OK.. Sorry, Can’t resist..

“Frustrated consumers” — Well for fifteen quid.. an expert will do it for you.
“Time consuming” — Pay the agent for their time and they’ll be all yours. let’s say 15 smackers
“Lacking inspiration” — Perhaps you need someone who has experienced the world to talk too.. I’m sure £15 will secure one
“Your thoughts on this issue” — I don’t have any.. unless you cross my palm with 3 blue ones

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Darren

There is a comparison site to search comparison sites it called an Independent Travel Agent. This is exactly what we do! As well as give general advice and help.

I think no matter how good a site you get currently it can not be the be all and end all, but there is something’s that could be done. Bringing CRS into the 21st century would be the best start. No matter which wide search engine you use at some point it has to get it information from systems written in the 60/70′s in a different language than we use today. The problem is those systems have only just paid for themselves and no one is prepared to underwrite the multi million (or has been mentioned recently billion) investment needed.

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I can relate to the stress of trying to comparison shop online to get the best deal. It’s that sense of wanting to be a smart-shopper, but after awhile one has to take into account the wasted time… A good price should be good enough.

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Always a good topic, Darren.

I use websites to do research and purchases from home electronics to overseas trips. My experience is that when it comes to travel, the web does not deliver. Here what I observed:

1) Travel booking sites have not improved their services for over a decade. Other than price, little to no investment is given to user experience. Contrast that to Amazon and you see an ever widening gap.

2) Research remains weak too. It takes hours to check reviews for hotels, restaurant, activities. Information is available but largely unstructured. Again compared that to product reviews websites and you see how much behind travel research websites are.

(Full disclosure: I am co-founder of Raveable – a hotel reviews and analysis website)

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@Rafik

I tend to disagree…

1. I think travel has been the first large industry to exploit web technologies and has innovated endlessly (I take “travel” here in the broad sense – including stuff like Google Earth) both technically and commercially. Think low cost carriers, think dynamic packaging, think fare families, think mapping, think user reviews. Think metasearch in a market with fluid prices and availabilities, which is not the case in any other industry. Precisely, Amazon in you example has not changed much in years a part from adding more and more “static” products, beyond books. We have grown up with the Amazon process for the past 10 years. Some travel sites are so much easier to use.

2. It takes hours simply because now all this user generated information is easily available. I agree with the fact that there is too much stuff around, but I vastly prefer this to no information and a failed holiday. Your site goes in the right direction? I hope so… for the moment I am getting even more reviews from sources I did not even know existed. But at least it saves me time to search on multiple sites at once, which is not a bad idea.

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@ Darren “The problem is that travel agents do not want to sit for an hour to go through and inspire customers or give them a lot of different options”…… Sorry Darren but that is exactly what I do for a living, Please do not confuse Independents with chains,it is like your comparing Tesco with a real butcher.

OK no I do not want your return flight to Paris, but yes we do spend hours effusing customers… use your experience with Lee as an example, he really did treat you like any other customer, even if you where spend just a few hundred pounds. (To an agent you spending 200 can mean us earning 15-25 pounds).

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Funny that you should post this now as we are smack in the middle of this frustration! Normally on our open ended world tour, we find all we need quite easily on our leisurely, independent slow travel, usually by RV and using lots of mass transit or quick trains/ferries if need be. We almost never book ahead & travel by whim.

But now I’m trying to book a week in London & find it very hard & time consuming trying to figure out all the best deals.To add to the challenge, I had a bike wreck in Austria and broke my dominant arm, so must do it all with slow lefty pecking!

Ergh! It can be done, but frustration & time must be added to the equation! Thankfully, we have travel savvy friends online that help a lot!

Good one Darren!

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Ya, it is quite time consuming though. But without the many online booking reservation, it will be even worst off. There are always sites that provide comprehensive comparisons. Those are the ones that will save time and where you should start with.

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For a travel blogger like myself the research and thought I put into deciding where to go, where to stay, what to do there is part of the pleasure and anticipation of getting there. But I suppose we forget that most people aren’t that interested, they just want to cut straight to the lying on the sun lounger.

You’d think that would mean that some people might want to use a personal tailored service to find their ideal holiday, but the trouble is we’ve got so attuned to the cheap holiday and the cheap flight that everyone’s counting the cost- you can’t have it both ways.

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@ Darren of course we do UK, it a big part of an Independent Travel Agent’s business. I think there is a big branding problem as Independent’s need to stress the difference. Make it bit more like other retail; people know the difference between a baker and a supermarket.

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What if… One were to develop a website where customers could quickly and easily describe their holiday needs, and agents could quickly and easily respond via the same site (perhaps by way of a personalised on-line brochure), allowing the customer to choose the best trip for them? A quick and simple way of accessing agents for customers, and a ready supply of customers for agents? (accepted, there would be some details to work out)..

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The comment from Mark certainly has its merits but we are back to the problem that was discussed under agents charging for quotes. That is you could set up the site, provide the ideal holiday for the client but then they just take that information and book elsewhere.

I believe that Travel Industry websites need to be more user friendly. At the moment they are very restrictaive and do not give much latitude, with some you need to be pretty specific to get the answer you are looking for.

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[...] Cronian’s Travel Rants blog provides much food for thought. In a recent post he claims that “searching for a holiday frustrates consumers”, and explains many of the reasons why this may be so. My opinion there are loads of great tour [...]

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Don’t you think part of the problem is the product itself? You can’r compare travel websites to sites like Amazon as Rafik has done because the product is so diverse. For example a book is a book. It exists as it is and doesn’t change. It’s a solid, tangible product and it’s easy to fill a website with solid, tangible products. The same applies with most other things we buy, especially online.

Travel isn’t and never has been like that. You can’t return travel if it’s not quite right. You can’t repair travel if it goes wrong. it’s there for the very second that it exists and then it’s gone. Combine that with the variables in travel. How many travel dates are there? How many travel times on each of those dates. How many destinations, how many hotels in each of those destinations.. Trying to package that information into an Amazon type website while not impossible is in practical becuase you’d just end up with the kind of frustration we’re talking about here. It’s because of all those options that searching for holidays can be such a frustration. Especially if you don’t know where you want to go and when you want to go.

I still get people come into my office who are looking for a ‘cheap deal’. When i ask them where they want to go, they don’t mind. When they want to go, they often give a wide date range. How much they want to spend, “It depends”. How is any person or machine able to come up with the perfect trip in just a few minutes? The client want’s the agent to spend the time finding the answers to the question but nobody is prepared to pay for that time. If you go onto Amazon to find a book, even if you don’t know what book you want, you generally have an idea of the subject or author your looking for. You don’t just go their and say, find me a book that i’d like to read, about anything.. do you?

10 or 15 years ago things were not so bad. In general the options for most people were limited. You’d go into a travel agent, pick up a few brochures, maybe ask a few questions and go home and look through the brochures until you found some things that you liked, at times you could travel, at prices you could afford. Often months ahead of time. Armed with that information it was much easier for the agent to be able to find your vacation.

The ‘lates’ market then became the main way people booked. They learned that if they don’t book ahead of time they could get a better deal. The travel agents window changed from static displays of exotic destination to a glass wall full of little cards advertising last minute late availability. Because travel isn’t a solid, tangible product the airlines, hotels and tour operators need to get rid of unsold inventory. Once the flight has taken off you can’t sell that seat. Once the sun rises you can’t sell that bed night. But the product was still limited, generally, to the main charter destinations. Spain, Greece, Turkey. Florida. Mostly short haul packages of flights, transfers and hotels.

Since then the world has opened up. Easyjet and Ryan Air made scheduled flying cheaper. People were no longer restricted to charters. Long Haul destinations became easier and cheaper to get to and so the possibilities for travel increased. With it the choices and options available. No wonder it’s frustrating. When you jst had brochures and guide books it was easier to find information because information was limited. Along comes the internet and suddenly it’s cheap and easy for anyone to get information out there. There is so much more information than we ever had before and you don’t need to leave your home to get it. Of course it’s frustrating. It’s information overload. Not only are we getting the opinions of our peers, were getting the opinions of strangers, millions of them, all over the world. Not only are we getting the brochures from the local travel agents but we are also getting the information from travel agents all over the world, plus the airlines and the hotels and the tour operators.

It’s not going to get easier or better it’s going to get worse. There is going to be more and more information.. More and more choices and because of that, more and more frustrations.

We wanted the information. We wanted to be able to make informed and educated choices. Be careful what you wish for..

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@Nick

I have to say I have worked in the travel industry for a few years now for an airline and although I am not a travel agent (I did train for it once) I have to say there is nothing I enjoy more than looking at endless options for vacations long or short, arranging flights or searching through ideas to help family and friends. The likes of searching every day endlessly for 2 weeks in Benidorm or other charter destinations does not appeal that much to me but I would love to spend my time searching for that something special or different….even if it involves me trawling the internet and a million different sites. Infact I am just about to leave the world of flying so if anyone wants to give me a job and keep up the good work to all you that already do it!

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Sorry to say it, but most travel agency staff these days are instructed to ‘sell off page’ when it comes to vacations, using brochures of ‘preferred’ operators. Few, if any, have visited the destination you are interested in, and if they have been on a fam trip, the knowledge gained from that trip is often sketchy at best. If you do want a vacation that leaves lingering memories (mostly good) take the time to research the destination, its attractions, hotels, best points and short-fallings on the web — it’s all part of the vacation experience. Either that, or seek out a dependable independent agent who takes pride in his/her profession and keeps up-to-date with the ever-increasing changes in the hospitality arena — and they are few and far between.

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