With the advent of search engines like Google and Yahoo almost two decades ago, accessing information became incredibly easy.
And with their success came tools like TripAdvisor, Kayak and Trivago – websites that scour hundreds of other travel sites and generate countless flight, lodging and car rental options.
While these sites provide travelers with tons of information at the click of a button, users are still tasked with sifting through pages of results to determine the best options for them.
Subscribe to our newsletter below
Websites like TripAdvisor have great information and reviews about venues all over the world. But instead of TripAdvisor doing the heavy lifting, travelers still need to find the right activities, coordinate hours, geography, seasonality and so many other relevant factors on their own.
Given the technology at our disposal and the sophisticated, personal user experiences provided to consumers in other industries, this is a losing proposition. If metasearch companies like TripAdvisor don’t begin to offer more personalization and delightful user experiences, they will soon be a thing of the past.
Learnings outside of travel
Because of artificial intelligence and machine learning, the aforementioned arduous sifting process should no longer have to fall on the user.
This is already happening outside of the travel world. As of 2014, Netflix had over 6,400 movies and 1,600 TV shows in its US catalog. How are you supposed to filter through all of that content to find what you like?
Consider Amazon, an e-commerce giant with an astronomical number of items for purchase.
Companies need to leverage artificial intelligence and move away from pure metasearch.
Amazon provides options and lets consumers discover what they can buy and where they can buy. It is well-positioned because it possesses a richer understanding of shopper intent.
Both of these companies offer their users personalized recommendations based on items they’ve previously viewed or purchased, or the behavior of similar customers, removing the time-consuming (and often frustrating) search and sift process.
It should come as no surprise then that Netflix has over 100 million worldwide subscribers and Amazon’s Prime membership alone is estimated to be at 65 million people.
Back to travel reality
As this trend toward recommendation engines and personalization continues across industries, travel will not be left behind. When TripAdvisor gained traction in the early 2000s, it solved the original problem it was created to address: tempering alack of traveler trust through peer reviews.
By solving that problem, however, it created a new problem: the incredible volume of information made the decision-making process difficult and extremely tedious.
If I use Kayak to search for a roundtrip from Seattle to San Francisco, it generates more than 1,100 results. And if I use Trivago to search for hotels in San Francisco that same weekend, it offers me more than 240 different lodging options. And that’s just flights and lodging for a weekend getaway.
No one has the time or patience to sift through all of that information. What about restaurants, activities and events?
Travelers spend up to 30 hours planning a vacation and visit 38 different websites before completing a booking. Nowadays - when people can instantly request taxis on their phones or order groceries simply by talking into a speaker - that is no longer acceptable.
Do you agree?
Challenge Berenstein in the comments below!
Travelers want an experience, not a research project.
Today, not only do travelers want to easily plan complete, end-to-end travel experiences – they want to do so in an intuitive, enjoyable way that also maximizes their time and money.
The endless sea of information available online, coupled with the current consumer expectation for a personalized digital experience, precipitates the need for companies to leverage artificial intelligence and move away from pure metasearch.
By doing so, travel companies can automate the onerous parts of travel planning while also tailoring their online experiences to every traveler’s unique preferences.