Yes, of course it is. What Google does, matters. However, we seem to be missing the long-term picture. Google is mainly great at keyword based search.

But will keyword based search be the dominant search form in 20 years? Ten years? Five years even? Doubt it.

Mobile search is much more about location. Ecommerce search will be much more about your social connections and their experience with the same product.

If I am still typing in keywords in five years time I consider that as bad as travel agents still typing in cryptic command line messages for flight/hotel bookings. (And, yes, I understand the efficiency argument about an expert using a concise well matured language).

What is the alternative to keyword search? Well one step forward is destination/travel date based search. Not exactly a UI panacea but probably more useful than a keyword based research query in terms of pitching back destination inspiration ideas or available travel product.

Yet, Google is not winning that game. In fact it is not even playing in it. The game has changed and it is Bing with its Farecast acquisition just 16 months ago which is playing the game of converting mainstream searches from keyword based search to destination/date based.

Is that 16 month head start sufficient? Will Bing have built sufficient knowledge to be able to fend off any Google-ITA mainstream solution?

It’s a big question. I don’t have the answer. What I am sure though is that Google have a fight on their hands and they are not first to market. In that situation regulators are bound to give them the green light.

If Google ultimately lose the battle (such as it has with book ecommerce moving to consumers searching on Amazon first) then I believe they will regret the five year period between 2005 and 2010 where it basically squandered a lead.

Can you name a single big innovation in travel search that Google has delivered to market in the last five years? Nope.

Oddly, Expedia is making noises about the Google-ITA Software deal expressing concerns to the US Justice Department.

But Expedia is actually in the same boat as Google. Expedia has also squandered a leading travel search position. Compare for example this 2003 hotel search result to a 2010 version.

2003

2010

Remarkably similar, although the Expedia quality rating has been replaced with a user generated one and wireless has trumped breakfast!

What both Expedia and Google have achieved is the fallacy of the local maximum.

They have both made brilliant efficiencies on their core UI design. Undeniable. However, alternatives now exist that are fundamentally different and none of this will be uncovered by A/B testing that just sandpapers existing approaches.

[NB: Expedia continues to keep the faith, as Dan Lynn, managing director of Expedia Asia-Pacific, told a conference in Sydney this week: "Whenever we A/B test, consumers confirm that the typical layout of OTA is the right one"]

The tortoises are just building up momentum and could overtake the hare.

Solving problems is what entrepreneurs are guided to do and consumer-facing issues are easy to spot and often look ripe for addressing.

Hence we end up with a glut of inspiration websites, social media services or product review aggregators.

Whilst there is certainly an opportunity in these sectors (for the ultimate few who capture sufficient traction to become category winners) it is becoming an increasingly obvious that sites such as inspiration websites are really focussed on web traffic arbitrage between Google and travel product suppliers and are not really winning the battle to become the place to start trip planning research.

That is not a plan for long term success.

Instead, I propose three problems that are crying out for help.

Idea #1 – the easy one suitable for bootstrappers: Tour operator/travel agent discovery

I work with specialist tour operators through our reservation system TourCMS as well as via the SmallFishBigOcean forums.

These tour operators tend to have great products not available via any distribution channel and their marketing can be limited to spending a few dollars on Google and other direct approaches.

Historically they have never worked with travel agents but now they are beginning to think about agent distribution or perhaps dipping their toes in affiliate marketing.

However, they struggle to find agents/affiliates interested or sufficiently knowledgeable in what they are promoting.

In just the last couple of weeks I have been asked who might promote a one month residential yoga teacher training course in India, tours of Ethiopia, mainstream tours of South Africa or walking holidays on the Isle of Wight (UK).

The problem exists in reverse. Conventional agents want to find tour operators/activity providers who have commissionable products that are credible, provide date, price and availability information in a nicely consumable format and who might be worth promoting to their consumers in their geographic vicinity.

Their current method to find new suppliers is exhibitions such as London’s World Travel Market, ITB in Berlin, etc.

There is no web based solution for this right now.

Solution: A central website much like a dating website.

Idea #2 – for a company with a bit of money behind them: Tour operator commission/balance payments system

IATA runs a Billing Settlement Plan (BSP) for airlines, which it describes as:

“A BSP is the central point through which data and funds flow between travel agents and airlines. Instead of every agent having an individual relationship with each airline, all of the information is consolidated through the BSP”

Now the industry could do with that for tours operators/activity companies and travel agents.

However it needs to not just handle balance payments but also affiliate commission (i.e. companies working on the media model). Note that affiliate commission flows in the opposite direction to travel agent balance payments.

There is no web-based (or non web-based for that matter) solution for this right now.

Idea #3 – a toughie, but with the right contacts and partnerships you could be onto a winner: Credit card risk data

Credit card companies are happy to be informed when you are travelling abroad in order to incorporate this information within their risk analysis profiles.

Then, when you are based in the US but suddenly start charging payments from Thailand, the card company may permit the payment.

There are all sorts of problems with card company traveller profiles. For example, some card companies can only hold one trip at a time, causing problems to travellers on a multi-country trip.

I am less confident about this idea than the first two (because I have never worked for a credit card company), however, I sense they would pay for a source of traveller data which helps them mitigate payment risk and understand whether to accept a particular payment or not.

Might be worth looking into if you have the right contacts OR it might be left for a TripCase/TripIt type company to work towards.

NB: Thats it! Do you have any more suggestions on problems that could be addressed by travel industry entrepreneurs?

With the speculation that Google is in negotiations to buy ITA Software (the system behind many leading flight meta search sites), I thought it was time to revisit that article and see whether I was right or not, and what I would advise now.

In May 2008, I speculated that Google should work around three key themes:

1. Owning the traveller profile
2. Increasing content that can have adverts served against them
3. Product metasearch

Owning the traveller profile

• In the last two years  TripIt, Traxo and TripCase et al have begun to dominate this sector. They provide tools to centralise, organise, manage and share travel plans over multiple suppliers and trips. Nothing like this announced by Google in last twoyears.

Increasing content (and advertising opportunities)

• Okay, a fairly obvious strategic prediction, but in September 2009 Google announced Place Pages – a page for each city/destination pulling together content from a variety of Google owned sources. Looks like I got that right.

A method to implement tour product metasearch with a standard data format

• I wanted Google to define a basic travel standard that could be used to build a tour/activity metasearch. They have a standard (travel packages in Google Base) but it is not widely adopted or known about.

So, I scored 1.5 out of three with my last strategic speculation.

But with Google taking much more interest in the travel industry, what would I suggest now? Indeed, what could be some of the options available to Google?

1. Owning the traveller profile

There is still an opportunity here for Google or at least a reason to be playing in this particular game. Imagine what would happen if Facebook (with their new penchant for sharing profile data) decided that high value travel data was useful to aggregate.

It would give them a massive advertiser opportunity. Google need to be in this sector if not for any other reason than to defend against potential Facebook evolutions.

2. Supplier centric models

The lens to look at strategic options should either be user centric (i.e. the traveller profile) or supplier centric. Travel ecommerce conferences are dominated by middle layer companies (metasearch/online travel agents) so if you only go to travel industry conferences you could easily begin to believe that this is what makes up the online leisure travel industry.

Consumers like to deal with suppliers directly (if multiple transactions can be pulled together into a single service using something like a centrally maintained traveller profile) and the new Google travel should support this supplier centric model. Suppliers include airlines, hotels, car hire companies and inbound tour operators. From a web perspective suppliers exclude meta-search, online travel agents and out bound tour operators without local operations.

Airline strategy:

• Yes – buy ITA. Use it to send customer traffic from the Google website to transact on the individual airline websites. Pull the transaction details back to the centre using a single traveller profile.
• Completely removes the online travel agent/flight metasearch layer.
• The product data source is ITA’s existing sources.

Hotel strategy:

• Move the pay per click advertising model to an individual bidding market per hotel. i.e. rather than companies bidding on keywords they bid around a known (unique) hotel. (Google already has this hotel data).
• Firstly, this brings supplier direct transactions up the list (as the end point suppliers are most likely to be able to bid the highest on their own properties). Secondly by moving the market model to be based on hotels rather than on keywords this assists mobile transactions where users are not typing in keywords but searching by geography or location.
• Again, like airlines, use the centrally managed traveller profile system to bring all transactions together into an entire trip – replacing the need for an agent to do the packaging.
• In this case the product data source are hotel advertisers.

Tour/activity strategy:

Products such as tours and activities, for leisure travel at least, are often the driving reason to travel in the first place. Three key aspects Google could also adopt.

• Travel product data standard
• Bring in CPA alongside CPC advertising
• Permit tours/activities to be paid for using Google Checkout

4. Travel product data standard

The existing Google travel package data standard is sufficient. Let’s get that data more widely used within the Google system. It is not trivial to create but it is possible for SME / SMB enterprises to create tour/activity data to this standard using basic data tools.

Tours/activities are the travel products that work the most like conventional ecommerce products (i.e. they have a single price and are available year round or at least within a season start/end date range). Hence product search can be much more about searching product attributes than about searching available dates (like for flights/hotels).

A few small developments on the existing Google shopping search would produce a tour/activity search quite easily and sit nicely alongside flight search functionality delivered by an ITA acquisition.

5. CPA advertising alongside CPC advertising

Google does have an affiliate marketing network, yet it is not well utilised within travel. CPA will really help day tour/activity companies work with Google as currently they compete selling their $150 half-day tours with companies selling a seven-day holiday to the same destination.

When two distinct product types battle on the same keywords then the one with the largest profit margin per click will win. Currently tour operators selling holidays (not necessarily the end supplier) ends up gaining from this and activity companies are unable to compete fairly.

To truly go supplier-centric, the CPA affiliate advertising will have to be more accessible for small travel companies.

6. Google Checkout

Google Checkout (the payment system that Google operate) excludes travel products. By permitting payments for travel products in Checkout, Google will be able to operate a CPA advertising model to much greater effect (as they will know that a transaction has taken place as they can see the money)

So what happens now?

I promise to write another post in two years with an update on whether Google has taken my advice. If the search giant follows this set of predictions by a degree of 50%, like it did last time, we are in for interesting times!

NB: If you are NOT Google (!) but want tips on running your travel ecommerce business, then read 55 Travel Ecommerce Tips, a free e-book published in April 2010.

Plenty of advice around these days for the humble offline travel agent, but here are some important points to take into account when considering or reviewing a website strategy.

What is a High Street (Main Street) travel agent?

High Street travel agents tend to sell human expertise, product experience and personal service. This, to a proportion of the general population, has value. In particular there is value to consumers for complex or high value bookings – such as cruise or luxury long haul tours.

What is the service agents sell?

One customer comes into the shop. The challenge is to, using the agent’s experience and knowledge, find a handful of products that match that one customer’s needs on that occasion. It is a sales challenge and requires a great deal of connections to product suppliers and powerful (read expensive) technology.

The opposite is true for tour operators. Tour operators start with a small set of products and must find customers who are looking for those style of products. This is a marketing challenge. Technology needn’t be so expensive.

What website strategies?

We hopefully agree that offline agents sell a service. Services are notoriously difficult to promote online (vs products like tour operators sell). You can summarise in one paragraph what you do “we sell flights from 100 airlines, tours from all the leading tour operators and have some great cruise options”. That is your website in one line. Dull.

Some travel agents therefore try to create product centric websites based on the same products they sell on the High Steet. However these websites are tough to build AND MARKET on a low budget because they are taking on the big OTAs head on with exactly the same products. Sorry small travel agents this is not a fight you can win.

Instead small travel agents choose to become specialist tour operators – focusing on specialist destinations or activities. That can work online very well indeed. Key point for these agents is to contract with suppliers in the ultimate destination.

If a UK travel agent contracts with a UK based company, for example, to sell a remote destination then there are too many UK profit margin layers to make the transaction price competitive.

But let’s assume that the travel agent wants to keep selling their traditional service, human expertise and personal service, selling widely available travel products from leading suppliers.

The key points here are humans and efficiency.

Humans:

• I would want to see heavy use of LOCAL social media for this. All the time reinforce that you are human and what the humans are doing.
• Run evening events focussed on destinations – fronted by your staff – showing their expertise.
• Reinforce your service, not your products.
• Talk about fixing travel problems (due to ash for example) and what the humans are doing.
• Run schemes to get people to come into the shop as part of a competition. All the time focus on humans (not products, not destinations).
• Products/destinations are the hook, but humans are what you are selling. Stay positive. Don’t bash other ways that consumers may choose to book travel.
• Remember your customers may book with you for their complex travel but book online with a leading OTA for a weekend city break. They won’t want to see you bash that approach.

Efficiency:

• Rather than making all your customer touch points automated (which may cause the customer to forget they are dealing with a local agent) make the touch points efficient (from your perspective).
• Send personalised emails with information (not automated ones) but make the emails templated so you can stay on top of who needs what emails – and they take 1 minute to write rather than 10 minutes.
• Create a customer login on your website so that they can see the status of any work you are doing for them. Where are you tickets? Can you download pre-departure information? When is my balance due?

Humans have common sense. Make use of it. Making a web system efficient is much less costly than making an automated system. Having to put all that human logic and expertise into an automated system will take months of configuration and a big budget.

NB: I have published 55 tips for travel agents and tour operators in a free ebook which covers this area in more detail.

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:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q96Z0cm7Xgo

Not sure this story is over quite yet…..

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.

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!

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.

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.

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?