Showing who else is travelling with you in the booking engine

Travolution reports that Kuoni are shutting down Shoestring [See report].

Shoestring is a niche tour operator selling tours to Africa, Central/Latin America, the Middle East and Asia. The tours look well positioned in a market that I know well (I have previously been MD of a tour operator selling the Middle East / Asia).

I won’t get into the ins and outs of what Shoestring have done right or wrong as frankly I haven’t a clue. Never heard of them. I was though interested in a quote from Kuoni, via Travolution:

Kuoni has previously said that it wants to get close to 30% of group bookings from the internet, and that this is still its target. Currently, online accounts for around 14%. 

The niche adventure travel tour operators I know, who are promoting the same destinations, are working on 80% plus from the web. [They are my clients]. Weird that Kuoni are turning off destinations that are easy enough to sell online when they have an objective to increase their online sales.

I expect their marketing is at fault…. here is what they say about their marketing (via Travolution)

“Maybe we should have done more marketing,” the spokesperson said, when asked why the brand failed to take off. “But marketing is expensive, and the margins we were achieving were low.”

Yep, us techies are always happy to blame marketing guys!

Anyway, the reason I wanted to mention them here is some quite interesting functionality that I found on their website (still kicking myself about not writing about a pretty cool thing on the XL / Travel City Direct Florida forum…. before they ceased trading) - so I have to write about it before they turn their site off.

As you book you can see who else is on the same trip on the same dates.

I am not completely sure about this from a data protection perspective - but I haven’t seen this before (well, I suppose it is similar to the functionality on TravellersPoint where hotel bookers can see other travellers staying in the same hotel on the same date - but that is opt in rather than everyone)

What do you think? Is this a wise idea to show who else is on the same trip before you book?

If you want to be notified next time something is published sign up for email alerts or subscribe to the RSS feed. Thank you for reading!