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.
Learn more...
Contact Travelier to learn about connecting to the largest global distribution system for ground and sea.
About the author...
Noam Toister is the co-founder and CEO of Travelier.