Updated: Competition suspended yet again!

Over the past few days I have been following the ups and downs of a social media campaign by iTrek, an Australian travel insurance provider.

The idea is to submit a YouTube video (max 30 seconds) around the theme “The Travel Agent is Dead”.

itrek travel insurance brings you an exciting new film competition: “The Travel Agent Is Dead”. Amazing prizes to be won and all 10 finalists will be invited to attend the finalists film showing at the Chauvel Cinema, Paddington, Sydney. It’s going to be very big indeed.

We believe that the travel agents days are well and truly numbered. A large percentage of their margins are made by “bolting on” travel insurance products to customer’s flight bookings. Some travel agents have been known to make margins of up to 50% on Travel Insurance policies. The time has come for the public to see that there is an alternative. By going online and taking your travel agent out of the equation completely. This ‘alternative’ could save you up to 50% on the costs.

More and more people are going online to purchase their flights, hotel accommodation and now, their travel insurance too.

The travel agent is dead.

Umm -- I can see this being unpopular in certain quarters. I mean social media is meant to be warm and cuddly right? If you are going to do a video submission competition it should be around something amusing and shareable such as the Jamaican Tourist Board’s Dad Dancing. I like that one.

The competition has got trade people agitated. One industry colleague emailed me (cc Travel Guard, the company behind iTrek) saying they had personally emailed over 12 tour operators and agents in the US to stoke up feeling against the competition.

And they are not even an agent! Assuming they are not alone it looks like trouble.

Travel Weekly US reported that the competition has been terminated. However, as I write, it appears the competition is back up and running again. Catch it while you can.

The premise that travel agents are dead (or dying) makes an unlikely consumer facing competition. Now if they asked me to create a video about the death of travel agents I could go on and on about desire building vs service oriented travel agents -- and why only in the business travel sector will service oriented travel agents remain useful to consumers (companies).

Leisure travel agents have to be generating reasons to travel and product desire rather than servicing existing demand in order to retain a role within the industry.

But iTrek didn’t ask me to create a video. Instead they want consumer generated videos such as this:

Not sure this story is over quite yet…..

So who owns a review? Product reviews are known to work on travel websites but when a consumer adds a review who owns it?

This isn’t completely clear and different solutions have very different answers.

Take for example Visitor Review from Digital Visitor. For their service (£150/$240 a month), Digital Visitor retain the copyright.

They have a medium sized list of travel company clients including the VisitBritain DMO site (See reviews page).

As confirmed by Digital Visitor, if VisitBritain cease to use the Visitor Review system they can’t take their reviews with them.

Additionally, any other travel website could come along and, having formed a deal with Digital Visitor, use the VisitBritain reviews.

A second example from a similar service (PowerReviews Express) – their system starts at £50/$80 a month. They are very clear who owns the content.

“You own the content. If you are not satisfied for any reason, you can end your contract and stop the service with 30 days notice. You will still own all review content collected up to that date.”

To me this is critically important. If you own the product you need to own the copyright to reviews of those products if those reviews are on your own website.

If you don’t care too much about who owns the copyright then you may as well use a plugin from TripAdvisor. TripAdvisor owns the copyright to all reviews on their system but additionally give you significant marketing exposure. If you are going to give your copyright away you may as well make your content work for you.

Final thought – should the consumer own an aspect of the copyright to their own reviews? It is their review after all?

For example on Ning-powered communities (I run two of them) if a user no longer wishes to be part of the community they can leave and have an option to delete their content. Quite annoying for the community owners but absolutely fair to the community members.

The copyright question will matter over time – right now people are forming contracts with review system providers. Doesn’t seem much consideration is being given to what happens at the end of these contracts.

I am completely stumped with what ABTA, the UK official travel body that represents the interests of a large proportion of the UK travel industry, is up to.

Seems they want to regulate airline websites in a way I don’t understand at all.

Now I admit I don’t understand what they are doing. Last week when I wrote about it I got back-channel comments saying it was perfectly obvious what they were doing and I shouldn’t be writing about if it I was confused.

Maybe it is others who are perplexed, but just do not realise it – illustrated by recent public comments.

Here, for example, is what the ABTA chief executive Mark Tanzer said this week (via Travel Weekly UK)

“If this review is to truly and fairly extend the scope of consumer protection then airlines who operate click-through bookings on their sites must be made to face up to their customer responsibilities.”

So what on earth is a click-through booking?

Now I asked ABTA last week what they defined a click-through booking as. I know I am not a journalist but still try to research things.

Here is what an ABTA official said:

“We are looking at aiming to agree principles and we believe ‘in principle’ that linked arrangements should be protected, but we don’t know what the definitions will be at this stage.”

So, even ABTA has no idea what a click-through booking is – yet they are making it a key part of their submission to the European Union.  Travel agent Broadland Travel (Nicholas Lee) stated on Twitter about the previous post:

“Load of rubbish… When ABTA members voted they vote on travel click though air-land etc. (It’s the way we think).”

Er, fine. Rubbish it might be, but has Lee got a definition when ABTA does not?

So here are my key questions:

• If it really is about flights and not about packages then shouldn’t ABTA be talking to the Civil Aviation Authority about ATOL and leaving the European Union out of it? (NB: remember the Package Travel Directive is about packages which doesn’t actually mandate a flight, just two travel components.)
• How do you handle delayed contract bookings? Say an airline website links to a hotel website – and a consumer clicks through and books a hotel. Say that booking was actually an offer to buy rather than a contract. Then the offer is converted into a contracted booking subsequently. Well, immediately you do not have click-through bookings but click-through enquiries/quote requests. Stopping that would require mandating that any offsite links on airline websites would be prohibited because this is advertising, and not sales.
• And, finally, how would you handle websites that are operated by airlines but are not the same actual website as the flight sale site (such as MetroTwin, VTravelled et al)?
• If the proposals are to be wide-ranging can we expect to see ABTA trying to put legislation onto airlines as well?

So, before I go completely mad – perhaps you would like to comment saying what you think a click-through booking is.

Look – I am here in public saying I have no idea, ABTA officials say they have no idea – they want the European Commission to define it (sounds a bad idea to me) yet the ABTA Chief Executive want to keep saying its key to their strategy going forwards.

What a mess! Over to you – put your legal hats on and define what a click-through booking is. Thanks!

Read the headline again… That’s right, the UK’s official body which represents the interests of travel organisations and consumers has a rather interesting idea.

But first, some background: two key distribution models are emerging in consumer-facing online travel.

Firstly, there is the distributed transaction model – supplier places product, price and availability information into some form of distribution system, consumer buys from an agent (online or off), the transaction details are transmitted to the supplier.

Secondly, media models are coming to the fore. Awareness of the product (including perhaps price/availability) is on a 3rd party website, but ultimately the consumer books with the supplier directly.

Media models are simply a form of advertising with rich data. It is a marketing process, not a sales process.

With flights, hotels and other commodity products distributed transactions work well.

Most leading OTAs sell flights/hotels and consumers are happy enough to book these products via OTAs.

One reason is that collectively we as an industry have worked out what product information the consumer needs in order to make a purchase decision on a 3rd party website.

For flights/hotels the hot news is the media model websites (including meta search, trip planning sites etc).

For escorted tours, activities and some ground arrangements the story is quite the opposite. Take the example of a customer looking to book a white water rafting holiday.

The consumer will want to communicate with the supplier prior to booking. It is the nature of the product. Hence for these products distributed transaction websites have never really taken off and, I argue, are unlikely to.

Instead of automation tour companies focus on efficiency. You know you are going to have human-to-human contact as part of the sales and booking process – how can that be made efficient?

For these kinds of products the media models are king as ultimately it ensures consumer-to-supplier communication takes place directly.

The hot news is where you see distributed transaction models being given a go.

Trouble ahead

In the UK at least, distributed transactions are a core part of what a travel agent does. In flight/hotel sales the travel agents are competing not only against strong online distributed transaction players but with media model sites that don’t need any complex technology nor any consumer protection mechanisms. Is that fair?

Seems the agents don’t believe so and they want to even up the playing field.

What we may have here is the start of a proxy war between the smaller agents who want to maintain the distributed transaction model and the media model people.

However the media model people haven’t really woken up to it yet (probably because the trade press tend to write from a travel agent perspective!).

The proxy war will be fought within the new Package Travel Directive (a European-wide proposal that is under consultation at the moment).

From an ABTA statement this week:

“The ABTA submission to the European consultation advocates that the scope of customer protection should be extended to include all linked leisure travel arrangements, including “click-through” arrangements bought on the internet.”

Now I am not quite sure what this means yet. Does it mean that if you are a travel website and you have an affiliate banner to sell a hotel – and an affiliate banner to sell a flight – you need to be offering consumer protection?

That would be troubling. It would also be troubling to all non-travel websites who have travel advertisers and, if finally incorporated into the new directive, break the media model at least in Europe.

ABTA asked their members the following question:

If a new Package Travel Directive were introduced, indicate which of the following travel-related products or arrangements you think should be within the scope (tick all that apply).

One of the answers was:

• Accommodation, transport andor other tourist services purchased on the internet from different sites which are clearly linked on their web pages.

105 out of the 141 responses (74%) ticked that this should be in scope.

I am somewhat surprised by this position taken by ABTA. Last year when the ABTA chairman was being elected there was a great discussion on the Musings blog about this very topic. John McEwan (now ABTA chairman) stated:

“My view is that ABTA is best placed to represent the industry as a whole and that should include non transactional companies such as Cheapflights, Google etc. The methods of purchasing travel have evolved and ABTA needs to evolve accordingly.”

The European Union is still accepting responses to the open consultation (until 7th February 2010). Consultation website.

If you believe that websites should be able to link to travel companies without taking responsibility for consumer protection then make your voice heard!

NB: I am taking part in a debate about these two models in tour distribution as part of Travel Technology Europe (London, February 9th 2010). Seminar A1. I will be debating these two models with Deepak Jha from Isango.

I am a logical fellow, at heart just a code developer, hence when I look at what is happening I tend to analyse from what is possible, regardless of probability.

Code developers have to handle the one in 1,000 chance that a particular section of code will run hence we have to consider everything. That is just how it is.

But our logical minds don’t work quite so well when it comes to business.

Business seems to be more about emotion and connections than about whether something works or not.

• A to B – Take for example the humble online travel agent website (OTA). Historically they have been designed around how to get customer/user from A to B. User chooses departure (A) from a dropdown list. User chooses destination (B) from a dropdown list (that may or may not have updated depending upon the choice made in A). Simple. Basically this is how travel agent systems worked so early travel websites were bound to reflect that. Some argue that this meant that consumers were more likely to want to select destinations they knew.  Long Tail destinations (that would have been suggested by an experienced travel agent in a human conversation with a customer) were not popular.
• A to anywhere – Next we hear about inspiration websites but, frankly, I haven’t seen one that I really like yet. Some local single destination inspiration websites are noteworthy, but no global sites that help with choice of destination in the first place. What is an inspiration website? In essence it is an A to anywhere website. You are in a fixed place where can you go? Most have to earn their income from media or commission from flight sales as with almost unlimited destinations it would be impractical for a company to have interesting commercial deals in every single destination that was in their inspiration tool.
• Anywhere to B – This is the logical combination that my code developer mind keeps coming up with. If you are going to have A to B and A to Anywhere surely there has to be an Anywhere to B option. It’s just logical. Except no one seems to be running a service with this combination. Thousands of A to B OTAs, tens of VC-backed A to Anywhere inspiration websites. Can’t think of any Anywhere to B sites/services.

Who would want such a service? Well many existing destination based travel companies for a start. Events also.

Imagine you sell tours in Morocco. All you really care about is how to get people to Morocco.

You have customers arriving from UK, from USA, from continental Europe, from Middle East etc. What you want is a really nice iframed content source that you could put in your website and explain how to make your destination attractive (reachable) from all sorts of source markets.

Doesn’t have to actually sell the flight ticket (for commercial/regulatory reasons) – just make the end user aware that they can actually get from Paris to Morocco for their 1 week holiday and who to check flight availability with.

The point about Anywhere to B is that there is money here. These destination websites/companies have real customers, real transactions. They are crying out for some kind of clever iframed/affiliate system.

But travel entrepreneurs have gone down the A to Anywhere route – complex, hard to monetise and technically challenging to build something that can come up with great advice to all sorts of different use cases.

Perhaps 2010 should be the year that startup entrepreneurs park the fancy concepts and focus on back-to-basics revenue generation? Anywhere to B would be a great place to start.

Recently we have seen a spate of travel startups describing themselves as a GDS – Global Distribution System.

I am intrigued by TourAbout, a social GDS. Then there is Kumutu, an adventure and activity tour GDS.

So are they really a GDS? And what is a GDS anyway? Is this just semantics or are the legacy (they won’t like that) GDSs being taken on by new entrants?

Lets have a go to define what a GDS is. Perhaps this is an impossible task, like defining pornography, where the US Supreme court said it was tricky to define but you know it when you see it.

One thing for sure, a retail travel website with an affiliate programme is not a GDS. Agreed?

OK – onto the 10 checkpoints

• No content editing – if the supplier puts in a really bad description of their product it is down to them to fix. The central GDS does not edit the content.
• End point contracts – the travel agent commercially contracts with the hotel chain / airline / tour supplier. The GDS doesn’t even need to know the detail of that contract, they are just the data conduit. (This contrasts to where, for some web systems, the supplier contracts with the website company, the affiliate / agent contracts with the website company – hence they are centralised contracts)
• Purpose of the GDS is to communicate live product, dates, price & availability data – this can lead to a transaction (booking) via the GDS or something else (e.g. a PPC click, if the company is a media model company). Many traditional GDS systems revolve around the objective being a transaction rather than marketing but I digress.
• GDS is commercially agnostic – they shouldn’t care which products are returned first to a product search query. If a search order is required (it will be) then it should be fair and equal to all suppliers based on some form of random order
• Able to apply own business logic to front end – if an agent / media company wants to use a GDS as a source of products to run a media model they can. Or an agent can run a transactional model. The GDS shouldn’t care what kind of front end model is being applied (again, the traditional GDS model is based on transactions, but that has to change at some time)
• Open to all to take part – tricky one – but say a hotel chain wants to join a GDS and a similar hotel chain is already on there. There should be no objections to the new hotel chain joining. In this sense a GDS is a true aggregator not a curator of product.
• Trusted intermediary – the GDS acts as the central, trusted, tracking mechanism for all bookings between supplier and agent. The GDS acts neither for one or the other.
• Global –  the same product can be represented in multiple languages sharing the same prices / availability. If not global it is just a DS right?
• GDS charges based on the technology burden not on the value of the transaction – doesn’t matter where the decimal point is on a piece of data. Tend to charge based on how much traffic / load placed on system.
• Able to use GDS for own channel pricing – say a supplier wants to give a specific price to a particular agent. The GDS should permit end point to end point specific price contracts. Remember the GDS is just the data conduit….

Did I miss any out?

One event running concurrently with World Travel Market is the Get Funded Show, run by EyeForTravel.

Eighteen entrepreneurs pitched in front of an audience consisting of angel and VC investors. This is a quick roundup of who pitched and what their services are about.

Seen Mobile Media – Providing a mobile as a service platform taking expertly written destination content (e.g. Rough Guides). Consumers pay for the content as part of their mobile application purchase. If the consumer revisits that city they have to buy a new guide (to get the latest version of the content). Business model based on 3 way revenue share between the guide publishers (e.g. Rough Guides), the white label partner and Seen Mobile Media. Content provision is after the decision about where to go (i.e. not an inspiration based startup). ANALYSIS: Reasonable chance of success but do consumers really want to pay for mobile based destination content written by guide publishers? Not if another service can find a way of making money but still offering free content (e.g. perhaps as a loss leader to other transactional services)

Toozla – A mobile service where you can share your opinions of a location there and then. As you walk around a city you can hear what other people have said about that spot. ANALYSIS: Nice idea but travellers may find rather large data bills when they return home. Toozla understand this but I wasn’t clear from the presentation how they were going to solve it.

YourTour – A B2B service that websites can use to provide trip planning advice for their region. ANALYSIS: One of my favourites as launching with a B2B service is a great way of learning about whether the concept works whilst bringing in revenue at the same time.

Evature – Use clever natural language processing to assist human business travel agents to become more efficient. e.g. it can read incoming emails / texts from clients and begin automated searching against a GDS. If the system, Eva, can’t understand the incoming message it can be routed to a human. Currently at prototype stage and will be running client trials within the next 6 months. Not the same as TripIt because TripIt read booking emails with standard layouts – Eva can read freeform emails from clients. ANALYSIS: I like it but will business travel agents buy it in sufficiently large numbers to pay for what must be expensive research and development? Seems to be solving a problem that is diminishing over time.

TouristWay – Booking engine for SME travel companies selling their own products. ANALYSIS: Good marketplace potential but a number of companies offering similar tools in what is a highly complex problem to solve.

GetYourGuide – Find and book experiences / activities. ANALYSIS: An area with many competitors offering similar sites. However none of the competitors have really taken a grip of the sector quite yet hence there is still plenty of opportunity for a new entrant to create a winning proposition. This team could do it.

The Zouk – A hotel finding service. Customer puts in a request and room providers pitch back to the customer their price / availability. The confidential reverse bidding process could permit the hotel to offer a vastly reduced price that they make available elsewhere because no one else knows what price they have offered. In the last 6 months of trading customers have sent 500 requests and received 2500 offers. The offer is not opaque (unlike Hotwire). Revenue made from charging the hotel 8 EUR for an accepted offer. ANALYSIS: If this service takes off it could become a little overwhelming for the hotelier as each request has to be dealt with manually. I have seen similar services for tours (not hotels) and tour operators start with writing custom replies addressing the questions put by the customers but after a few months tend towards replying back with a generic paragraph or two and a link to a couple of web pages.

Dajiudian – Hotel bed bank / booking system operating in China. Available in English, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Thai and Vietnamese. ANALYSIS: They seem to be creating some momentum in the Chinese marketplace however booking volumes remain very light.

Jet2Ski – An online ski publication based on revenues from affiliates and partners. Looking to address their seasonality issues by featuring summer activities (not just winter ski). ANALYSIS: Seem to be doing well in their chosen market but running a portal requires constant attention to content freshness and accuracy and personally I prefer businesses where that isn’t required.

TripSketch – Trip planning system. Building a database of attractions, opening times etc – this data is then presented and can be manipulated by consumers to create day by day itineraries for destination cities. Their content (and functionality) is available for use on your own site via a variety of API methods. ANALYSIS: Their data looks great but their functionality hasn’t got that finely tuned feel quite yet. Good business here though being a data provider.

Tripatini – Traveller social network / blog. ANALYSIS: Travel communities are omnipresent and I am not sure where the uniqueness is for this service nor where the revenue will come to support some quite aspirational investment levels.

AboutAnywhere – Hotel booking system. Charge hotels 10% (vs an average of 25% that larger OTA’s charge). Of the 10% charged, 5-7% is returned to the customer in the form of something the customer will appreciate (e.g. a bunch of flowers) rather than a rebate (such as Bing cashback). ANALYSIS: Consumers probably don’t really care whether a hotel is being charged 25% or 10%. What they care about is good clean search and book functionality and either being able to book their favourite hotel that they always stay at – or to have a selection that offers them a choice within the criteria that they have set. If About Anywhere can provide this functionality on the lean margins they have announced then this could be disruptive indeed. Probably easier to setup as a lean operation than be an OTA and have to cut back to meet the same margins. One to watch.

HouseTrip – Holiday rentals OTA. Guests have to call an average of 8 rentals before finding one that is suitable and available. This service solves that problem as well as providing safety for consumer’s money (rather than consumers having to wire / Paypal money to a supplier they don’t know). There is also an auction model for peak periods (e.g. during large events). ANALYSIS: Seems to tick all the right boxes! [HouseTrip were chosen as the winner]

Nimbus Airlines – Flying from Scotland to Europe. Will charge a “fair price for a fair product” – not copying Ryanair pile them high and sell cheap. Will be following the Scottish ethos of “The price you see is the price you pay” – e.g. no ancillary fees or expensive credit card fees. ANALYSIS: The pitch seemed somewhat optimistic that an existing airline (e.g Ryanair / EasyJet) wouldn’t compete on the same route if a new route was found that was profitable.

Uncle Sam’s New York tours – Guided tours in New York. Looking to expand to cover more cities perhaps using the franchise model. ANALYSIS: Looks good and a fairly understandable business to be in (not like technology startups!)

Arrange Your Exchange – Enables holiday home owners to swap their home for another elsewhere. Solves the issue of “same location fatigue”. No money involved (uses site credits) – as the holiday home owners believe they have already invested in their holiday (by buying a holiday home) so won’t want to pay further. ANALYSIS: The money is probably in renting out the homes rather than building a swapping community. However creating a swapping community is a rather nice way of building a network of holiday home owners who trust you which is a great first step to going fully transactional.

Aviatour – Plan to link up key islands in the Philippines using seaplanes. Will cut journey time from the main international airport to tourist islands down from 17 hours to 90 minutes hence provide a boost to tourism in the area. ANALYSIS: I wasn’t sure whether I was going to be that interested in seeing this pitch but actually it was very nicely done and now I feel much more informed. Not natural Tnooz territory this one!

Hip Chalets – Boutique chalets in Chamonix, France. Aiming to become the next big alpine lifestyle brand. Looking for funding to renovate a hotel in the area. ANALYSIS: Marketing / product distribution will be the big challenge.

And the winner is….. HouseTrip!

Learn more: Tnooz recently interviewed Arnaud Bertrand from HouseTrip

Follow TravelBlogCamp 2009 as it happens and take part using CoverItLive.

Live video feed

When considering an online travel startup you tend to think about three approaches:

• taking on an incumbent at their own game, but executing better
• creating a whole new category that you can dominate, as long as you can make that category desirable (no point dominating a category that no one is interested in)
• assume that the market must be massive so if you can only capture 1% you will be fine

All three approaches require consideration of barriers to entry. If you are startup up you have to consider what barriers competitors or incumbents have put in place – e.g. do they have a bigger consumer brand, do they have more data, do they have mature technology partnerships with lock out clauses etc.

If you are the company that is currently in a dominant position you look at the equation the other way around. On every project you look to make it harder and harder for new entrants to come and take a piece of your pie.

Hence a great deal of an entrepreneur’s time is taken by active consideration of building or bypassing barriers to entry.

So, take TripAdvisor’s primary barrier to entry.

TripAdvisor has a mammoth website (approx 60 million pages in the Google index featuring 25 million reviews). That is a significant barrier to entry for any new review based travel startup.

You would have thought with such a grip on the review market as TripAdvisor has that they don’t need too much help to maintain their position. However it now comes to light that Google are assisting TripAdvisor to maintain the status quo.

The Google Adsense API is only available to websites with over 100,000 daily page views. Whilst this doesn’t sound a particularly high number it does mean that the API is only available to the top few thousand websites. Startups need not apply (and will have to be content using Google Adsense via the omnipresent JavaScript widget).

But what is the Google Adsense API and how does it affect all this?

The Google Adense API permits API consumers to return an HTML snippet of Google advertising (Adwords) that can be manipulated prior to serving onto the final browser consumer. It can also be stored for later analysis.

e.g. this advert box on TripAdvisor comes from Google Adsense API:

Unfortunately, when this text is displayed as in page content it also appears on Google search results. Here you can see TripAdvisor ranking higher than Viator, but with the two TripAdvisor results using Viator advert text:

You can see the Viator advert text appearing as part of the TripAdvisor results.

Viator have blogged about their reaction to uncovering this problem.

So are we all happy that TripAdvisor has access to this API from Google but other startups don’t? Is there a real benefit here or are people overreacting? What do we think about text from adverts being used as snippets within the main search results?

• Daniele Beccari (VP Isango, a Viator competitor) tweeted from a personal standpoint: “I stand with Viator against TripAdvisor”
• Scott McNeely (director: consumer & affiliate web at Viator) called it “highly annoying and, at the extreme, not the Internet we signed up for”

Me, I think TripAdvisor are being astute in how they use the Google Adsense API and business is business. However I do consider it unhelpful that Viator’s advertising text should appear in the snippet shown on the Google main search results as if it were TripAdvisor’s text. Google should address this in order to keep their advertisers happy.

There is some confusion about extra services (which are mainly non mandatory to the end customer) that are now available on many forms of mainstream travel products such as flights.

Much of the confusion and concern comes from agents who sell these products [e.g. see this Facebook group setup by agents who are upset with the new BA seat reservation charges] [Hat tip: Travel Weekly UK]

Or read what tweeting business travel agent Murray Harrold has to say about the new United Airlines baggage package:

Why should United travelers “save” money of baggage fees? – The fees are not supposed to be there in the first place!!! I mean: First, take something away and charge for it, THEN turn round and say, “Here’s how you can save…all this goes to show that airlines have got themselves into a big hole – more precisely, all these bright young exec’s…and they are just ruddy clueless how to fix it. What a ruddy shambolic lot. I wouldn’t trust any of them to run an airfix model airport.

Murray is worth paying attention to if you are on Twitter as he summarises the agent perspective eloquently.

The problem is these agents are looking at all these ancillary products through the wrong lens. Yes of course it is about the money but it is also about centralising bookings. No wonder agents are upset – but they put the issue down to airline incompetence rather than well considered strategy. The agents are complaining about the wrong point!

To understand what I mean we have to go back to initial principles.

I do a lot of work with small tour operators. Many of them come from a tailor made tour background. They start with the idea that they are based in a destination and can pretty much sell you whatever tour you want.

These tour operators really struggle to be successful online. In effect they are promoting a service not a product.

A lot of my conversations with these small tour operators relates around advice to create a few sample products (tours). These products can then be promoted and used as the basis of a tailor made tour. These products can be listed on a website (and 3rd party websites).

In this situation these tour operators have had to decrease variations of their product in order to be able to market online.

It is the same with working with agents. By decreasing variations it makes the product easy to learn, easy to sell and enables an agent to be confident they are selling an appropriate product.

Back to the airlines. By increasing variations they make it much harder for agents to sell their product. A customer who finds they can’t get the information they need from an agent may end up looking on the airline’s own website and therefore booking directly.

Summary – if you want agents to work with you, if you want distributed transactions, then reduce product variations. If  you want customers to book direct (via centralised transactions) then increase product variations.

We can have a long debate about the merits of Twitter. It has its advocates as well its opponents.

The reason I like Twitter is because the travel industry is so fragmented that it is a great mechanism to keep up with the zeitgeist.

No other tool, website, conference or trade association is as effective at joining together so many people from all corners of the fragmented travel industry.

When used for a B2B perspective Twitter is not trivial or banal.

I no longer have to wait for email newsletters (that I never read) in order to find out what companies I am tracking are announcing. I can see what my competitors talk about hence what they consider important. I can see what our customers are thinking (last time we had an outage more people tweeted about it than raised a ticket in our helpdesk). This is all important information to me.

Hence Twitter has become a key part of my daily information and opinion supply.

Now I have a new source of information and insight. The Google travel team have joined Twitter! (@GoogleTravel)

For many smaller companies in B2C leisure travel Google are responsible for providing traffic representing 50-75% of bookings (taking into account organic traffic, PPC & traffic from intermediate sites who themselves have sourced their traffic primarily from Google)

To me any percentage over 50% or so indicates significant risk. Google have dropped plenty of hints that Google Travel is coming and when it does the outcome could well be disruptive, intentionally or not.

Quoting Google from their 2009 Q2 earnings call:

I think it is the case on the vertical side that there is a lot of opportunity to get incremental monetization gains where you can further qualify the leads better for the advertisers.

So for example, the finance area and the travel area are areas where there’s a lot of opportunity to do that, so that you end up putting more information in the ad and then incrementally getting more information from the customer so that you can further qualify whether or not the customer in the finance area is interested in a particular type of mortgage, and then you send them to an advertiser with whom they are more likely to consummate a specific transaction that that advertiser is willing to pay for. So there’s a lot of opportunity there

So we know they are considering plans and are probably either in research or in active development right now.

What we don’t know is how Google see the travel industry. How do they form their opinions? What travel industry news do they read? Who has their ear?

For example do they care more about destinations – see the new Google destination pages – e.g. Paris (Worth a look if you haven’t seen this style of page yet)

Or do they care more about transport? e.g. information on how to get from one place to another (such as their maps provide). See Google Transit

Or perhaps they care more about products? Are Google’s plans based on product reviews? E.g. Here are the hotels in Southampton, UK along with aggregated reviews.

Or perhaps they fancy themselves at providing advice on what makes a good tour itinerary. E.g. Here are tours you can take in London, UK [Citytours functionality]

From what they have released so far it is difficult to read too much into where they are going next. They seem to have a wide variety of online travel services but not the same deep product / price based functionality for flights / hotels that Bing travel has.

As I mentioned earlier, I believe you can learn a great deal about what a company considers important from how a company uses Twitter. Lets take a look at the new Google Travel twitter account @GoogleTravel

They currently follow 93 twitter accounts. These 93 are dominated by big travel brands (airlines, hotel chains, cruise companies), mainstream media and US based travel startups.

They have tweeted travel tips from CNN, they read Hotel Marketing (having retweeted several articles featured there). No Tnooz tweets yet (keep up Google, keep up!)

But these are all large companies. They don’t seem to follow many smaller travel companies or tour operators.

I remember last year sharing a platform at a travel industry conference with several folk from the UK Google Travel team. One comment I had from them was that a particular idea wouldn’t be acceptable to them because it wouldn’t support their small travel company advertisers. Hence I know they care about the smaller companies, just they don’t follow any on Twitter!

Who should Google be following on Twitter in order to understand the wider travel industry on a global basis?

I suggest they follow all the Tnooz nodes all of whom are active (or at least exist) on Twitter.

Also I think they should follow the Travel Insights 100 group, a forum of 100 leading diverse travel leaders all active in social media. Single click subscription and further info from Uptake Travel Insights 100

Who do you suggest Google Travel follow on Twitter?

In a short blog post Dopplr has this morning confirmed that its rumoured sale to Nokia has completed successfully. The announcement contains this line:

Nokia shares our vision of the Social Atlas, the idea that social location data can improve our experience of cities.

I am interested in this concept of the Social Atlas but best to leave the description to Dopplr themselves:

There are plenty of great sites out there where you can find subjective reviews and star-ratings of places round the world. We wanted to do something different, building lists of the best places ranked by everything that we know about the traveller.

Because of our existing community, we already know all sorts of things about our travellers’ habits – for example, we know who visits New York most often, and we know who lives in Europe. These “opinionated lists” would tell us things like where Europeans eat in Tokyo, or where frequent visitors to New York stay compared to people visiting for the first time.

Taking into account these sort of factors, we can build aggregated views based on the wisdom of particular crowds. It can be interesting to see “people who visit X also go to Y” statements.

Discovering a city starting with places you already know is a great way to improve your local knowledge, but what if you’re new to a city? The Social Atlas has another mechanism to help sort and sift the combined knowledge of Dopplr travellers. We calculate lists of places that aren’t just ordered by plain popularity, but take into account the travel experience and social interconnectedness of people who visit.

So it’s about the data. Interconnected data.

One of the challenges with Dopplr is that it relies heavily on the network effect. The network, collectively, becomes more useful the more people join. This is true of most social networks.

Cloud travel itineraries

Putting aside the specifics of Dopplr’s Social Atlas what their platform is really about is storing your travel itinerary in the cloud. Once the data is “out there” you can start to find interesting uses for it.

Dopplr are by no means alone when it comes to cloud based itinerary storage. TripIt for example is a strong category leader. The difference with TripIt is that the utility to a single traveller on a single trip is immediately obvious.

No need to keep pumping data into the cloud hoping that the hyped networked effect will kick in at some future point as you do with Dopplr.

Super PNR for direct bookings

Where I think we are going with cloud based itinerary storage is towards a Super PNR (Passenger Name Record) concept.

Imagine the future where travellers research and book directly online via a variety of supplier websites. At that point we need some glue (or perhaps a bucket) to store this itinerary data in one place.

Independent services, with access controls (eg perhaps using OpenID) could access that data and provide either personalised travel advice, latest transport news, suggest other products, give you coupon codes etc etc

Imagine an open eco-system of travel applications just like Facebook or iPhone applications all feeding and updating a central cloud hosted Super PNR.

Does this sound far fetched? Look at what Google have done with centralised records in Google Health. If you can do this with health records it can be achieved with travel records.

Sadly that isn’t what Dopplr were building. I don’t think that TripIt are building that either! The concept is too big for a startup…. an existing player who believes in direct bookings (rather than distributed bookings) is needed to put their weight (and money) behind it.

If this Cloud Super PNR existed then I expect Dopplr would have been one of the most successful applications  using it. But it doesn’t, so they aren’t…. but as with many entrepreneurial ideas the Dopplr concept has shown us the future…. just we collectively haven’t understood it yet.

Bing… incoming press release from HotelsCombined, a Sydney based hotel reservation company.

They have launched a new scheme to guarantee 100% up-time to their affiliate partners.

“Through this agreement, affiliates of HotelsCombined.com can rest assured that the site will remain available to Internet users 100% of the time. If in the unlikely event the operation of the site is interrupted for any extended period of time, 100% of the missed commission earnings will be credited to the partner’s account.”

Is this for real or just a wacky plan that has been dreamt up in a marketing meeting in order to achieve a quick PR buzz boost?

100% uptime is a very tough target.

Digging deeper in discussions with their head of affiliates, Adam Zebrowski, I have found out the following:

• The policy is for their website only – if one or two of their upstream hotel content providers don’t return results within the timeout period they won’t take any responsibility for it (but other than that, it covers full system uptime which means any planned maintenance will still incur an account credit).
• Only 1 downtime event would have paid out in the last 6 months – a DNS issue caused by a denial of service attack on their DNS provider.
• The onus is on the affiliate to request a credit request – rather than credits being applied automatically

I would prefer to see a full system guarantee that includes all their hotel product suppliers.

I was once involved with a hotel distribution company and many of the providers had 2 hour maintenance windows at various times (normally weekend). When you totalled all the windows up (and they never occurred at the same time) it meant our full system uptime was significantly impacted (as we needed all suppliers to be operational for our system to work). HotelsCombined need to offer the 100% uptime guarantee over their entire system, not just their website in order for the guarantee to be credible.

The second key change I want to see is that the onus for requesting payout should be on HotelsCombined not their affiliates. Credits should be applied automatically.

Without these two changes it is a little too much of a PR buzz idea than a genuine advance in how HotelsCombined will work with their affiliates.

What do you think – is this a PR puff or for real?