolidated fares, trying to guess routings as well as providing a useful reassurance if a fare on a particular itinerary just does not feel right.
But there are a few things travel technology has missed, and here are some of them:
1. Websites cannot distinguish between “cheap” and “best value”.
There is a major difference. I often see cheap fares presented for itineraries that I have to develop. What I have to do, though, is to weigh up the consequences of that cheap fare and present this to the client.
Long layovers may be involved, the trip may last 26 hours rather than 11 or there may be tenuous connections. A website’s consideration is based on price alone.
My consideration is based on: “Given that my client may have to pay $2,000, how can I make sure that every $1 of that $2,000 gives the maximum possible return for my client?
2. Websites do not understand the client.
It is now easy enough to go on to a pudding – sorry, metasearch – website and pull up a selection of itineraries. The client can then choose for themselves what they want.
The thing is, the client does not, very often, know what they are letting themselves in for.
There have been many instances when I have been called by my client who has booked their own flights only to be asked to find them something which does not involve airline X or airline Y, and “no more sitting around for hours”, and “what’s all this with not getting any lunch?”
A wry smile (good job it’s on the telephone) lightens the face. A good travel agent knows what their client will put up with and what they won’t. A website does not.
3. Websites are not pro-active.
So websites do not offer best value, just raw price, and websites do not understand the client. Together, this means they cannot be pro-active.
They cannot go back to a client and say: “Look, you are going here and here – you have a client there, which could be included far cheaper.”
A website cannot say: “You want to go here, here and here, but you would be better off doing two separate trips”
They cannot say: “I suggest you put that trip off a week if you can, it’s half term.” Yes, the client may have to go, but understanding a client and achieving best value, is a matter of working in a trusted partnership with the client.
Certainly agents figured out a long time ago that simply being an order taker is no good at all.
Websites, starting with a great knowledge of technology though little of travel, seem to think that being an order taker (which is basically all they can ever be) is a good idea.
4. Websites cannot look into the whites of the eyes.
A recent itinerary carried two warnings: one about not completing booking until all elements were in place and the other saying you should allow enough time to change aircraft.
Both these statements frighten me. The thing is, with any small print, you can write it down, you can read it out – but can you communicate it?
You can put big red boxes around it, you can make it flash… but can you communicate it?
Which bits of the small print are relevant – really relevant – to what has been booked?
Sure, all of it is relevant but as George Orwell may have said: “All small print is relevant, but some small print is more relevant than others”.
One asset an agent has, which cannot be taken away, is that the agent can use his or her skill to read an itinerary, understand it, analyse any real issues and then communicate this to the client.
They can look into the eyes of the client and (or on the phone, pause to get a reaction) and make sure the information has sunk in.
5. Business travel does not work.
Travel websites are very good at simple point-to-point tickets. Indeed, some agents even encourage people to do the very simple stuff online – the agent cannot add value to the booking and the fuss is not worth the reward.
When it comes to anything more complex, however, things are different.
Business travel, in particular, features other things which web-based travel bookings cannot cope with – instant changes, the booking made from the back of a taxi, a departure lounge, time snatched from between meetings.
The client does not have access to their credit card, for example, just wants to “hold” a seat for a short while, can’t access the internet, can access the internet but can’t remember the logon or does not the time to go through endless point and click bits.
The big thing about website-based business travel is simply this – why should they bother?
Firms pay their executives a salary to land them multi million dollar deals – not to play about trying to re-book flights.
6. Conventions.
This really worries me. As soon as one starts going from A to C, rather than B, or from A to B to C to…. then we are in a totally different ball game to standard outbound and inbound travel.
In order to make multi-stop travel work, there are two principles, without which no-one would be going anywhere.
These are the ability to interline and the agreements with regard to Minimum Connecting Times (MCT) – and the two are not mutually exclusive.
Earlier, I mentioned the difference between reading and communicating and the “why?” question – an executive worries about his own problems and is, furthermore, not paid to deal with the vagaries of how travel fits together.
Interlining is the ability to fit more than one airline onto one ticket and MCTs specify the amount of time that has to be allowed to effect a connection.
The MCT does not apply to non-interline tickets and it certainly does not apply when low cost airlines are involved.
This gets interesting when websites talk about the ability to integrate low cost and legacy airlines.
You cannot integrate low cost and legacy airlines. Period. Any attempt to do so is fraught with danger.
How long do you allow? How do you get the message across without, again, as mentioned earlier, seeing the whites of the eyes to establish that what is involved, has sunk in?
If I am using a low cost, legacy connection I allow an overnight stay – or about 4 hours at least connecting time – and that’s without changing airports.
Further I repeat, ad nauseam, what the passenger is letting themselves in for and that on their head be it.
Websites take no responsibility here. Yet to me, as an agent, that is fundamentally wrong. My client is responsible for making the big deal, my responsibility is to make sure my client is at the right office at the right time.
If I am not sure he or she will be on schedule then I have failed in my function.
Yet websites blithely trumpet how they have achieved this legacy/low cost integration – and I have seen some connections that offer little more than the MCT on some low cost/ legacy connections – but do not “communicate” the dangers and pitfalls.
Worse, they make it very hard to contact someone of things go pear-shaped. And they do. Often.
Conclusion
Technology has grasped travel. Technology has taken the raw elements and taken a lot of time and effort to integrate more and more technology into travel.
Yet technology seems to have a rather tenuous grasp on the practicalities of how real travel works.
There is only a small financial margin involved and, so, technology does not wish to grasp the nettle of responsibility that comes with taking this and that feed and mashing up the two, to produce yet another curiously-named dot com.
Having to deal with issues takes the shine away. It means having staff and offices; it means having people who understand the fares’ manuals, the conventions.
True, some operations do have this facility – though they charge heavily for it.
Some websites don’t really need this sort of backup as their product is simple and straightforward (though who do you contact at the low cost carriers office when the hotel you added on has not been booked, or the car is not available – and it’s 3am and it’s cold).
So, where can you find this proper service? I think you know the answer to that one.
NB: This is a guest post by Murray Harold, a homeworking business travel agent from Buckinghamshire, UK.