Hi Darren,

So in your opinion, what could be the new innovative ideas we could develop for the online travel experience?

What else do you want to see online? What product do you want to transact online?

I believe there too much content these days on OTAs and the future is maybe about offering less but with a much more complete transaction (not just Air + Hotel).

Cheers, Guillaume

Report this comment

I agree with you there, Darren. When we think about travel, innovation and online, travel used to be on the for front in utilizing the web, whether that was in affiliate marketing, booking, peer reviews and user generated content. But it’s a bit like its come to stagnation. We haven’t seen anything new for quite some time, only the same things repeated and maybe improved a tiny bit. What happened to more innovative use of podcasts, GPS and mobile phones? And connecting all three together? Why isn’t that going more main stream?

Maybe we need a TechCrunch for travel where we shout out when we find brilliance in travel innovation. I’ll ping you when I come across some innovative travel ideas

Cheers
@hjortur

Report this comment

Spot on, Darren.

I think the way to innovate is to start bypassing the travel industry itself. With global access, the barriers between producer and consumer have gone (or are going). At the moment consumers are using the web (and digital platforms) to essentially tap into the same modes of business that were around in the 70s, when you popped into your travel agent on the High Street because they had all the knowledge. More and more middlemen (read: trip planning sites) are trying to set themselves up as the repository of all knowledge, but in fact the sources of knowledge are diversifying and atomising.

Innovation will not come from within the industry, because innovation will – eventually, over a couple of decades – kill off the travel industry (which, let’s face it, is only 3 or 4 decades old anyway).

I had a glimpse of one possible future this summer, in a very unlikely setting – a disused church in London’s financial district. I blogged about it here:
http://quitealone.com/2009/07/03/tourism-2-0/
(Forgive the back-to-basics stuff in that post; I was finding my feet in a new world…)

If I had to sum up in one word what I think innovators in travel should be aiming for, it would be FACILITATE. Not guide, direct, encourage, monetize, advertise, market – just FACILITATE. Give power to the consumer to create their own experience. (That, oddly, is exactly what the High Street travel agents did in the 70s.) It’s scary for the industry, because there is no model yet devised by which that can be profitable, and it’s scary for the consumer, because it puts more of the onus onto them to make of their holiday whatever they want – but the old ways are dying…

Report this comment

…more of the “same damn pile of rocks” agitation that gets to everyone on the road. Seen it, been there, and let me guess, your hostel has its own website? yawn…. No innovation in what to see and what people offer, or how people are seeing it.

Report this comment

Thanks for mentioning the discussion on innovation in online travel that we started on PhoCusWright Connect a few weeks ago. The opinions are diverse on the topic with some claiming that in fact the OTAs have continued to innovate in how they sell travel. Others are more skeptical and I tend to come down on that side of the debate.

The planning sites I listed were mostly started by frustrated travelers and not by people with a track record in the industry. This is a tell for me. Are they perfect? Not yet, but they show a way forward by not asking site visitors for a departure date and booking information but about preferences for the vacation they are planning. That’s where the process needs to start online as it is how people have always approached their leisure trips.

The technology challenges to then come up with truly relevant choices are still quite huge and that is where the innovation has to happen to improve the user experience and keep them from having to wade through endless pages of irrelevant search results.

As for the TechCrunch for travel, I just want to bring to your attention the Travel Innovation Summit, part of the PhoCusWright Conference. This year again, 30 carefully selected applicants who provide travel technology innovations will be presenting their solutions to the audience. We are continuing our effort to expose those companies to industry leaders and to the market at large.

Report this comment

IMHO, there has been some ground breaking innovation in travel over the last 10 years. It is also continuing. Darren, perhaps you have been too quick to dismiss innovation as just another subject to pen a rant about.

Take the no frills airlines for example. They looked at the traditional business model for air travel (tickets, check in, in flight meal, movies, no baggage restrictions, subsidised state carriers etc).

They looked at what an aircraft actually is (a flying bus) and stripped away all the necessary costs and made air travel affordable to millions that would never have been able to afford a scheduled flight.

If consumers fit the profile of the airline (not taking hold baggage for example) they get a very affordable deal.
Then the hotel industry joined the act and introduced the dynamic pricing model used by airlines.

This means you can book a hotel room sleeping 4 persons from £12 a night. They also stripped away the packets of soap, hair dryers in rooms and the like to keep costs low.
Other ways in which travel has moved on include more sustainable resorts where the ecological impact of the holiday is considered and reduced.

Even in the gadget field you can now get podcasts, maps and information that you can use on your phone instead of a guide book when visiting cities and other attractions.

Report this comment

I know what you mean. Although the Internet has done a good job at providing greater transparency and has dis-intermediated the booking process to some extent it has brought with it a new problem – that of navigating an extracting useful information from a very cluttered on-line environment.

Although many new start-ups are doing things in this area (sometimes it seems as if almost everybody is trying to innovate with a new travel site) very few seem to have gained much traction, and very few seem to solve the real exam question – “How can I find out about and book travel to XYZ?” I also suspect that Tech Crunch doesn’t give travel start-ups too much coverage due to the sheer number of them..

A while ago I wrote this post: http://www.travolution.co.uk/blog/2009/05/is-the-travel-sector-stuck-in.php bemoaning travel innovation, which lead to a new idea we have had called OfferMeaTrip. Can’t really say too much about it now, but we are hoping that we can launch something *innovative* in the next few months that can answer some of our own criticisms.

Report this comment

I get so fed up of poor customer service doled out by hotels to guests. I had another instance this week where a client had a genuine complaint and was ignored by staff – promised a bottle of wine in compensation but this didn’t appear and so on. This from a 4 star hotel in Rome. I was there at the end of the phone line, listening to the tale of woe and liaising with the UK operator who I booked it through (who were supportive and did their best to resolve). If there is a problem with a hotel, I’m finding it is mainly a city centre hotel rather than a resort hotel.

The hotel industry needs some innovation – staff that care about their customers! Good customer service shouldn’t be an innovation – it should be automatic. How do we get this message across when hotels are full and there is no incentive to lure the guests back?

Report this comment

I could give you 5 interesting ideas that haven’t been done yet in online travel!

Existing companies are doing a pretty good job of raising the barrier to entry for new entrants. You would be amazed as to how much money is spent on web projects. Innovative people can’t get past those barriers.

Frankly if I were talking to an entrepreneur with web skills I would probably take on another industry right now….. one where you can build supplier relationships without having to go through complex, expensive, legacy systems.

Too many entrepreneurs digging for gold and not enough selling shovels….. what the innovative B2C travel entrepreneurs need is innovative platform companies who are replacing the legacy platforms. Actually that is where we sit with TourCMS….

Report this comment

Hi Darren

I concurr with John, there has been a lot of innovation in the industry as a whole, although I would suggest much of that has been driven by cost cutting. An iterative process, rather than true ground breaking innovation. {BTW, an old but interesting book on the topic is the Innovators Dilemma, which also talks about how consumers aren’t necessarily all that open to innovation}

A personal pet peeve for years has been the screeds of paperwork & tickets I’m expected to carry with me – when the airline can’t be bothered to print a ticket and mail it to me anymore becuase it’s all ‘e-ticketed’. Yeah right. Just try turning up at most airports with just your passport to hand.

Air New Zealand have done some decent things, although it more revolves around cost cutting than real innovation (again!). I can at least checkin the night before for my domestic flight, allowing me to walk straight to the departure gate. Not that there are real queue’s at NZ airports compared with Heathrow, the other London airports or even Glasgow for that matter. My new local airport is literally a one room shed where I can turn up 2 minutes before the flight leaves and still get on the plane.

Now we also get to ‘process ourselves through the departure gate’ on domestic flights. which still involves two AirNZ staff standing around taking a boarding pass off of you to pass it through a scanning machine as if we’re just too incompetent to do that ourselves. I find that offensive, not innovative.

One thing I thought was going to be really innovative from AirNZ was their iPhone application – yes sorry, I am one of those 12% who has one. It keeps my bookings stored electronically and displays a 2d barcode for the scanners at the gate. Finally!! I can actually purchase an electronic ticket, and not have to carry a single peice of paper. Yippee!! I was so excited.

Except when I allow my iPhone screen to be scanned at the gate, they insist on printing out a small piece of paper with my flight number on (duh!, as if that’s important as I walk down the air bridge) and seat number – like I’m going to lose my iPhone walking down the airbridge and not stop to look for it before sitting down on the plan to fly to the other end of the country..

So ho hum, innovation and the paperless ‘electronic ticket’ is almost there. Just not quite.

BTW- sorry for the long post, I don’t really do short, which is why I’m not a blogger..

Report this comment

Agree entirely Matthew Teller, one of the fears we see in international education marketing in Australia is that we have to go through physical marketing managers who mediate…and may even use internet to attract traffic, enquiries, direct bookings etc. to themselves directly.

Meanwhile, they are still commissioning offshore events that do not work…. but they get a free flight out of it…..

We tell many in marketing, sales, PR, promotions etc. who ignore the internet that they are already redundant, and will be bypassed in future if they do not adapt.

Report this comment