Over this time on this blog I have published 424 posts (and you have contributed 1733 comments – thank you).

But it is time to move on. I am now going to be writing and other things over at Tnooz.

You can access all my posts from this node: http://www.tnooz.com/author/abainbridge/
You can subscribe to just my posts via RSS: http://feeds.tnooz.com/tnoozabainbridge

Alongside Tnooz I am going to spend more time building up Small Fish Big Ocean – our travel ecommerce forums for small tour operators and niche travel agents. Maybe will launch a blog over there – unsure – because my main concern is that I am spreading myself a little thin [Remember I am not a journalist but running a business too!]

I am also working on a couple of travel ecommerce ebooks and remain active on Twitter @alexbainbridge !

For the moment I will keep this blog’s RSS active until all has settled down.

Possibly I may move existing RSS subscribers over to my Tnooz RSS feed via a bit of RSS magic but if you don’t want to miss the good stuff in the meantime please add the Tnooz RSS feed.

Or if I don’t get on with the concept of having an editor maybe I will be back here in a shot!
Yeah, I have always been a little independent!

What have I learnt?

I have learnt so much about social media from blogging. I have a long list of topics that I could bore everyone with one final time about my blogging strategy and approach. But maybe I will leave that for another time!

One thing I have learnt that is worth sharing….

I started blogging because the small tour operator / activity sector were not getting any mainstream coverage in the travel industry press. There was nowhere to pitch stories about our platform, TourCMS, and nowhere to advertise. I thought, hey, lets start a blog and I can mention it every so often. That will work.

Reality is that actually its ethically frowned upon to pimp your own stuff all the time – so I have only done so on very very rare occasions. Turns out that actually blogging makes the situation worse – other travel industry journalists who may have covered TourCMS actually haven’t – purely because I haven’t pitched stories at them as I know them personally and if they covered the stories readers may consider it has been covered for all the wrong reasons.

Anyways, hope to catch you all over on Tnooz where I won’t be mentioning TourCMS either (proving I learn from my mistakes!)

Thank you
Alex

• YourTour – who will be presenting at the forthcoming GetFundedShow
• Duffel – who just presented at Techcrunch 50
• SightSi – who are not much more than a blog at the moment – but look like they have plans in this direction

According to reports, Dopplr (one of the category leaders) has sold to Nokia for 15 million Euros (15 -22 million USD). No reaction from Dopplr yet to confirm these rumours.

Om Malik on his coverage stated

I’m happy for the founders and backers of Dopplr, after all it is a nice financial outcome for a service that hasn’t grown beyond a base of passionate users

Lukas Zinnagl, a Techcrunch EU editor, stated

10M$ seems adequate for a hyped product, with low traffic and very focused usage #dopplr #nokia #fail

….and…

jesus, how come people are so stoked about this? this is really not a good deal for any of the investors or stakeholders.

this is a present to nokia and some nice pr.

Interesting that an exit of this size creates such different opinions.


Thoughts
This is an interesting moment in my blogging career. Dopplr are one of the first European online travel startups that I have covered from their inception through to final sale from the founders. Whilst not many people read my blog in 2007 I did, in October, cover their FOWA presentation (1 month after Dopplr got their first round of funding).

See blog post [Good historical perspective]

Ummm – Interestingly I seem to have got one thing right – and one thing horribly wrong. At the time I thought their competition was going to be WAYN. But I don’t think WAYN are in that game still and have their own challenges in the hyper competitive online travel space. Instead the main competition is TripIt.

Still, as I wrote in 2007, I had the Dopplr strategy down as to work with the digital thought leaders (probably due to their backing from Silicon valley expert VCs). I compared that to WAYN who had travel industry backers and seemed to talk (and still do!) at many travel industry conferences.

A classic battle between web people / web VCs and travel people / travel VCs….  dukeing it out in the online travel space. Swap WAYN for TripIt in my 2007 blog post and it has pretty much gone to form.

And here we are a few years later and Dopplr, in Om Malik’s opinion, have failed to break out of their digital thought leader strategy and achieve full adoption phase.


API battles
Both TripIt and Dopplr have web APIs. TripIt is a complex API that is sooo powerful it reminds me of back end travel reservation system APIs that I often come accross. Not for the faint hearted BUT it has meant they can work with many different devices and many services have been successfully built on the TripIt platform. Solid.

Dopplr however is much more lightweight. The level of detail stored on their platform was sufficient for most social purposes but is insufficient to start getting clever with providing travel services from the data. It just isn’t detailed enough. Hence I bet that it didn’t lead to that many travel industry services that could be integrated with it (hence restricted monetisation plans). This could well be down to the Dopplr folk being highly competent web people, just not travel industry folk. A warning for other entrepreneurs entering the travel industry who propose startups without having spent a few years working for existing travel companies.

• Dopplr web API documentation
• TripIt API documentation

Dopplr have seen that they need to enhance their API but very little has happened. In early June 2009 Dopplr announced that there were plans to launch a new version of the API “soon” (during this summer). On September 18th 2009 Dopplr announced that they have had to postpone the launch of their new API. [Source]

If you look at the change log of the Dopplr API wiki you will see that in the entire of 2009 only 3 or 4 edits were made (most recent change 5 weeks ago so it is still currently maintained). This rate of change (and their announcements about the delay in the new API) are not the signs of a company that is continuing to innovate rapidly within the online travel sector, sadly.


A good sale?
Yes. Brilliant. I am very happy for Dopplr. It is fantastic to get any company to give a return back to VCs and for the founders to presumably walk away with enough to buy a house each after 2 years work.

However the Dopplr folk are heavyweight web / mobile people. This was a golden opportunity to reach further than being able to buy a house. And I bet the VCs were wishing for more too.

But that is life. I think the Dopplr folk have done well. I know how tough this game is within the current hyper competitive online travel market and the travel industry conditions.

Expectations are tough to manage – I feel bad when we have only grown to be 3 times as large this year as we were last year. Most other people would be jumping for joy!


Finally
Oh, here for a bit of fun, is a Dopplr parody (created by Mahalo in 2007)

!

I want to focus just on one session – the leisure travel best practice session. The idea, as announced 4 months ago via press release, was to “contact with fellow members and …. learn from each other”. Last year 87% of delegates rated the sharing best practice session as excellent or good.

Some people  argue that best practices stifle innovation but I believe that best practices should be followed and once you have them mastered then you can innovate.

LowCostDeals.co.uk – Website
LowCostDeals is a website setup by Aspen Travel. They were presenting about how important it was for agents to have a website. In particular they seem to be doing many of the actions I have been going on for years about on this blog – Facebook page, active (ish) on Twitter, they have a blog, a monthly email newsletter, they do evening live chat web events (6 pm) to discuss certain destinations etc.

On the surface this all about generating desire (rather than the historical reactive role of travel agents to service existing desire for a travel product). Great!

They do 1 million GBP per month turnover (about 1.5 million USD) and have a 10 to 1 ROI on their web investments (on 40,000 unique visitors per month)

From a web marketing perspective their activity looks pretty average but I wish I had their ROI!

One comment stood out. They are attracting customers from far and wide…. not just where they are geographically based.

Advantage have 700 travel agent members. In my view if all Advantage members followed the same strategy (rather than just one or two) there would be so much online noise that not all 700 could succeed. They would all be shouting for attention and individual members would suffer.

Advantage can support 700 geographic niches (split into business and leisure travel) but online can probably only support a fraction of that number (but each agent would be larger). Catchment areas will be so much larger for online local agents than local ones trading more traditionally.

But perhaps the Advantage consortium would be better served by having fewer, but larger, agents as members? I am sure Advantage head office know how this online concept will work out so that must be their strategic intention even if that isn’t how they present it to their current members.

Or perhaps they just suggested a web example as they need it to show relevancy but hadn’t considered the implications of wide adoption of their advice.


Holiday Travel – ATOL
Holiday Travel gave us an example of where they have applied for their own ATOL (basically a license to create travel packages including flights).

Holiday Travel are no longer a travel agent but a tour operator. This has meant that their margins (on tours) are now 15-20% (with some at 25%). This is great too.

In the long term, insufficient margin exists in the UK travel industry for a UK travel agent to buy a product from a UK tour operator for an overseas destination. You don’t need two UK margin layers. Hence this step is in the right direction for agents to follow in order to grow their margins.

ATOL sales are 20% of their business (unclear if by revenue, profit or bookings – but assume revenue I think)

A benefit of their ATOL is that they can create their own single price packages, joining together multiple components. Agents, selling the same package, would have to price up (to the customer) each individual component. This opaque pricing style is common online and permits a little cross subsidy and margin inflation.

This was a nice case study…. but unusually Holiday Travel, I believe, had purchased their ATOL themselves (rather than buying one from Advantage head office). Meant that the Advantage guy (moderating) had to jump in at the end to say that they sold ATOLs too…. at competitive prices. Well if they were that competitive then their members would have brought via them, wouldn’t they!

So muse on what would happen if all these agent members of Advantage become tour operators. They won’t of course as being a tour operator is tough (you need to do safety checks on your suppliers, have all sorts of insurances, a 24 hour phone number etc etc… its not just a legal change but much more complex than that).

Why would all these members need to stay as Advantage members? If these small agents really want to be tour operators there are alternatives – they can become TOPP insured, they could join TTA etc etc. A whole range of opportunities become available to them that are not available as a travel agent consortium member.

Also being a tour operator is a completely different concept to being an agent.

Agents have a single customer in front of them at any time – hence you have to have great supplier networks and reservation systems to search 10,000 products to find a handful that match the one customer in front of you. Its all about search.

Tour operators have a much more of a marketing challenge. You have 10 tours. You must find the 1000 customers who are looking for those 10 tours. Marketing, marketing, marketing.

If Advantage were running a network of 700 tour operators (rather than 700 travel agents) they would need to massively alter their reservation system and supplier relationship strategy.

Again, wonder why then that Advantage offered up this as a great best practice for other agents to follow. Great for that business yes, but not great for Advantage.


Finally
I enjoyed the day. Felt a little alien going to a travel conference where there was hardly any mention of online travel at all. But these business people are entrepreneurs just like us travel startup people. We need to respect them as they have years of experience. Their main challenge is being locked into local, geographic sales areas when us online lot can sell over the entire country (or multiple countries) without any real issues.

Where we differ is that online travel people tend to start with the principle that they are passionate about the web and then look to setup an online business. The offline travel folk tend to come to the web as just another marketing channel. They have no passion for it.

Which is why I am sat here at 9.30 writing a blog post and the rest of the conference is enjoying the gala dinner. Ummm – perhaps they are right afterall!

I am still confused as to the reasons behind needing all this bureaucracy in the first place. Doesn’t consumer travel insurance, the Package travel regulations 1992 and credit card companies provide sufficient cover already?

To me, these are the factors that are involved:

1. Protect the travel agent from supplier failure
2. Protect suppliers from travel agent failure (not something the retail travel trade press mention too much)
3. Protect consumers from any failure within the booking process
4. Protect consumers from any failure/cancellation within an interlinked chain of trip components (e.g. a package) – for example if the supplier sells both a flight and accommodation, any alternation to one should be compatible with the other
5. Ensure that consumers can be repatriated in case of airline failure
6. Keep the government off the back of the travel industry – as if we don’t self regulate, the UK government / European Union may create their own solution (such as enhancements to the package travel regulations currently in place)
7. Keep a the credit card companies off the back of the travel industry (not sure that is working!)
8. Empire building by the national bodies (ABTA etc).
9. Complexity over time – the system has been added to and added to. Systems rarely become simpler over time.

We have to remember when proposing adjustments to the protection system that consumers now have a very credible alternative. They can book direct (via the web) both to remote destinations and with airlines. I would expect that any change to the protection system will just add complexity and cost to the existing travel industry players making the protected system even less competitive vs the direct, less protected, system.

Before consumer advocates suggest that consumers must have protection – well yes – but that could be fully provided by the travel insurance system. Insurance companies are in a great position to understand and put a value on risk. That is what they do. Also consumers understand the concept of insurance and won’t have to figure out in detail which bits of their trip are covered and which aren’t. Insurance could be enhanced to cover it all.

Easy!

Further reading: Article from the BBC covering 5 consumer laws you really ought to know

Here is another version of it

The storyline was that this lady had a baby (conceived by a tourist) and now was looking for the father. If someone can help me understand how that promotes Denmark as a tourism destination please do add in the comments!

Being youtube got some good reactions already!

Is buzz by iteself helpful? Or does buzz have to reinforce an existing message?

For further coverage:

• Revolution magazine – Visit Denmark video hoax prompts backlash
• Nick Burcher – including screenshot of the microsite that was created (no longer live)

Perhaps they want to promote the concept of tourists being able to pick up Danish girls – which is a destination attribute not often highlighted by government backed tourist boards!


The Westin example
The Westin resort on Aruba is offering people (couples presumably) a 300 USD “conception credit” towards their next stay if they can conceive a child while staying between Sept 1 to Dec 19 2009.

This offer seems to have got the social media networks up in arms too (mainly complaining about the PR).

Analysis
I don’t particularly like either social media oriented campaign. The Visit Denmark one in particular seems badly conceived (!). I guess when we watch TV we know what is news, what is real and what is advertising. When companies blur that distinction in order to promote a brand this tends to confuse us so we react negatively once we find out it was a hoax.

The Westin example just seems in poor taste.

What do you think?

What a ridiculous price for a shoe shop!

Online trading has an unusual way of altering our perception of size. A good friend runs an online garden centre selling all sorts of garden kit in the UK market. It is easy to be a web snob when you know a company only employs a handful of people but that would be so wrong. We calculated that actually they are doing the turnover of 10 physical garden centre shops. This places them as the largest online garden centre within the UK. And growing.

[Side fact, one of the founders learnt their skills in online travel and joined the online garden centre industry because its less competitive than online travel (and an opportunity came up). He is in the process of demolishing that sector. Online travel is so competitive you become very strong at all sorts of skills - that if you join another industry you could easily be super successful. Go Go Go (and leave online travel for us!)]

So yeah, a shoe shop, but a 928 million USD shoe shop. Easy to underestimate if you just look at their website.

I have no idea what makes Zappos worth that much. I don’t have an MBA!

It could be their physical product distribution mechanism (that us online travel folk we have so little understanding of):

Or could it be their customer service / social media?

Their online service is legendary. Bing it (is that a verb!?) to find out more. People rant and rave about their service levels.

Wow. How do we recreate that in travel? Tricky challenge.

I am not a customer service expert but I do answer customer enquiries so am still on front line support. Hence this comes from my practical experience, not anything that is suggested as industry standard.

Here are the 4 levels of customer service you can offer (as measured by customer expectation):

• Poor – slow, wrong, poorly explained
• Average – customer happy to get answer. Not that exciting though
• Over deliver – customer excited with your answer – exceeds their expectation. If you keep this up over a couple of customer service experiences the chances are they will tell someone else how good you are. At this level, even on a once only customer service experience, the customer will likely suggest you by word of mouth – IF someone else asks them who they suggest.
• Super amazing – the customer receives such great service that they feel they have to immediately tell someone about it.

The odd thing with the super amazing level is that if you only give 5% of your service experiences at that level (and all other service is at average level) you will still create such positive word of mouth than you don’t need to over deliver on every occasion.

Hence, to me, customer service is about having a system where those would would appreciate the super amazing level of service (and likely tell others about it) should be given it. I think this is where corporate customer service goes wrong – they feel they have to give everyone the same level of service and that is it.

The problem with travel is it is too costly to over deliver on customer service.

Take shoes (Zappos). Really there isn’t much you can do when someone has an issue with a 200 USD pair of shoes. At a maximum you could give that customer some compensation costing you twice what the original revenue was. Overall though it isn’t a big thing, financially.

Say someone has a delay on their 200 USD flight hence miss a connection to a 10,000 USD cruise. Superb customer service would indicate that you should compensate them for their cruise (as in the customer’s mind, you have lost that for them). Being realistic, that is so never going to happen.

Hence it is all well and good looking at companies like Zappos and reflecting how to bring their customer service ideals into our own businesses – but the reality is that within travel it is just very hard to do so.

We are trying in my business. But over delivery and super amazing service levels require doing custom web developments (often taking 2-5 days or more of developer time) and then charging nothing for it. Sometimes though these developments get put in a different order to what we announce. Our customers then get grumpy at our free development services because we took a week or two longer than we originally thought. Impossible to win.

Oh to be selling shoes.

Read the article

The premise is that now is a great time to launch a startup. This lines sums up the article:

Why, the real entrepreneurs who have been waiting in the wings for the perfect conditions for a startup: a downturn.

Ummm….. not sure I agree it is as easy as that.

I would qualify the article, now is a great time to launch a startup BUT ONLY if you are already financially cheerful.

Running a startup is a horrible experience. I am on number 3 now from my own backing, and have worked for 4 failed VC supported startups.  All require weekend working, long hours and pressure (emotional and financial). I happen to thrive on that but not everyone does (including my close family)

Here are my 6 failures (I am not proud of them, just mention them to let you know I am scarred too):

• 1996 - A software company where we taught languages to kids (CD software written in Delphi). As the developer I learnt a lot about software production (and usability testing with children) but we didn’t reprint the original run of French, English and Spanish CDs. Broke even then closed.
• 1997 - Set up a business offering home based computer training / support – launched successfully in the Southampton / Hampshire (UK) area – Much like the Geek squad but on a local basis.  No investment so no loss. I was too young to understand “Go big or go home”. Opportunity missed.
• 1999 - CTO of a Durlacher backed concept to provide an online health service website. Interesting research into the sites of the time and pitching experience, but ended in failure.
• 2000 – Backpacking arrival packages – concept of selling arrival packages to backpackers (e.g. airport transfer, 2 nights accommodation). Company continues today (without me) but sells tours rather than backpacker services.
• 2001-2002 – Head of web design for Andbook, founded by Hilton International, Accor and Le Meridien (Forte). We created a multi hotel chain B2C website at the same time as Opodo launched a similar concept (backed by various European airlines). Our vision was to create an SME focussed business travel portal but funding fell through (due in part to to 9/11, although that could have been a convenient excuse). Few million GBP loss but personally it was a great boost to my confidence for working at the highest levels within the travel industry. Expensive lessons (paid for by someone else!)
• 2004 - Consultant to a hotel distribution marketplace with VC backing. Basically I had to tell the investors to shut up shop. Less said the better. Not fun and my invoice is still unpaid (another expensive lesson)

Thankfully we are trading fairly happily now with TourCMS.  Oh, and a weekend project I created a few years ago got reviewed on Techcrunch US. That is geek success! I should be happy

My war wounds go deep.

So yeah, now may be a great time to setup a new business, but probably best if you are already financially stable. Mike should have made that clear. Running a startup is easier when your startup doesn’t have to pay your rent/mortgage.

One problem we have with trading in a recession is understanding whether sales volume is impacted most by product quality, state of the online travel industry (poor) or our own marketing attempts. The recession (particularly strong within the travel industry) adds a factor that can create a great deal of complexity to understanding the numbers (as with startups you tend not to have other years to compare with)

If you are considering setting up an online travel startup right now think really carefully what you are doing and what you are risking. I have seen a number of our customers (tour operators) spend too long working on creating their websites and not getting trading early enough. In an industry where companies with long trading histories are going under it is imperative to get money coming in ASAP.

So listen to people like Mike Butcher from Techcrunch Europe, but bear in mind that a startup is a tough, tough, concept, regardless of recession or not. Not for the faint-hearted.

When I say acceptable, I really mean in terms of industry ethics (which should be global) rather than the UK trade descriptions act, which also has a part to play.

What is the consumer expectation that the travel product/service exactly matches the image – and to what level of detail should there be an exact match?

Nearly always acceptable

• Adjusting colour qualities
• Cropping an image (unless cropping something out of the image that could be bad, but how do you judge that?)

Marginal cases / unknowns

• Removing people (to better show a product) unless you are removing people in order to make somewhere seem less crowded?
• Removing boats from a picture of a bay. But would it be acceptable if sometimes the bay was empty, just not on the occasion the photographer visited?
• Service delivery method – e.g. the photo is of a minibus (capacity 15) but a coach (capacity 50) is used in reality. Or where a white water rafting company changes the brand of raft used – do all websites images have to be updated too?
• Adjusting the sky to make the weather look better, perfect, etc

Not acceptable

• An image that since alterations at a property (e.g. a hotel changes) no longer reflects the true image? Changing the colour of the awning probably is OK so tricky drawing the line?
• Where a product attribute is shown (such as a swimming pool) but the pool is no longer in use (different to the minbus / coach question as the product is not present as per the image, rather than delivered differently?)

What do you think?

Does it make any difference if it is a general destination photograph vs a product specific one? Does anyone have a guidelines that suggest not to use images that are over 3 years old?

Trying to write some guidelines so need a little help.

Passengers will now be able to head for the sun this winter with the addition of Sharm el Sheikh in Egypt (03 November to 27 April) and Monastir, Tunisia (01 to 22 November and 7 March to 25 April).

New for next Summer, Thomas Cook is offering the popular beach resorts of Antalya in Turkey and Sharm el Sheikh in Egypt. Both destinations are available from 04 May to the 26 October 2010.

As now common within the travel industry, the press release was accompanied with a youtube video:

Read the press release

Lets muse what a fresh design from scratch would look like – howabout this version from Dustin Curtis?

[Reproduced with permission]



Or howabout this Google style version from Thijs Jacobs?

[Via Flickr, Creative Commons]



Airline website design is more politics than design

The AA UX designer, in response to Dustin’s proposed design, stated that..

the group running AA.com consists of at least 200 people spread out amongst many different groups, including QA, product planning, business analysis, code development, site operations, project planning and user experience.

We have a lot of people touching the site and a lot more with their own vested interests in how the site presents its content and functionality.

Simply doing a home page redesign is a piece of cake. I have got six of them in my archives.

But doing the design isn’t the hard part, and I think that’s what a lot of outsiders don’t really get, probably because many of them actually do belong to small, just-get-it-done, organizations. But those who work in enterprise-level situations realize the momentum even a simple redesign must overcome.

The AA UX guy is right. Corporate web projects come with their own set of rules and processes. As one UX designer who works on large scale travel websites keeps reminding me, the UX design of a travel website often ends up reflecting the structure of the organisation behind the site, not the structure of how the user has built their mental model, hence the problems.

I would love a forward thinking airline to take these two designs (and their existing design) and create mockups and put them past some usability testing. Any innovative airlines out there want to back some research?
Read American Airlines’s full response to Dustin Curtis’s redesign from Dustin’s blog

What is TripBod?

The strapline is “Your friend at the other end”. The pitch is that consumers pay a fee for upfront advice about their, probably independently organised, trip.

The wider travel industry has been going on for years about highstreet travel agents moving away from earning rewards for their knowledge from commissions paid by suppliers towards taking fees from consumers.

That day is here.

Except with TripBod you buy that advice from someone local to the destination, not local to the source market. If you remember, we had the discussions of the merits of this a few weeks back.

It is arguable that this makes obsolete the concept of source market local travel agents providing advice for remote destinations. Time will tell.

The marketing challenge
The main challenge that TripBod faces is the two step marketing process.

• First they have to make consumers aware of the idea of buying advice from locals
• Secondly they have to convince consumers that their version of locally supplied advice is what the consumer wants to pay for

Personally I have made too many mistakes with previous startups where you have to sell the idea before you can sell your product. Right now, selling toothpaste where you know the demand is present in a massive market and where you just need 1% to make a great return looks most attractive. Of course we need entrepreneurs who want to be a little more adventurous but this requires boundless ability (and no shortage of money).

Take the use case of an independent traveller (who has never heard of TripBod) planning a trip.

They start their research at google and for several hours visit a variety of sites, probably destination focussed sites. At what point during this research do they become exposed to the TripBod brand – and concept?

TripBod can buy visibility on destination sites but this is, at least initially, going to require some agile business development and plenty of PPC advertising. Knowing the TripBod people I think they can do this, but it will take longer than they envisage (everything does)

Reassurance
What TripBod are really selling is that your independently planned trip will go like clockwork. Its a handholding exercise for adults.

I have been down a similar route before.

9 years ago I started a web startup that sold arrival packages at various cities (such as Delhi, Mumbai, Kathmandu etc). The concept was that the customer (normally a backpacker) would be picked up from the airport, taken to 2 nights accommodation, hence would be reassured that they knew what they were doing at the start of their trip.

In particular if a backpacker was travelling from the UK to Australia (via a stop off in India) often the teenagers were not in the India mindset hence really benefited from the helping hand.

Was often purchased by parents, not the backpackers.

Reality struck after a few months and actually the company (in an offshoot) is still trading today – but selling tours. There was more money to be made from selling tours to people who need reassurance than in selling the reassurance in the first place.

Competitors

• Every highstreet travel agent (who sell advice, geographically local to you, but not the destination)
• RentAlocalFriend – book a friend for the day
• Non personalised information – e.g. Spotted by Locals
• ToursByMe – Locals create fixed tour ideas
• Niche tour operators who offer tailor-made tours

If TripBod can get their marketing costs to be lower than their service fee I think this is going to work.  I hope they can, but am not convinced completely without significant brand (and idea category) investment. I still think that +6 months they will be selling tours as that is where the money is (rather than selling advice)


Disclosure list
Yeah. When given things by companies I review I feel it right to list what they have given. Besides, its kind of funny! From last night’s launch party (including live music from Charlie Winston – Photo and 45 second excerpt)

• 100 ml of Ecover washing up liquid – do I wash? I am a tech geek!
• Charlie Winston CD with 3 tracks – I like him actually
• WorldNomads.com luggage tag – kind of heavy!
• A Hippo water saver – why do all water products get named after Hippos? I am still a fan of the Hippo water roller
• Mystery envelope from Thinking Flowers – turns out to be purple sunflower seeds!
• The Book of Green – directory for eco living. Just about passes the bin or keep test
• Waitrose food magazine – eh! The one thing I didn’t get the context of
• Rough guides bag – yep nice – although the line on it “Make the most of your time on earth” is not something to give to travel startup people who spend 18 hours a day stuck behind a computer facilitating great experiences for other people.
• An onya bag – that is nice too (and trumps the Rough guides one in style). I am on a mission never to use plastic bags when shopping so these kinds of handy bags are useful, but the one I use most often is one I got from a Bangkok cooking school as the branding is exclusive. I am such a brandaholic.

Considering that half the room was journalists I do ponder where their disclosures are!

What makes these failures different to previous failures is that their directors have been interviewed by the trade press and they have offered excuses for their failure. The excuses are interesting:

From TTG we have “Direct discounting killed us” – where the agent blamed discounting by operators and that it was tough competing with operators and cruise lines selling direct.

From Travel Weekly we have “We have been going for 25 years but the recession got us. It was mostly because sales were down and the bank would not help”


I don’t know the specifics of these two cases and it is sad when any business ceases trading, especially at an individual level.

What I do know is that the way the travel industry is currently structured, the innovative and commoditising travel companies founded by disruptive entrepreneurs are aiming for exactly this outcome – the failure of high street travel agents. Should we be surprised when they succeed?

Surprising, to me, is that it has taken SO LONG for web only companies (which is mainly what the disruptive entrepreneurs found) to have their impact felt on actual shop closures.

The rebirth of the travel industry is revitalising and only to be feared by people on the wrong side of it. The retail travel agent trade press continue to focus primarily on the negative stories surrounding travel agent failures rather than positive stories of the rebirth. Tonight for example I am going to a new travel startup website launch in London. Doubt if that will get any coverage at all.

These positive stories balance the negative ones, just they don’t involve retail travel agents hence fail to get the coverage they merit. Time for the trade press to tell the full story of the rebirth.


What we should muse about is volatility

I am beginning to think that the new travel industry is going to be a highly volatile environment.

With highstreet travel agents they had their customer bases and their regular suppliers they worked with. Due in part to product knowledge reasons the agents would continue to sell similar products year after year (but perhaps not to the same person year after year). This was a good thing as it created stability that suppliers could plan against (e.g. tour operators, hoteliers).

Now, with the web as the originator of most B2C travel traffic each year could see completely different product types becoming the popular style of holiday. Raining too much? Lets go abroad. Exchange rates moving around? Lets buy all inclusive so we know what we are paying for when we get to resort. Don’t fancy that supplier? Lets book with someone else.

Only the most agile of travel company will be able to navigate this increasingly volatile environment. The toddler tantrums are coming.

He suggested that the most popular tourist attractions enable people to see a view.

e.g. a pier (which is what he was talking about) enables people to walk several hundred metres out to sea and get a new view on the seaside resort the pier is linked to.

The London Eye (and other famous ferris wheels) give people views.


Why then are travel destination websites structured around

• Events
• Attractions (normally commercial)
• Tours (often commercial)?

Views are sometimes mentioned, but they are secondary data rather than primary navigation mechanisms.

For you web 2.0 types, here is a thought. I did a VERY QUICK analysis of twitpic, a twitter image sharing service.


5% of the images on Twitpic are where people want to share views

33,400 images that have been shared have the word “View” on (out of the 752,000 Twitpic image pages currently in Google index).

Is there opportunity for a travel startup to start geocoding views and creating a sharing community around them? Seems the demand is there.

Would probably also work based on shortcodes such as Hereit.is (e.g http://hereit.is/2r) so could share a geocode AND a view (i.e. something similar to Twitpic / Hereit.Is combined)

What would a travel website look like if the navigation was structured around views?

These are the odds that the marketplace suggested as of September 12th, 2008 (12 months ago):

SkyEurope 5 – 2
Alitalia 4 – 1
Air Berlin 7 – 1
Spanair 9 – 1
Vueling Airlines 10 – 1
Clickair 10 – 1
LOT 10 – 1
Olympic 12 – 1
Germanwings 12 – 1
Malev 14 – 1
JetBlue 14 – 1
Aeroflot 14 – 1
Aer Arann 16 – 1
Scandinavian airlines 16 – 1
Jetstar 16 – 1
United Airlines 16 – 1
Flybe 20 – 1
Czech Airlines 33 – 1
BMI 40 – 1
Aer Lingus 40 – 1
Qantas 50 – 1
Virgin Atlantic 66 – 1
easyJet 66 – 1
Lufthansa 100 – 1
BA 100 – 1
Air France 100 – 1
Ryanair 100 – 1

So did the betting marketplace call it right? Looks like it did

From public sources…..

SkyEurope- 1st September 2009 – Administration [Source]
Alitalia – December 2008 – Administration (but still flying) [Source]

Depends what you call Alitalia’s status.
I wonder if PaddyPower paid out on that – or whether they will now pay out on SkyEurope

For more airline betting action PaddyPower currently have a book open for projected Aer Lingus 2009 profit.

• Any Profit 50/1
• €0 to €100 Million Loss 12/1
• €101 to €115 Million Loss 8/1
• €116 to €130 Million Loss 6/4
• €131 to €145 Million Loss 9/4
• €146 to €160 Million Loss 7/2
• €161 Million or More Loss 5/2

Umm

Perhaps it was meant to be added to a task list but was accidentally put in a web browser search bar?

Any other explanations? I am dying to find out what what you make of it.

For the budding Miss Marples out there, that DNS entry is the visitors….

According to the free dictionary there are a number of meanings:

• Repeated too often
• Outmoded ideas

This week Mark Simpson from Maxymiser has been pushing around ideas to the travel industry press about why best practice should be dismissed as “old hat”. I think, in this context, he means outmoded.

He puts forward a good point of view, unhesitatingly republished by both Travolution and TravelMole. It is however a point of view I disagree with. More on that in a moment.

This isn’t the first time that Mark Simpson has called best practice outmoded. Here he is on the eConsultancy blog (2 years ago) saying that “The notion of there being a right and wrong way of laying out a page or presenting an offer is old hat”.

Maybe it is Maxymisers press releases that are being a little old hat! Time to invest in a thesaurus!


What is best practice anyway?

“Best practice reverts to the lowest common denominator,” Simpson told Travolution. “It’s generic and makes assumptions that have typically been agreed by ‘experts’ in a closed room, based on past experience and the input of random focus groups.”

Source: Travolution

Umm…. sounds bad!

For example, here are some best practices probably conjured up by experts in a closed room:

1. Test and test again.
2. Have only a few clear “calls to action”.
3. An uncluttered home page.
4. Relevant images in the right places.
5. Breadcrumbs for clear navigation.
6. Segmented landing pages so browsers get what they want immediately.
7. Keep it short and simple

Source: Write up by OpenFace Internet of Internet World 2007.

I like these best practices but they are not easy to apply – they are somewhat generic and do make assumptions – just as Mark disagrees with so much.


The case for best practices

Best practices can be very helpful at the start of a project.

Best practices help you decide whether you are designing a chair or a table. Once you have a chair (assuming thats what you wanted!) then you can sandpaper as much as you like (using tools such as Maxymiser) and you can make a totally smooth chair with a perfect finish. What analysis using Maxymiser can’t do is turn your chair back into a table.

The purpose of the Maxymiser service/software is to fine tune websites and work out, through iterative testing, what works and doesn’t. I am a fan of this approach but it is ONLY A TOOL. Just because you use one tool doesn’t make other tools moot (such as undertaking a heuristic evaluation against best practices).

The real problem that Maxymiser has isn’t in convincing us that tool based iterative design is the future. Its great and the more people who think about design the better. Their problem is convincing companies that there is value in buying an expensive tool from them instead of the perfectly adequate tool supplied by Google – Google Website Optimizer.

It is the ROI argument that Maxymiser needs to be conducting in the press, not making an enemy of followers of best practice based design.


Example travel website best practices

Of course I am biased. I have previously researched and written a number of documents outlining best practice for travel websites.

Here they are online, published between 2002 to 2003 [Free downloads]

These are specific (not generic) and are based on usability testing of many different hotel booking websites that were around at the time. The tasks used in the usability testing are contained within the documents, just to show that the guidelines were not created by experts in a closed room but from real, human, feedback and analysis.

I am sure they were valuable at the time, and continue to be valuable (in particular hotel booking process and the date entry usability). They are not mutually exclusive with tool based iterative design and are just a tool.

Just like any tool, the craftsman need to know which tool to apply when.

A quick recap: Guitarist flies with United Airlines. Guitar breaks. Guitarist spends many months asking for compensation for broken guitar. United Airlines don’t help. Guitarist releases Youtube song…. and all of a sudden (apparently only after 50,000 views) United Airlines offer compensation.

What makes the United Airlines guitar story so interesting to study is that it is a uniquely Youtube example. Yes of course there was coverage on twitter – but most tweets were just signposts to social media objects (either youtube, or to blog posts containing youtube videos).

This was a rich media conversation hence the barriers to entry to comment and to get attention were higher than other social media stories (where sometimes just a single tweet can be the cause of a headline).

You don’t have to watch all these videos (although I have chosen them for a reason). Just read the commentary. These are not the top 15 videos by number of plays but a curated set that I have found to be of interest to demonstrate certain points.

United Breaks Guitars – The initial video that started it all

Currently on over 5 million plays



Official song 2
I haven’t seen the point of this. Just dilutes the original video and now that United Airlines have offered to pay compensation makes the video a bit moot.

It is a reasonable success on 225,000 plays, but in Youtube terms, that is low.



Official statement from Dave Carroll

OK, included here for completeness

Taylor guitars add their own video
160,000 plays
One commenter suggests “I do not like this response from Taylor. Independently of his guitars are good or not, it seems that his only purpose for his response is to put an advertisement. Smells as opportunism“

Of course it is opportunistic. But business is about taking opportunities when they are presented – so the commenter was being overly harsh suggesting that Taylor guitars shouldn’t add their video. I actually think it is quite nicely done (in particular the background shots of the workshops and the information provided in the audio). Thumbs up to Taylor

Not just Taylor guitars jump on the product promotion bandwagon
CaseExtreme, makers of strong guitar cases, didn’t miss this opportunity to put up a few videos about their products.

This video is quite funny and demonstrates their product nicely:

…and he ends up throwing the guitar off his house…
[As requested to do in a comment on the youtube video]

Why is CaseExtreme interesting? As it happens the guy in the video is a former airline luggage handler! Here he is explaining from his unique perspective WHY United Airlines were under pressure to handle luggage in the way that it was reported.

Apparently luggage is commonly thrown around as it is faster!
Only watch the first half of this video (where he tells his story about working as an airline luggage handler)

The lesson here is that here we have someone uniquely able to provide insight into guitar handling:

• A guitarist
• Former airline luggage handler
• Now runs a business creating extreme travel cases for guitars

For a journalist he is a perfect source for good quotes and background research. But now people who used to make great sources are creating their own media – and making themselves part of the story – without journalists as gatekeepers.

Fake responses from United Airlines
Yep. People have created fake responses (for comic reasons). This one is amazing in a weird kind of way. You can only wonder what the damage this is doing to the United Airlines brand. 20,000 plays. Worth watching, in particular the 2nd half, which is more of a horror movie!

If you remember, Ms. Irlweg was the United Airlines customer service rep named in the original video:

….while this one…. is also a comic perspective recounting a conversation that probably took place within the airline…. [or not!] (Miss this one if you are short of time!)

Join the conversation
Chicke Fitzgerald from WordOfMouthMedia blog posted this 25 second reply. To me this is more akin to a blog comment but this guitar story is a youtube event not a blog one…. hence even short comments are youtube based

Remember the customer service maxim, by default, reply to the support request using the same channel as it was asked. If it was asked via phone, reply via phone. If it was asked via email, reply via email, if you are joining a conversation about something in youtube, reply by youtube (er, I know I am breaking that one on this blog post!)

…while this guy, in this 15 second piece, wants to remind people that United Airlines break trumpets as well as guitars….

The important thing to note about these conversation joiners is that they are really short. 15 seconds, 25 seconds etc. Keep conversational youtube videos short.

UNLESS – you are going to do something really weird – so can keep someone’s attention for a couple of minutes. NSFW

But there is room in this world for really dull explanations of something. You don’t have to go all freaky in order to make a youtube hit. e.g this dull explanation of the guitar story has managed to score 19,000 or so plays  (about even with some of the more entertaining videos)

The reason for this is because it was published in the Cessna154 youtube channel that has 8400 subscribers all interested in flight stories. Moral of the story is, like blogging, to build a channel subscriber base of people interested in a particular niche in order to ensure your videos get attention.

Existing web memes
No big youtube hit can escape from the Hitler meme. This is where a classic film scene is subtitled with whatever the issue is.

And finally…
Simpliflying (a travel industry blogger like this one) and their song suggesting ways for United Airlines to fix the problem [See story of the creation of this video]

…still waiting for the United Airlines response video….

• It’s estimated that a third of a single person households under the age of 65 have taken a solo holiday
• 1 in 8 long-haul destination holidays is taken by a solo traveller

Travel/theme park voucher searches up 200% since start of year

• There is more opportunity to use vouchers as a tool to get people through the door
• This year, 63% of Britons are likely to over-spend their holiday budget by upto 200 GBP (300 USD) a week

Searches for holidays in the UK still popular

• Caravan and camping holidays continue to be popular despite the variable British weather
• Search traffic for specialist holidays on Bing were up 55% in Q2

…also contains discussion on impact of Swine Flu, staycations, social media

Google PPC data

The data above was provided by Google and represents an average of Q2 monthly performance for the category leaders in the travel vertical. This data is a great way of understanding how your performance compares to the market leaders and, subsequently, the budget required in order to take prime position in the listings

Download the PDF

Latitude – 2009 Q2 Travel Summary [PDF]

Quick recap: Customer flies with United Airlines. Guitar breaks (oops). Customer can’t get any money from the airline (reportedly). Customer turns out to be a singer with a Canadian band who then go on to create 3 youtube hits (2 published so far)

Video #1 [Over 5 million youtube plays]

Video #2

But now, SimpliFlying, a travel industry blog similar to this one (but Shashank’s is better!) has made a video suggesting ways that United Airlines can respond:

Amazing!

More (much more than you want) on the SimpliFlying blog

* No, really, I don’t want to cover this anymore. But when a fellow blogger creates something worthy of re posting it would be remiss of me not to mention it….

Small tour operators tend to want to work with agents but struggle to find agents that are looking to sell that kind of product (or where there would be value in working together – i.e. number of bookings will make the product initial training etc worthwhile)

Travel agents are pitched ALL THE TIME by tour operators looking for agents to sell their products. We get pitched too (via email, spam on blog comments and badly written forum posts) all of which are very annoying and tend to get deleted instantly.

The existing way of building these working relationships is, I conclude, broken.

What the startup needs to do is act as a clearing house for introducing agents to operators, operators to ground handlers etc. Each would have a profile page outlining what they are about, and what they are looking for in a partner.

Then some form of clever functionality (much like dating sites!) would propose relationships!

Further discussion on the problem of working with agents on the Small Fish Big Ocean forums…

Got a suggestion for how to promote South Africa as a destination?

The Ubuntu awards have been announced and its all about ideas for a campaign (online / ofline etc) to run in January / Febuary 2010.

Criteria:

• The quality of execution
• The breadth of elements used in the campaign
• The success in the way the elements are linked to provide a 360 degree campaign.
• The innovation that will make South Africa stand out as a destination
• The expected return on investment.

Entries must be submitted by October 9th 2009.

Why for web design agencies, marketing companies & PR people? Because you only get to SPEND the money, not keep it, hence only service companies within the travel industry could make any commercial return out of this.

i.e. its a pitch dressed up as a competition!

Personally I think I would have created a second prize, for a couple of thousand GBP, for anyone to come up with the best IDEA. They wouldn’t have to actually deliver / execute the idea. This would open this idea award upto tour operators / travel agents who are probably in a strong position to come up with ideas but are not in a position to execute on them directly.

I have a pitch idea for South Africa and after the entry closing date I will publish our proposal online!

Learn more via Small Fish Big Ocean….

http://www.qfly.nl/en

Straightforward principle. Provide

• Budget
• Originating airport (and secondary airports that would be acceptable)
• Length of stay (e.g. 5 days)

And the site will come up with where you can go.

To me, this is much more aligned with the consumer mindset than having to laboriously check through various airport city pairs until you strike it lucky and find something acceptable.

Business travellers tend to want to go from A->B.
Consumer travellers MAY be happy to to to A->anywhere interesting, within a certain budget

Only minor issue is that, even on the English language site, the adverts are in Dutch. Buy hey, I don’t care. This site has gone to near the top of my flight metasearch sites.

Hat Tip: The Next Web

They are somewhat active on Twitter (nothing overboard, before today they follow 21, are followed by 120 but have tweeted 360 times).

Today they have been running a 2 hour session with the focus on Madagascar.

The idea was to use Twitter to take questions from customers, agents and others about the destination and make an interesting web event out of it.

I think they failed to capitalise on the potential of the event, but at least they are trying. Without making a few mistakes on the way we are never, collectively, going to learn what works and what doesn’t with Twitter (and/or realtime small tour operator event interaction).

Here are a few lessons/notes I have taken from the event:


Promotion

The press release said 10 am to 12pm BTS (rather than BST). British Summer Time is an odd timezone, especially odd when the characters are reversed in error. Not sure anyone outside of the UK would have understood when the event was on.

In the 24 hours preceding the event no tweets on the AcaciaAfrica account mentioning the event was taking place. First tweet was 2 minutes AFTER the start time – and then it was straight into the questions & answers.

No mention on the AcaciaAfrica homepage. Not one I could see anyway. Would have been easy to add a link and mention for a couple of hours whilst the event was taking place – then remove it soon after.

Madagascar? Lovely destination I am sure, but is the destination attractive enough (volume of people wise) to make this web event work?

Time of day? I know that many of my UK followers are more active at lunch time (UK) and like to have something to read when grazing their lunch at their desks – hence this should probably have been run between 12 and 2…. rather than mid morning when everyone was at work (especially on a Friday when people are trying to work extra quick so that they can leave early!)

i.e. pre-event promotion was pretty poor. I would blame the PR agency for that one as I am sure it was the agency who guided their client to most of these choices.

Interaction with event followers

No interaction with people following the event.

Firstly I would have liked to have seen a “welcome” tweet – saying what was going on – how long it was going to last and how to submit questions. Bet not many potential customers / agents actually read press releases!

When people asked questions at least acknowledge them, even if you are not going to answer it. I asked about whether people, when booking Madagascar, are more or less likely to book online vs the other destinations they feature. Admittedly not an easy question to answer, but it should have at least been acknowledged.

All of the questions looked “canned” – i.e. submitted ahead of time and just spewed out over a couple of hours into a twitter stream.

Should have created a hashtag for the event so that it was easy to follow.

An event follower suggested using this search method [http://twitter.com/#search?q=acaciaafrica]. This helpful suggestion should have been acknowledged and retweeted.

A question tweet was posted followed by an answer. Perhaps should have added “Q” to the start of question tweets, “A” to the start of answer ones.

Summary

Poorly promoted and zero interaction with anyone following. I didn’t get the point at all. In a week or two the tweets will be out of Twitter search so no long term benefit either.

But at least they are trying – we should give them credit for that.

AcaciaAfrica twitter feed

Just for fun I am going to trawl through my ideas bank and see what I came up with before settling on what we are still working on today.

First a hotel reservation project from 2002……


Hotel pirate
At a basic level hotels work on two different booking models:

• Reservation model - guest pays on checkout (generally generous cancellation policies mean that you can cancel right upto the last minute without penalty)
• Merchant model – guest pays upfront (normally non refundable)

My mad idea was to suggest that customers book a long time ahead on a reservation model booking. Then they would provide the information (hotel name / rate & dates booked) to the Hotel Pirate website.

As prices drop nearer the time of travel the website would constantly check to see if any merchant model rates could be found that would be significantly cheaper than the reservation model rate “in the bag”.

If so, it would suggest to the customer that they book a merchant rate and cancel their original reservation (with no cancellation penalty). This could be at the same hotel or a similar hotel nearby.

Could even check one merchant model (and known cancellation fee) against a new merchant rate. It would keep the hotel market alive all the way upto consumption of the product (rather than just upto the time of booking the product) and would seriously impact the dynamics of the hotel industry.


What would the hotels think of it?
Not sure hoteliers would like it much!

This is why you would need to have known comparable hotels – so you would have your “in the bag” reservation model booking at your second choice hotel waiting for the merchant model rate at your favourite hotel to drop…..

The hotels could never track you over two hotels so would find it difficult to stop in practice except by introducing cancellation fees on reservation model rates – which would push people to merchant rates which I am not sure they want?


Could it still be done today?
Yes – Bing (Farecast) is similar – except works on the principle of forecasting whether to book now or to hold off. It doesn’t get clever and suggest you book and cancel because you can save.

And yes, when I came up with the idea I really called it Hotel Pirate!

I notice hotelpirate.com is still available!

Google MapMaker is a Google Maps service that allows you to add or edit features, such as roads, businesses, parks, schools and more.

Good writeup about enhancements to it on Techcrunch, including a rather nice before and after shot of a map in Pakistan.

I previously wrote about other opensource map data sources back in June (e.g. OpenPlaces, OpenStreetmap etc)


iPhone application
Interesting iPhone application of Paris – a map in 3D.

From French developers Newscape Technology

More cities coming, apparently.

Hat Tip The Next Web

Twitterlogue
Nick O’Leary is currently driving around New Zealand in a camper van. Sounds like fun (and my wife and I did a similar trip a few years back)

Not quite sure if he has managed to scoop the 900 GBP (approx 1500 USD) 10 day camper van hire and flights package that Quantas Holidays are currently promoting as advertised on the 101 holidays website but I am sure he got a good deal!

He was looking for a neat way to keep friends and family updated as to where they had got to. The answer, of course (!), is to mash up a Twitter feed with a Google map.

The tweets would help record what we were doing, but they would lose the where. So, after a few hours hacking, I have created a real-time twitterlogue of the trip.

This is a simple mash-up of a twitter feed along with a google map of where we were when I sent the update. As we’re driving, it also records how far we’ve driven at that point.

Under the covers it works like this… I send a direct message to my secret twitter account using the format:

[lat,long] [distance] [message]

When the DM is received, the information is injected into a database which feeds the page. It also sends the update, sans GPS/distance, to my twitter account, including a link to the update on the map. As each update has its own permalink on the map they are individually linkable. Awesome.

To make life easier on the road, and because I can, I’ve put together a little python app for my phone that gathers the GPS location and lets me enter the other information before sending it off to twitter.

Currently had a bit of a technical issue as none of the tweets texted to the NZ shortcode came through…. so the updates have had to be updated manually. Teething issues.

Full details in this blog post

View the trip plotted on a Google map [Click the locations on the left hand side of the screen]

The problem with most itinerary sharing services that travel websites provide is that they are about pre-travel (as then the itinerary can be used as an advertising object) (e.g. Dopplr / TripIt etc). Not many online travel services focus on in-trip travelogues? How else could Nick have created this Twitterlogue without having to roll his own?