All eyes on ground and sea transportation

For most travel executives, the offline to online shift has already happened. Almost all of the industry has transitioned online, but there is one sector that has lagged behind—ground and sea transportation. However, tech innovations, traveler demand and support from the investment community are driving the digitalization of intercity buses and coaches, ferries and trains. The change is happening now, in real-time and on a global scale. And that’s a positive development for all stakeholders across the travel and tourism ecosystem.

Airlines and hotels started their consumer-facing and in-house digitalization journeys decades ago. Both were helped by global, regional and local online travel agents who supported their move by providing an online distribution platform to supplement the direct sales through brand dotcoms and other owned channels. Tech suppliers emerged with new tools to help brands access and exploit these new channels.

More recently, the tours, activities and experience sector has taken on the industry’s digitization baton. Again, technology for suppliers to run their business more efficiently and to sell inventory online became readily available. This specific offline-to-online shift is subtly changing how the entire industry operates—a panel at the recent Phocuswright Europe event in Barcelona confirmed that bookable-in-advance experiences are now at the heart of the traveler’s decision-making process.

The increasingly online ground and sea transportation sector is primed to take advantage of this new trend. Many of the most memorable experiences are located off the beaten track, outside the big cities, and travelers need to know how to get there.

Ground and sea suppliers are starting to adopt tech to run their business, which in turn opens up direct and indirect online distribution. Advance bookings and better payment flows generate incremental revenues for suppliers as their products become more visible to travelers and easier to book. The online shift in ground and sea transportation requires educating the suppliers and providing them with the resources to make the shift, and there are many players, including Travelier, whose B2B and B2C innovations are accelerating the change in an industry worth $198 billion.

It is important to note that the digitization of ground and sea transportation benefits the entire travel ecosystem, from the major online travel agencies (OTAs) looking to bring the connected trip and the travel super-app closer to reality, to destinations looking to address overtourism, to travelers interested in remote tourism, sustainability and authentic experiences.

There’s no connected trip without the connection

Trip planning, the super-app, the connected trip and seamless end-to-end journeys are concepts so embedded into the travel tech zeitgeist that there’s a danger their dominance is blinding us to the reality. The commitment is great in theory, but in practice, the connected trip is never going to happen until intercity buses, rail and ferries are as easily integrated into the itinerary as the flight and accommodation.

Luckily for the OTAs committed to the connected trip and for those start-ups, scale-ups and blue chips trying to crack and commercialize trip planning, Travelier, its peers and comp set are on the case, changing the face of the industry by developing new digital infrastructures. In doing so, inventory can be accessed by travel sellers via a single API which is as robust, scalable and well-architected as the APIs which have supported the success of hotels, air and experiences.

With an API in place, OTAs of all shapes and flavors can embed ground transportation into their trip planning and itinerary management tools, bringing the connected trip closer to reality.

But digitizing ground transportation at scale requires a commitment and investment to the back-end processes as much as to the consumer-front end.  While the mature players in our space—Deutsche Bahn, National Express, Amtrak—can be integrated into a connected trip via their own standalone APIs, there is a long-tail of small suppliers who need support getting their business into shape and need someone to do the heavy tech lifting on their behalf. 

As with hotels 20 years ago and experiences 10 years ago, getting the long-tail of ground and sea operators online requires a clarity of vision and a long-term commitment to creating a platform that can address local and regional nuances in a globally consistent way, all funneled through a single API. Our version, Travelier Connect, gives API subscribers access to more than 19,000 of these long-tail operators, in 122 countries, offering 750,000 routes. 

Traveler demand for ground and sea options is driving digitalization

Travelers are increasingly interested in authentic, off-the-beaten track destinations—Expedia talks about destination dupes to describe more affordable, less crowded alternatives to popular travel destinations.

And while the industry talks about "off-the-beaten track," it’s worth noting that off-the-beaten track is not the same as inaccessible. Travelers need to be able to get to and from these destinations, and often the only option is intercity bus or local ferries.

In this context, digitalization is essential because travelers want to book the bus or ferry to their off-the-beaten track destination in advance, using their payment method of choice, on their smartphone. In fact, I decided to launch Travelier (or Bookaway as it was originally) after I wasted half a day of my honeymoon in the Philippines at the central bus station trying to buy a ticket, in cash, from Manila to the rice terraces of Banaue for the next day. Today, I can do that over breakfast in minutes without leaving the hotel or weeks in advance before my trip has even begun.

Our own research shows that once at their destination, travelers book three to five intercity trips on average. The demand is clearly evident, and there’s an addressable market in established as well as emerging destinations—visitors to London also want to visit Brighton, for Budapest it’s Lake Balaton, for Rio de Janeiro it’s Petrópolis.  

Tourist boards can use ground and sea transportation to fight overtourism 

For travelers, off-the-beaten track is a way to avoid the crowds (factoring in the reality that hidden gems often become mainstream over time). For destinations, the off-the-beaten track trend is an opportunity to shift demand to spread the economic benefits of tourism more equitably and a way to address two of the industry’s building headwinds: overtourism and sustainability.

Experts agree that there are many factors driving overtourism, but one area that needs to be part of the conversation and can be part of the solution, when supported by a digitized ground and sea transportation sector, is airports. Airports and their airline customers, it could be argued, dictate demand and create the bottlenecks and hotspots that characterize the overtourism narrative. It came as a surprise to me when I looked into this that there are only 4,000 commercial airports in the world, when businesses such as GetYourGuide promote activities in 10,000 different cities. Travelier itself has around 170,000 bus stations.

So, travelers are already finding ways to get to places not served by airports, but this is happening organically and there’s significant room for growth. destination marketing organizations and convention and visitor bureaus can help here by working more strategically with the ground and sea transportation providers, in a similar way to how they work with OTAs and airlines to shift demand and promote alternatives. 

Travelers need to be aware that if you land at Athens International, there are more onward options than Santorini or Crete. 

Elsewhere, many airports are connected to hubs that have more onward options than are served direct from the airport. Consumer-facing websites have a vital role to play here, giving travelers the information they need to use ground transportation to get from the airport to their destination via a city center hub. B2C brand owners are aware of the opportunities here, and competition between brands is raising the bar in terms of user experience, supply relations and marketing innovations.

Conclusion

Having worked in ground and sea transportation for about eight years, I am starting to see a sea-change in how we are seen by the travel, tech and travel tech communities alike. There’s a lot of capital being raised in our sector, a sign that there is more growth to come. Our research shows that less than 25% of ground and sea is booked online, significantly less than other travel verticals.

There’s a growing realization that intercity buses, trains and ferries are the final piece in the connected trip puzzle. And with tens of millions of investment dollars going into digitalizing back-end and front-end operations, the legacy constraints are vanishing. Travelier, its peers and comp set are united in their desire and belief that bringing the global ground and sea transportation sector online is good for the industry, good for travelers and good for the planet.