Blog homeA couple of weeks ago I had the pleasure of talking at the Travolution workshops that were taking place alongside the annual travel technology show (London). I was asked to talk about legacy systems although I probably focussed more on legacy business processes.
One area that I am quite keen to highlight and discuss is the problem of who “owns” online travel within an organisation and therefore how do you define what it is. Within new, web based, companies this is not an issue as everyone tends to be focussed around the website however in traditional companies, the website can be owned in a number of places:
- IT - they run the servers and understand code…..
- Sales & Marketing - they have the marketing budget
One of the points I made in my presentation at the Travolution workshops is that in an “old school” organisation, the success of an IT team would be measured by how they adhered to any service level agreements - and how quick they resolved any technical issues that occur from time to time.
I opined that asking someone in IT to increase sales by 20% using ecommerce is like asking your accounts department to make money buying and selling foreign currencies. Both believe they can do it - but are not best suited to it.
i.e. new organisational structures should be formed that join IT and marketing together - or what is now known as ecommerce.
However I now believe I have got it wrong. Very wrong.
Your travel website should be owned by your customer support team (the post booking pre travel team)
IT is now commoditised….. so yes they have a part to play, but they don’t need to be the “owner” of the website. Likewise of course the sales & marketing teams have an important role to play….. but actually those who really are able to add understanding about what a customer wants and needs are those are have to deal with the problems caused by a poor website.
Having your website owned by the customer support team would also help with balancing the spending power that, in medium and larger companies, both IT and Sales & Marketing have. Might make for some interesting meetings also.
Disappointed by the UK Travolution online travel awards
What spurred me to this conclusion was some thinking I have been doing today about the recently announced Travolution Awards 2008 and in particular the categories they have chosen to reward.
I have been thinking about what being successful at online travel means. Does it just mean great advertising and brand building - or does online travel also encompass online service? I believe that a website is not just a sales & marketing vehicle but a complete customer contact system.
Lets look at some of the awards in detail and why they have irked me:
Best use of CRM
This award will be given to a travel brand that has made the most successful use of CRM which allowed you to increase the level of repeat visitors and/or boost revenues from your website
Sounds great on the surface. However this is wide of the mark. There are many uses of CRM that are great and should be potentially rewarded but are about cost minimisation and customer efficiency rather than increasing visitors or boosting revenues. We should not exclude the other side of the equation.
Examples that come to mind are projects that assist by providing post booking pre travel customer extranets - where customers login online and pay their balances. Others are projects that let people have a “hotline” to a resort or someone travelling for emergency contacts etc…. all of this has the potential to be innovative however is outside of the scope of this award.
Best use of Social Media
This award will be given to a travel brand that has made the most successful use of social media outlets and techniques which raise awareness of your brand and/or drive more traffic to your site.
Very similar problems to the CRM award. Completely misses out companies like GetSatisfaction who are using social media to enable social customer support.
There are also 3 awards that I think are missing from the list:
- Cruise / Rail / Ancillary - there are awards for hotel, airline and car hire…. but not other products. I am not sure why that is. OK - I know you can’t have an award for everything but at least then create a “catch all” award for a single product website that isn’t hotel, car hire or air.
- Mobile - every single award dictates they are for ”websites”. Therefore, I suppose if you are doing something really clever but for mobile devices - you are excluded from these awards. Even the advertising awards are about driving traffic to a website….. so what about mobile only services?
- Technology suppliers - go on, give us a crumb. If you are a web design agency or an SEO agency you could get an award…. but not a reservation system supplier….. when frankly reservation systems are at the core of what online travel is about…. no reservation system, no online travel.
Conclusion
I have been busy reading my dictionary today trying to work out if I can squeeze what we are doing into any of the categories. We use social media and CRM heavily online - but only for customer support - not sales or brand building.
And of course this blog is probably excluded from the blog award because Travolution only want consumer bloggers not industry bloggers (although technically as I am a travel technology provider my consumers are the industry!). Well that is what our entry will say anyway.
Is this all a fuss about nothing? Do these awards matter? Well actually I think they do. They are the best online travel awards we have in the UK and therefore yes they are important. This is what makes me so irked that they are just not worded how I would want to see them worded.
Go and take a look at the awards site….. and enter
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Technology suppliers can enter in the Best Use of Technology award in the Agency, Operator and Travel Information categories.
We’ve restricted the Blogger award to consumer bloggers simply because we could hardly give Best Travel Blogger to ourselves!
Mobile, yes it is a platform, but people can enter via the Use of Technology categories.
I trust you will be entering TourCMS!!!
Our intention with the awards is to keep the actual the number of categories low at this stage. No-one, especially, us wants to sit through 45 awards.
We will certainly consider putting in cruise and other anciliaries categories if demand warrants it.
We were not on the receiving end of such concerns last year.
Hi Kevin,
Thanks for your reply. We can’t enter best use of technology categories because they are for tour operators, agents or travel information portals. We don’t fall into any of those master categories.
We can’t enter a client on our behalf…. because they are in essence using “off the shelf” software. The clever use of technology is how we devised the “off the shelf” technology for our clients in the first place.
So there is no category for us to enter.
I would have also liked to at least enter the social media category with the TourCMS community and this blog - http://community.tourcms.com/ . We can’t enter that either because the community is about saving our support costs rather than driving traffic. (We wouldn’t have won as there are some amazing social media entries that you will get, I am sure!)
Oh well…. there is always next year! (which is why by mentioning it now I can hopefully persuade you that next year you should consider redefining your awards! Long term planning!)
Winning is one thing….. but not being able to enter is what I am most disappointed about.
You can enter - or co-enter - on behalf of an operator or agent or travel information site which has used your technology in an innovative way.
Hi Kevin,
Ah, that is the old commoditisation vs innovation debate. I think you can be very successful in online travel without having to innovate…. just fathom out how to commoditise a sector (probably using technology).
We innovated so that our clients don’t have to!
@Kevin,
Re co-entering with a tour operator client…… well that would be like judging how good Microsoft Word is as a piece of wordprocessing software by looking at how many books an author sells via Amazon who just happens to use MS-Word as their word processor!
Somehow the awards need to distinguish between what is great use of technology by the travel company and great use of technology that is used at the level below. You have that for web design agencies and SEO agencies - just not travel technology agencies.
I promise to get off my high horse now.