Sounding Off: State-backed or multi-brand travel projects rarely work

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

It just seems so obvious, especially during a crisis when, supposedly, "we're all in this together."

France was first out of the blocks a few weeks back when it caught the eye of those in the eager-for-a-headline folk in the mainstream media with the proposed launch of a Booking.com/Airbnb-killer.

We paraphrase for effect, but that's what was being insinuated.

The French platform was described as a platform containing all tourism information about restaurants, attractions and more for visitors to the country.

Italy followed suited with an idea of a web portal for the country's hotels.

Once the hoopla that such initiatives ignite in people subsides, there is always an annoying quickly coming down to earth.

Let's acknowledge the latter idea first.

Multi-brand initiatives, where a collection of hotels or airlines come together to create a service that sells their own products, with the plan being to persuade consumers to go there rather than an existing online travel agency, have not got a great track record.

The usual response in the hotel sector to similar ideas is just a single word: "RoomKey" - the much lauded cross-hotel chain platform that stayed around for many years but clearly failed to make any impact at all.

The problem? No-one REALLY cared about it and none of the brands behind it wanted to support it with the type of marketing muscle that would genuinely challenge the status quo.

And what about the other types of projects, such as that being mulled over by the French government?

The problem here is that often in Europe, initiatives must adhere to regulations around state aid that supports a specific project.

In other words, financial support could cover the creation of the technology but not its ability to gain any traction - again, the nasty "marketing" word.

Without marketing, as so many startups have discovered to their dismay, consumer-facing travel brands face an extremely tough job if they are going to start to compete against the incumbent online travel giants, let alone unseat them.

Perhaps the smart use of a state's money is to support existing brands during tough times such as now with staff retention grants, as has been applauded by travel brands in the Netherlands, for example.

Or working with the current tourism organizations to think a bit more creatively about their marketing strategy.

There are countless ways to offer support from the state but creating, operating and maintaining a brand new service that seeks to challenge the status quo may not be the best use of a government's money.