Well, I’m always happy to make wild predictions!

* Green trend will continue to grow and grow MUCH larger than it already is as the situation gets more dire. Not sure how this will play out online, but people will still want to travel and will be looking for ways to do it without hurting the earth. More sites will accommodate this and properties might be rated more for their impact on the planet (already can be seen on WHL: http://www.whl.travel/)
* Reviews will be more and more “trust” based – ie, you will have some sort of an affiliation or knowledge of the person reviewing a place. This in response to people becoming more sceptical about reviewers.
* Google can be expected to infiltrate the space more and more (maybe acquires Kayak?)

This should all be taken with a grain of salt, as the future is anyone’s guess really! Heck, maybe the internet will just crash and we’ll have to go back to writing letters to each other.

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Darren,

My sense is there has been a lot of interesting activity within the online travel market – much of it beyond booking flights, hotels, etc. You’re right that price-comparison engines do have room to get even better and user-friendly aside from simply saying X offers this flight for so many dollars while Y offers it for this many dollars.

Although global economic conditions are getting more volatile, my sense is this could spur innovation within the travel market because consumers are going to demand better tools before they commit to making travel decisions.

I think consumers will want to make smarter and more informed decisions so they get the most out of their travel dollars. They will want better information and valuable insight about everything from prices to the top-rated places to eat and stay before hitting the buy button.

Mark

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Hi Darren -

I think you covered most of the overarching themes well. I’d also include a few additional / related points:

* Increased transparency of user generated content: Despite it’s shortfalls, user gen content is going nowhere. However, there’s a big opportunity to beef up consumer trust in user reviews and ratings, largely via enhanced profiles, links to their personal blog / social network identity, etc., to make them more believable.

* Increase in smaller travel niches: I think there will be more category-specific travel services that go against the current “one size fits all” trend, yet still provide similar filtering / techie tools that are found on larger sites. Due to the huge increase in open source code and applications, the cost of building these tools is a fraction of what it would have been 5 years ago.

* A more balanced approach between expert content, user generated content and meta-search: I think this is already happening with some sites, notably kayak, mobissimo, planitgo and a few others.

Pete

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Hi Darren,

It’s funny that you mention about poor quality information online. We are an online holiday company it is always hard to convey enough information on the web. You have to give enough so that people can make an informed decision but not so much information that you bewilder people who are not interested in that particular piece of information. One person might want to know about child care and scuba diving and another person couldn’t care less!

We have a new holiday finder system in beta testing at the moment. It has taken about 6 months to develop and it tries to get to the bottom of what each person wants (rainfall, sunshine, hotel faciltiies etc..) and provides results bespoke to them. The people who can figure out how to use it say that it is amazing. The downside though is that it is quite flash heavy and takes a bit of getting used to. Could I ask a massive favour and ask you and your readers to take a look and either post any comments on a new thread (so as not to clog up this one) or to e mail me direct with any feedback? We need to know what people think and whether we need any more changes before we launch hopefully next week.

Thanks for your help
Charles Duncombe
Director
Holidaysplease limited
ABTA 65310

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I think the next phase of online travel will have a couple of characteristics:
- Consolidation. Mirroring what’s happening in a lot of industries, some of the weaker travel offerings will not survive. Just as when an airline closing might in some cases be ‘good’ for the market, the same holds true in online travel.
- Google. Completely agree with Peter, Google’s no dummy and with the amount of money to be made and their extensive expertise on ‘all things web’, I am sure we’ll see something from them in the future.
- Integration. For sites that survive consolidation, there will be further partnerships built to share content/resource. Many will find that ‘going it alone’ isn’t good enough.

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Hi Darren
It’s really interesting seeing the responses to both this post and the one you posted on improving the customer experience. It seems that lots of people are in the middle of investing in / creating new search and find functionality – let’s just hope they are not all gimmicks and that we move the industry forward with something that’s really customer focused.

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Hi Andy, the only reason I didn’t mention consolidation is that the internet is such a ripe place for people to constantly be starting new stuff with minimal capital. Although I think there will be plenty of small sites gobbled up by big ones, I also think there will be an even faster stream of new small sites cropping up with new ideas to take their place.

Mind you, another thing that I imagine will claim a few of the current startups is the financial crisis. A lot of these sites just have too much debt and no revenue model to keep them going. Waiting for another big site to buy you out doesn’t seem the best strategy in the current climate.

Totally agree on the integration front though. Seeing more and more of that every day.

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Hi Pete -

I agree it is easy to make a new start on the internet, but I feel as though there is a lot of ‘noise’ already so people need to have some really innovative ideas to make a splash in this industry.

Unfortunately, yes some startups will probably perish, which is a shame because I suspect some will have a poor models as you mention, but others will just be victims of bad timing.

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Just discovered this site via Twitter and totally agree on your last para entitled ‘Travel mashup’. Bring it all together in one place.

I also think, at present, everone’s going after global solutions as opposed to picking a niche (like a country or speciality) and covering that in real depth.

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