New competitors and disruptive technologies are more than happy to steal customers away from travel agents that fail to meet the needs of their clients, said industry experts at a summit organised by the European Tour Operators Association (ETOA) earlier this week.
Travel businesses that fail to listen to its customers or that deliver sub-standard services are liable to be taken out rapidly by a new company or piece of technology.
Besides traditional competitors, ETOA warned especially of Google, who “is progressively developing new technologies to give the consumer a better travel experience, with ever more relevant information and ultimately a path to making a booking via a partner company, from Expedia to Lufthansa”.
Itinerary planner Google Trips was launched just last month; Google Flight offers the same service travel metasearch engines do; and the Google Now app is able to offer users answers to questions that are immediately relevant to them. All these combine into a suite of services capable of challenging the traditional agent’s role.
ETOA pointed out that Philip Ries, Google’s industry leader for travel, said that Google would continually look to find travel experiences that it considered to be ‘broken’ and to offer the consumer a better solution.
In his view, the first place for this to happen is on a mobile device, as search and bookings are now more prevalent on mobile devices than they are on desktop devices. Mobile also offers the prospect of superior integration with payment solution services. He considers payment of hotel services currently ‘broken’ because it involves too much waiting time.
Andrew Aley, regional director of Viator, said that there is a huge opportunity in the tours and activities segment on mobile. It is valued at over US$70 billion; it is extremely fragmented and less than 10 per cent market share is online.
He believes the key to disrupting it will be to provide last-minute booking on a mobile device in order to cater to the growing number of mobile users who book at increasingly shorter lead times.
Concluded ETOA CEO Tom Jenkins: “We have no choice but to embrace innovation and market disruption. The travel industry will thrive when new, better services replace those that have passed their sell-by date and such progress is to be encouraged.”
