Blog homeFrankly I don’t really want to write this blog post. The news is too depressing with travel companies, banks and other businesses going bust…… and, for travel companies, the downturn in travel hasn’t really bit yet - so far we have only had the impact of high fuel prices on aviation.
I have been keeping myself busy helping customers (which I enjoy). Today I fixed a currency handling issue for an Armenian client, a web API problem for an Indian company and a sales tax pricing conundrum for an Australian travel business. Keeping busy is a good solution.
Anyway, I was wondering - the entire premise of the travel meta-search companies is to provide an easy, first-stop, mechanism for a consumer to check multiple airlines at once (for flight meta-search anyway). Where there are hundreds of airlines - this is a worthy solution. However what happens if there are many less airlines - and they are all in consortiums? Wouldn’t that make supplier websites more dominant - as after all as a consumer you would only have to check a few sites and you would find the information you would want?
I just don’t think we can have this much disruption to airlines and travel companies without a similar disruption to online travel websites and advertising lead destination content sites.
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For me the cup is still half full.
There will be more than a few (large, “national”) carriers, and even those in consortia (gobbled up by the likes of Lufthansa, e.g. Brussels recently) will not all have easily accessible or comparable offerings.
I see four main reasons why Metasearch (e.g. Kayak, dohop, etc.) will continue to be valid:
Breadth of offer, ease of access - customers will continue to seek sites, which give them access to and easy overview of many options, with added features (rate history, best price calendars, etc.).
Marketing - carriers will continue to use metasearch as valid marketing channels and only the few misguided ones (American Airlines…) will restrict access. The model is spreading to other industries.
Price - intermediaries (OTAs, wholesalers, etc.) will continue to compete on price.
Alternative routings - especially in places like Europe with many small airports and (still) more than a few carriers), going from A to B via C or D can add little inconvenience and often is much cheaper. Add rail travel into the search and this may have a real future.
Kayak and the likes will continue to work (for) the first two reasons. Dohop is best placed to add value in a more fragmented world where discretionary spend decreases and a small detour is not all that inconvenient.
Michael
disclosure: I own shares in dohop and have consulted for them in the past.