Why don’t travel companies use RSS (much) yet?

If you are reading this, you probably know what RSS is. RSS is an XML based format that enables websites (such as this blog) to syndicate articles out to RSS readers… so you can read this article without having to come back to the central site.

Of course, RSS isn’t just about blog posts, but can be used to distribute all sorts of data that is intended for consumer consumption. You can find info about what RSS is from here:

Anyway, today is RSS awareness day. Yeah. I bet you are pleased to know that.

Fact of the day….. there are 70 million (or so) RSS users on the web…. but this is only 5% of the internet population…. (Source: RSS Awareness day website)

So what can you use RSS for (apart from blogs)?
Well you could use RSS to create a special offer or “price feed”. For example:

• Expedia New Zealand
• Travelocity - actually pretty good
• Orbitz
• Lastminute
• etc….

Does RSS work commercially?
There is an interesting case study from 2006 where Travelocity promoted their new RSS system to just Hotmail and Yahoo email addresses (these users were chosen as Travelocity knew that these users had access to RSS readers either via Windows Live or My Yahoo). Anyway, apparently, 66% of users that opened the email (outlining the RSS system) subscribed to a custom RSS feed.

TourCMS also supports RSS feeds generation…. which is nice. Only one customer is using it for that though…. but from small acorns! (Full details on TourCMS RSS support and an example RSS feed)

An industry standard
I would love to see a travel industry “standard” for RSS feeds. The kind of organisation that should be creating this “lightweight” format would be the Open Travel Alliance - but they seem focussed on “heavy lift” data formats….. The advantage of having an agreed standard would be that companies (such as meta-search companies) could create tools to consume these RSS feeds in a standard way.

Subject lines, from a standard perspective, are not very interesting (but they are the most important aspect from a consumer perspective). They tend to include:

• Product name
• Date
• Rate

The key to any new RSS travel special offer standard would be to determine what data should be in the body (so can be both read by consumers and aggregators). I suggest:

• Product name
• Travel date (either fixed date, or applicable date if an extended period)
• Offer ends date
• Rate
• Short description
• Marketplace restrictions (in code form) (e.g. only available to US customers)
• Product tags (yep - a folksonomy)

Some come on Open Travel Alliance - can you knock up a standard for us? (or I could co-ordinate it, if anyone thinks this idea has legs)

Go on….tell me below how you are using RSS…..

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