Blog homeThe travel industry is full of jargon. The online travel industry is worse as we tend to chuck in the odd IT or web word….. and then people like me try to come up with new words (like metabook) and assume it makes us look clever. Of course, we are not clever, but stupid. The idea of words is to communicate so if we make up our own language we can quickly confuse everyone and fail in our primary objective.
Anyway, I have been watching the rise and rise of two words recently so thought had better spend some time explaining them – Aggregation and curation.
- Aggregation – to gather into a mass, sum, or whole [Source]
- Curation - adding a human element to the gathering / tagging process [Source]
Examples…
- Aggregation: A GDS (Like Amadeus etc) – with over 50,000 hotels available via their system. They have aggregated the hotels to one place.
- Curation: A travel agent who hand-picks specific properties that they know are good to feature
I remember when I was working on a Caribbean hotel website (for a tour operator). The competitor websites featured many many more hotels than we did. Some people in the product team wanted to feature more hotels (to match the competitors) but the head of product kept his ground – and continued with the hand-picked hotel strategy. We didn’t use the two words curation and aggregation in those meetings but I wish I had. It would have explained what we were discussing in much greater clarity. Everything is easy with hindsight.
The differences between curation and aggregation
The main difference is down to the consumer. With aggregation the consumer generally has to do their own product research to find out if the product is to their liking. With a curated website the product person from the website is in charge – they are acting more as an advisor to the customer (like a pseudo travel agent) – hence the customer may feel less obligated to do significant additional product research prior to purchase (if they trust the website sufficiently).
The future
The metasearch sites tend to be heading down the aggregation route. The inspiration sites tend to be heading towards the travel product curation strategy.
Perhaps this is sustainable – but ultimately I expect consumers will tire of having everything aggregated – and really appreciate a well curated set of compatible products. Therefore if this hypothesis is correct, tightly correlated product sites may become the front ends for meta-search – who – over time – will evolve into mid-layer product distributors – competing with the existing distribution platforms (hence competing for industry attention rather than building consumer brands)
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Hi Alex, Another great post and a succint way of summing up key business models.
The aggregation/curation dichotomy is something we have definitely struggled with, running a local OTA in Bratislava. In the early years of our site we angled for aggregation – that was our competitive advantage vis-a-vis the global players who only could feature a few hotels. With our local presence we were able to work with much smaller properties. However, as the big global OTAs have started adding properties in our destination and have become better at working with small properties, we are gradually moving towards more curation, since our competitive advantage lies in knowing all of these properties better.
I think these models can coexist (even within the same site) since there are different consumer temperaments: the methodicals will want the aggregation (perhaps cross-checking views of multiple curators), humanistic will look for a trustworthy curator, etc.
I have been an advocate of curation since I founded Travel Intelligence in 1999. Horrible word though, can’t we think of another one? However, the problems arise in managing the balance between the commercial and the editorial – nice for the consumer to have the choice made for them, but if this choice is driven entirely by who’s got the best deal, then the trust begins to get skewed. If this can’t be solved, then aggregation is more transparent. But I believe it can be, otherwise I would not be still in the business of curation!
…. I think we are stuck with the word curation unless we can come up with something else!
I used to say “expert lead” – but then, in a blogging vs community discussion, people misunderstood me and thought I was saying I was an expert…. when all I was trying to do was distinguish a lead discussion with an open discussion.
At Holiday Velvet we do both: aggregation AND curation. In certain destinations we hand-pick the vacation rentals we feature (Paris, London, New York… to name but a few) and in others we allow rental owners to advertise their properties without us checking it. However in the later case what we promise is that these are serious rental owners (we measure their response time) and that only 101 of them will be allowed in each destination.
Why not get the best of both worlds?
Although I keep on working at it I have never been satisfied with the way we communicate the message above – would be very curious to hear what you think of our website. Meanwhile all the best for 2009!
Another example of a curated site is
http://www.kallow.com/
(in consumer electronics). I wonder if such a site could work within travel? (just taking a single product per category – and saying – this is the best in class….. buy this one)
Interesting post Alex and one I’ve just come across (via Twitter)
My own site Holiday Pad is now a well established ‘curation’ travel site, and has been instrumental in attaining media coverage, most notably from The Guardian, for many of our members (as I like to call them). So in that sense, mainly through the simple design and use of RSS, it is acting as a highly effective and efficient PR channel.
Not bad for a simple website launched for virtually nothing using open-source technologies and hard graft. And also in a field which I previously knew nothing about (previous background is music biz related)
Does it matter that people don’t know who I am? I don’t think so because the site isn’t about me. It’s about the places on it.
I started it in 2005 based on the Mighty Goods model and I have to say, it is probably (possibly) the first travel site of its type. There is no affiliation schemes, never has been. No Adsense, never was. I built my own classified system which streams in listings in the sidebar. The whole site will undergo a major revamp when it gets moved over to WordPress (work underway as I write)
Is Holiday Pad sustainable? Well, the clue is in the para above, it’s now 2009 and the site is stronger than ever. In fact, I have just launched another travel ‘curation’ site called Go Glamping: http://goglamping.net
So, I would like to hold both of them up, if I may, as excellent examples of travel curation sites.