Blog homeI read with interest the latest TTI (Travel Technology Initiative) newsletter (Issue 33, Feb 2009 for the detailaholics)
Outgoing chairman Tony Allen outlines a new strategy for the UK based travel technology association (that TourCMS is a member of)
The main conclusion was that our previous major function, the development of standards, now plays only a minor role in our plans
That is interesting. Is there no longer any interest in travel technology standards? Or is this a recognition that standards are required globally not just within the UK hence standards are better set by organisations such as OpenTravel.
In a separate conversation Valyn Perini (head of OpenTravel) asked me whether with XML being cheap technology whether standards are no longer valuable. Perhaps there is an element of that as well.
[For clarification I am not sure she believes this just wishes me to discuss the point in this blog!]
Marketing not sales standards
Up to this point many of the standards I have seen have been focussed on the distribution of booking capability. They would permit the checking of availability and enable 3rd party bookings. Therefore standards have taken root in commoditised products – flights, hotel etc – where there is demand for distribution of booking capability to 3rd parties.
In niche tours (not packages) much booking takes place (B2C) directly between consumer and supplier due in part to the pre-purchase consumer to supplier communication. Distributing the booking function has never really taken off. Instead standards that we would find useful would be more marketing oriented standards.
The marketing oriented standards are not being set by the standards organisations but by commercial organisations who are creating their own solutions independent of industry scrutiny. We as a reservation system end up supporting those standards and so over time they become defacto standards:
For example
- Lightweight standard for tour special offer distribution – WorldReviewer
- Itinerary component / itinerary storage – TripIt
I would welcome organisations like TTI and OpenTravel to approach these companies and co-ordinate their standards.
Conspiracy theory re standards support
Perhaps there is another reason why standards haven’t really taken off. This is a bit of a conspiracy theory….. I know you love this kind of thing on this blog!
With the current industry setup we have a few large travel distribution systems each with some element of regional strength. A true Mexican standoff. A few years ago if you read business plans from travel distribution websites it would be about winning and dominating the sector (like Amazon.com does for books). Now instead of the goal being about winning the overriding desire is not to lose.
Standards create a “winner takes all” scenario as they make it easy for travel companies to move from system to system ultimately leading to a single winner, the one that is most efficient. Now travel distribution systems want to lock in their customers as much as they can – there is no incentive to make it easy to move (while letting travel companies retain all their existing distribution relationships).
But it is not just the travel distribution systems that are benefitting from the lack of standards. Ultimate suppliers prefer the status quo as well. The last thing they want is one single website (like Amazon.com for books) dictating how products will be presented and sold (and priced). They like the broken up, chaotic travel web as it currently is (they preferred it when it was even more chaotic being offline, but that is another point). Suppliers want to slow down as much as possible any aspect that helps the industry to move to a single, winning, entity. They won’t say this in public of course.
Intermediaries don’t particularly want Amazon.com ification unless it is them that is the ultimate winner. They are fighting a mexican standoff of their own.
And travel technology consultants like to be able to earn grand fees off what is a currently over complex technical landscape. If data standards were as simple as some web data standards you would only need web developer skills to implement – which are about half the daily rate to a top enterprise data developer.
Summary
Does anyone see a future for standards and standards organisations? Is my conspiracy theory right? Do you know any other defacto standards that have been created outside of standards organisations but are in strong use on the web?
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Taking a broader perspective on “travel” standards – one could argue that Google has created a de facto standard for sharing geographic information on a global scale, which heavily affects the travel industry. While KML has become an official standard (OGC), there are extensions to KML, such as the new Google Tour features, which may become new de facto standards for the travel industry to provide virtual tour experiences.
Hello Alex.
This is spot-on subject and kind of up my alley since I’m involved in Tourism Services TC of my national’s standardisation body.
Supporting standards means that you are supporting solutions. Many “big guns” on the market are not selling solutions but products. Because of that, they are driven to protect their property instead of push for open, standard solutions. This concept would be fine if we are in mid 90’s but we are not and I believe that it’s only matter of time when this model will collapse.
It’s somewhat like SMS messages. If one needs to buy a 200USD software, install it on PC, learn how to use it just to be able to send SMS messages the service would never become popular, even alive.
I don’t want to know the name of the software vendor who is responsible for sending my SMS messages. I really don’t care if it is MS or Oracle or SAP behind it all and what kind of technology does it for me. I just want a solution to send them.
Best regards,
Sinisa Perovic
Alex,
Not to be pedantic, but we need to make the distinction between a de facto standard and an open standard. KML might have become the de facto standard for geographical data, but it couldn’t be considered open (that is, created via transparent and inclusive participation) until Google donated it to the OGC (Open Geospatial Consortium). TripIt and WorldReviewer might have APIs that are really useful but they can only be used with their own products, and were developed (and continue to be developed) without industry participation.
Which is as it should be; TripIt and WorldReviewer are not in the business of creating standards. But to address your conspiracy theory and Sinisa’s point, all distribution companies, large and small, need access to supply, so suppliers have the power to break up the supposed cabal. How? By participating in standards bodies, and not accepting the concept of a de facto standard. I am an avid user of TripIt (my mother loves knowing where I am at all times) but does the industry really want to anoint it as a standard? Doing so locks the industry into one company’s non-transparent and non-inclusive way of doing business (see your Amazon reference).
So this brings me to the real question – TTI has announced that standards development will now be a ‘minor role’ in its business, and OpenTravel has seen a lack of interest by tour operators, trip planning companies and other new entrants to online travel selling. Do standards bodies no longer matter to the industry? Have XML development and XML developers become cheap enough that a common standard no longer has a justifiable ROI? Or are we (TTI, OpenTravel, etc.) not articulating the need well enough? I truly don’t know the answer, and would like to find out.
Thanks,
Valyn
Interesting post Alex.
Lately I’ve noticed an increasing number of discussion topics on XML standards between Hotels, Online Distribution and Revenue Management suppliers. To promote information on this topic, I’ve just posted a link to this particular blog post in the ‘News Section’ of our Linkedin Group: Hotel Online Distribution & Revenue Management Professionals (2,000-odd members).
Cheers,
Erik
Interesting post to which I do not have much to contribute I’m afraid. We rather stumbled into this standards business when we developed a simple xml schema for uploading tours and offers from small tour companies that slotted in to our geographical and thematic organisation of content – so product can be matched to relevant content. This schema now forms the basis of quite an extensive contextual ad network. Can ours be adoped as a ’standard’? Possibly, but as someone pointed out, we are a commercial organisation who have developed something for a very specific purpose. There’s no magic in it. I think standards are mostly adopted because they become de facto through common useage – normally driven by commercial imperatives – and not because some organisation or other has laid down the rules. If that was the case, we would all be speaking Esperanto.
Hi Alex,
I have been wondering a similar thing recently. The situation at the moment within the tours and activities industry seems less than satisfactory when it comes to availability information.
It is inefficient and frustrating for a tour operator to manually update (or set up auto feeds) to each and every distributor separately. As a result you have tours and experiences being distributed through sites like viator, isango and ourexplorer with dubious availability information. try going to one of these sites and click check availability for any tour. Most will show up as always available which clearly isn’t true, the operator just sets it that way because they aren’t updating the distributor regularly.
Whether or not you believe online booking will ever dominate in the experience segment, there is no doubt that having up to date availability information will be valuable information to the the consumer and save the operator a lot of time fielding standard availability enquiries.
It’s not conspiracy theory at all, it’s just a natural progression that has already happened in other areas – computers, diy, food and of course, brewing. It is also symptomatic. Several factors come into play, for example, that many businesses only employ younger people. Nothing wrong with that, indeed the newer technologies will de facto have to have younger people, but the industry itself, suffers; mainly because the industry (whichever one you are talking about) suddenly finds itself repeatedly having to re-invent the wheel or at least, looks down channels which may appear new but are in fact, a re-hash of older concepts.
Without the experience of years within any organisation, this latter point is not recognised.
Another is the pie theory. Any vertical structure, manufacturer, wholesaler, retailer allows for (or used to allow for) an element of the total pie to be alloted to each element of the chain – there may be a bit of agry-bargy around the margins, but the essential elements remain in place. Things go wrong (as they have done in many of the other businesses) when one pie element decides that they are going to have that element which belongs to another. This is a modern phenomena brought about, essentially, by the factor mentioned passim. It has already manifested itself in other industries and arrived in travel 10 or 15 years ago. “The model does not work” was the battle cry. Well, actually, yes it did. Many were just no longer prepared to make it work. The model was not broken. No-one suddenly woke up one morning and decided how to distribute/ market/ sell travel. Over (a long period of time) a system evolved, was fine tuned, developed. But the cycle had reached that part of development that someone in travel said “I want more of the pie and I am taking your portion”.
Retail is always king. Always will be and always has been. Wholesalers (or manufacturers/ product or service suppliers) very rarely make good retailers. It is not what they are good at and it was not how they conceptualised what they do, to produce income. As they have chosen to take another part of the pie that was not theirs, suddenly they find that they have to learn new skills very quickly, without the tools to help them learn.
Such it was with the internet. It was seen by many (airlines and operators) as a panacea. Instant, cheap distribution. Trouble was, these legacy players did not realise that they had to fix their creaking structures. You cannot take a Morris 1000 and put a Ferrari engine in it and ignore the suspension and the chassis. This is also why the likes of Easyjet were and are so successful, they worked back to front – taking the modern means of communication, seeing what it could produce and then building an organisation which suited – and then fine tuning the thing later. This left the legacy players floundering, they could no longer (traditionally) retail (burnt that boat and to their consternation, a whole sector survived) , still had ageing, antiquated structures and now – a massive technology bill. Worse, they suddenly found that the retail element was not as daft as they thought and being retail, came up with much better ways of doing things. And the new techonlogy grew, the entry level (money-wise) grew and so by definition, retailers have started to get bigger and bigger – hence what you summise, that the last thing travel suppliers/ providors wanted was for that nice, higglety-pigglety (as you say) chaotic world of travel distribution, where those providors orginally ruled the roost to become dominated by a small number of very large players. That was not the plan, travel retailers were supposed to disappear leaving a supplier/ customer direct facing structure and no-one off line, online or any other line getting in the way. Nemesis!
Naturally, the last bastion is the lack of standards. We had them in the GDS systems but various airlines (eg Lufthansa) are doing their best to break that up as fast as possible in the vain hope that they can, Canute like, put a spanner in the works and stop the inexorable asencion of the over-sized travel retail organisation; that opportunity passed with the decision to stop commission (to online, offline blah blah) because by doing so, they broke up the myriad of small off and potetially, on line agencies and ergo airlines would, no longer be able to divide and rule; that the tail would now wag the dog was inexorably written on the wall from that date.
I don’t think that “technology data standards had their day” (unfortunately) we are still just at the early beginning.
Look at the tremendous and fast development that happens with wikipedia or OpenStreetmap. And such “free” information will drastically change the way information is distributed within the travel industry. And selling of travel products has much to do with retrieving and distribution of information.
But Valyn wonders about the “lack of interest by tour operators” in OpenTravel. If OTA is really interested in a broad usage base of it’s standards, then why do you for example restrict the access to the OpenTravel Implementation Guide to members only?
A minimum annual member fee of US$2,250 looks not really attractive to small start up companies or small tour operators. So for me OTA looks more like a traditional (mainstream) standardization body and not like a real open (dynamic) internet movement.
But I acknowledge that http://www.opentravel.org looks more “open” now than a year ago when I was looking for standards we could use in our (internal) web based booking system which in the future needs to connect to suppliers.
But still: For me OTA seems to big for the real need of small tour operators. But I’m not a software developer. What do you think Alex?
For example: What I really would like to see, would be a lean xml-schema for a hotel fact sheet: Physical adress, contact numbers, GPS-Koordinates, services, ect. All the basic information each tour operator wants to know from a hotel.
And in the perfect world all hotels would just put such an XML file on their webserver (like a robots.txt). And if only two tour operators use this file instead of sending an email questionary the hotel had an ROI.
Sounds to easy? So why don’t we just do it. If someone sets up such an easy schema I will urge all hotels who want us as distribution channel to use it.
By the way, I think these simple thoughts are in the same direction like what Alex wrote last year:
http://www.tourcms.com/blog/2008/06/20/an-idea-for-decentralised-meta-search-for-b2c-travel/
Think also of a museum putting an XML-file with their facts (admission fee, opening hours) on the web. We then could automatically include this information in the clients personal itinerary / guide book.
What I’m talking about? Yes, it’s the semantic web. But when can we use it? I’m anxious for it!
So much for today
Harald
…… actually, you have to laugh a bit, really. We had all this in days of yore with viewdata, travicom and the like. Instant booking with guaranteed availablity. Old technology, yet kept the distribution system trundling along for 15 years and upwards. Trouble was, you had to visit a person in a shop and the supplier had to pay that person something. System worked, though.
Got rid of that. Old hat. Model broken. Throw all of it out the window. We have spawned (we meaning the old travel agency network) a whole new industry of people re-inventing the wheel and I bet (’cos no-one tells us, really) all you techy types are costing a awful lot more money than the odd bone suppliers had to throw the old agency network.
Alex,
first of all, great post, thank you very much.
I think standards for data exchange can be achieved easily only on a technical level. But as in tourism, we need to exchange rich data to transfer presentation data and semantics. The issue with semantics as I understood so far is it’s context dependency. The more people you involve in a standardization process, the more different contexts will have to be matched. So the costs of creating a common understanding will grow exponentially. The only way to handle this is bringing together a group with shared interest. The shared interest replaces the context and drives the process. This is the case in the so called “open” initiatives where the product domination of the GDS suppliers sets the scene. This may explain why we often have the “conspiracy” sensation.
Nevertheless, as we continue to understand more and more the nature of sematics, we may overcome the need of rigid standards and may well be able to construct web 3.0 applications with self adapting communication interfaces. They will be able to cope with different representations of data and incorporate diverstiy in their solution. Thus, a decentralized network of solutions may replace today’s product dominated closed world of travel technology.
These are all great comments – thank you everyone.
I wonder if people adopt standards and then look to build distribution partnerships with companies who use the same standards….
OR if they work out who they wish to partner with – then decide to work together using a specific data standard?
This maybe why standards are not so popular within small tour operators because companies are not really making data driven partnerships – and if they are – it is based around what their existing software can support – rather than what the travel company can build (as that is probably out of their budget)
The OTA standard has some good and bad to it like any standard. The main detraction I would think is that it is oriented only towards booking request/response standardization. It does have some coding domains that are useful and pretty comprehensive but it says little about how to taxonomize/ontologize travel data effectively. For instance…ask around to colleagues what a “leg” or an “orgin/destination” are and depending on what organization they are from or what product segment they work in you will get a different answer. Travel products are though quite varied in quality, price, the consumer experience, and the like…much more so than say insurance or goceries (two heavily data-standarized industires).
Another problem this this industry that other industries don’t have is that the ultimate holder of inventory is the vendor (with the exception of consolidators who buy bulk capacity of airfare, hotel nights, etc). Since everyone else makes money on the sale, but doesn’t hold the capital risk…anything that allows cannibalization of the market channel is more profit and fair game. Anyone that holds a “middleman” advantage in the propagation of information from the source provider to the customer wants to protect that as a proprietary process…this includes the GDS engine providers.
The end customer is segmented in Travel in a unique way. Pricing, marketing, communcation, booking, policies, etc are all geared to one of three segments: The Corporate business traveler, the luxury high-touch traveler, and the commodity general public. Many companies cater to these different market segments in very different ways and appropriately so, and companies that do service two or more segments have sepcialized business units for each (with different budgets/tools/goals). However, the underlying data and information stream is the same for 90% of the function of data propagation, integration, and so on.
Airfare being probably the most commodtized and standardized product, it is amazingly non-transparent in terms of faring rules and predictability – market segmentation is a large part of course. If this is the best the industry can do in standardization of a product it has a chasm to cross in terms of a broader approach to making data management and sharing something useful.
In travel some non-Travel standards are the most consistent such as ISO encoding for currency. A good start would be to consider some standards for content as the “peripheral” foundation for deeper standards in content. IATA airport codes are used everywhere, but those are already part of the industry. By borrowing some standards approaches from industries where data has been more successfully integrated and standardized, travel can begin to really start to get a “critical mass” of agreement going. For instance what would one use, as workable model, to fill some of these needs:
- Standarization of geographic markup/content? (which GPS coordinate system)
- Standardization of pricing and rate quotations (Fares/rates/fixed price) and how that is adjusted (promotions/discounts/etc)?
- Standardization of domain terminology (”Leg”, “O/D”).
- Standardization of Product categories (Excursion vs. Tour vs. Event)
Certainly data standards would benefit the industry…and in the end the consumer. They would also eliminate a lot of middle men as well, making travel more affordable. One major difference between insurance, banking, health care, etc (highly standized with regard to data) and travel is that travel does not have a large body of international law, such as settlement agreements, and regulations behind it in such a way as to make compiance with a given standard compulsory from a legal standpoint or from a practical one. Therefore, compliance is based on advantage and profitability to the individual organization alone.
A good data standard for travel would include some different aspects unqiue to travel to make it palatable and useful to the folks that might adopt it. It would:
- Allow for different levels of participation in terms of complexity and detail. Smaller players could “play” with less IT/Data rules and support but would in turn receive less benefit from the standard, which is a public commodity.
- Take into account all the various business processes involved in travel. The data is not so useful as a standard if it does not allow for full product lifecycle.
- Include the ability to represent the data across many langauges and systems so that precision and/or richness of function is not lost. This means the data standard is just as “representable” in C#, SQL, Java, XML, or any other tool it might be used in.
- Include not just the data and structure of the data (be that a table or class), but include all the correct taxonomy to describe the data and the meta-information that is needed to communicate from system to system.
Absent regulatory intervention, you have to ask yourself how the industry today could approach something like the data standards seen in other industries and what benefits they would have. It would require a sea-change in the way that companies view and manage information and that would take a very long time given the roots of the highly automated segments go back to the 70’s at least.