Sounding Off: Travel must learn from the messiness of humanity

Rory Sutherland, Ogilvy

"We need somehow a much, much better way of looking for travel which acknowledges the messiness of human decision-making as opposed to the neatness of business decision-making."

Quote from Rory Sutherland, Ogilvy vice chairman and behavioral science researcher, in an article on PhocusWire this week on how psychology and emotion hold the key to extraordinary travel experiences.

Each Friday, PhocusWire dissects and debates an industry trend or new development covered by PhocusWire that week.

Online search and discovery, in the early days of the online travel agencies, was based on very few parameters.

A website visitor would enter their departure date, return date, preferred destination (in the case of a hotel), preferred airport to leave from (in the case of a flight), number of travelers and that was about it.

It was basic but it worked.

We then get to the late 2000s, with many travel websites - perhaps driven by the huge number of startups that keep proclaiming how "travel search is broken" - adding more filters to narrow down a user's search results.

Customers could search for results on whether they would be suitable for a city-break, beach holiday, cultural or sightseeing trip, adventure-related and quite a few more.

Add romantic, solo travel, tranquil, clubbing, etc. - you get the idea.

And there it has mostly remained ever since, with a few examples here and there of brands that have added to the filters of trip types.

We're now arguably into a different phase of what travel search could and, perhaps, should be.

As Rory Sutherland suggests, decision-making is based on what the platform provides in terms of options, rather than how the user might feel at the time.

This is somewhat ironic as many travel brands might argue that their tools are part of the "personalization" trend in the travel industry.

But they're not really. They are about what the provider has and what it hopes will reflect the desire of the consumer, without really understanding how the consumer feels.

How a consumer might feel on any given day, when they are conducting a search for a trip, is likely to vary.

This is never more apparent than now, in a period when the emotions of people have been stretched in a myriad of ways over the last two years.

Such emphasis on the consumer's thought process might be difficult to achieve technically. But it seems as if a switch is necessary to achieve true personalization with the consumer, rather than simply offering more stuff based on previous buying patterns.