I have been running this blog for a couple of years now but I first started industry blogging in 2003 with a short lived blog called Travel Website Builder.

Over this time on this blog I have published 424 posts (and you have contributed 1733 comments – thank you).

But it is time to move on. I am now going to be writing and other things over at Tnooz.

You can access all my posts from this node: http://www.tnooz.com/author/abainbridge/
You can subscribe to just my posts via RSS: http://feeds.tnooz.com/tnoozabainbridge

Alongside Tnooz I am going to spend more time building up Small Fish Big Ocean – our travel ecommerce forums for small tour operators and niche travel agents. Maybe will launch a blog over there – unsure – because my main concern is that I am spreading myself a little thin [Remember I am not a journalist but running a business too!]

I am also working on a couple of travel ecommerce ebooks and remain active on Twitter @alexbainbridge !

For the moment I will keep this blog’s RSS active until all has settled down.

Possibly I may move existing RSS subscribers over to my Tnooz RSS feed via a bit of RSS magic but if you don’t want to miss the good stuff in the meantime please add the Tnooz RSS feed.

Or if I don’t get on with the concept of having an editor maybe I will be back here in a shot!
Yeah, I have always been a little independent!

What have I learnt?

I have learnt so much about social media from blogging. I have a long list of topics that I could bore everyone with one final time about my blogging strategy and approach. But maybe I will leave that for another time!

One thing I have learnt that is worth sharing….

I started blogging because the small tour operator / activity sector were not getting any mainstream coverage in the travel industry press. There was nowhere to pitch stories about our platform, TourCMS, and nowhere to advertise. I thought, hey, lets start a blog and I can mention it every so often. That will work.

Reality is that actually its ethically frowned upon to pimp your own stuff all the time – so I have only done so on very very rare occasions. Turns out that actually blogging makes the situation worse – other travel industry journalists who may have covered TourCMS actually haven’t – purely because I haven’t pitched stories at them as I know them personally and if they covered the stories readers may consider it has been covered for all the wrong reasons.

Anyways, hope to catch you all over on Tnooz where I won’t be mentioning TourCMS either (proving I learn from my mistakes!)

Thank you
Alex

There are *so* many companies that are focussed on aggregating and sharing travel itineraries or assisting with trip planning (around web based itineraries). Just this week 3 sites are preparing launch plans:

• YourTour – who will be presenting at the forthcoming GetFundedShow
• Duffel – who just presented at Techcrunch 50
• SightSi – who are not much more than a blog at the moment – but look like they have plans in this direction

According to reports, Dopplr (one of the category leaders) has sold to Nokia for 15 million Euros (15 -22 million USD). No reaction from Dopplr yet to confirm these rumours.

Om Malik on his coverage stated

I’m happy for the founders and backers of Dopplr, after all it is a nice financial outcome for a service that hasn’t grown beyond a base of passionate users

Lukas Zinnagl, a Techcrunch EU editor, stated

10M$ seems adequate for a hyped product, with low traffic and very focused usage #dopplr #nokia #fail

….and…

jesus, how come people are so stoked about this? this is really not a good deal for any of the investors or stakeholders.

this is a present to nokia and some nice pr.

Interesting that an exit of this size creates such different opinions.


Thoughts
This is an interesting moment in my blogging career. Dopplr are one of the first European online travel startups that I have covered from their inception through to final sale from the founders. Whilst not many people read my blog in 2007 I did, in October, cover their FOWA presentation (1 month after Dopplr got their first round of funding).

See blog post [Good historical perspective]

Ummm – Interestingly I seem to have got one thing right – and one thing horribly wrong. At the time I thought their competition was going to be WAYN. But I don’t think WAYN are in that game still and have their own challenges in the hyper competitive online travel space. Instead the main competition is TripIt.

Still, as I wrote in 2007, I had the Dopplr strategy down as to work with the digital thought leaders (probably due to their backing from Silicon valley expert VCs). I compared that to WAYN who had travel industry backers and seemed to talk (and still do!) at many travel industry conferences.

A classic battle between web people / web VCs and travel people / travel VCs….  dukeing it out in the online travel space. Swap WAYN for TripIt in my 2007 blog post and it has pretty much gone to form.

And here we are a few years later and Dopplr, in Om Malik’s opinion, have failed to break out of their digital thought leader strategy and achieve full adoption phase.


API battles
Both TripIt and Dopplr have web APIs. TripIt is a complex API that is sooo powerful it reminds me of back end travel reservation system APIs that I often come accross. Not for the faint hearted BUT it has meant they can work with many different devices and many services have been successfully built on the TripIt platform. Solid.

Dopplr however is much more lightweight. The level of detail stored on their platform was sufficient for most social purposes but is insufficient to start getting clever with providing travel services from the data. It just isn’t detailed enough. Hence I bet that it didn’t lead to that many travel industry services that could be integrated with it (hence restricted monetisation plans). This could well be down to the Dopplr folk being highly competent web people, just not travel industry folk. A warning for other entrepreneurs entering the travel industry who propose startups without having spent a few years working for existing travel companies.

• Dopplr web API documentation
• TripIt API documentation

Dopplr have seen that they need to enhance their API but very little has happened. In early June 2009 Dopplr announced that there were plans to launch a new version of the API “soon” (during this summer). On September 18th 2009 Dopplr announced that they have had to postpone the launch of their new API. [Source]

If you look at the change log of the Dopplr API wiki you will see that in the entire of 2009 only 3 or 4 edits were made (most recent change 5 weeks ago so it is still currently maintained). This rate of change (and their announcements about the delay in the new API) are not the signs of a company that is continuing to innovate rapidly within the online travel sector, sadly.


A good sale?
Yes. Brilliant. I am very happy for Dopplr. It is fantastic to get any company to give a return back to VCs and for the founders to presumably walk away with enough to buy a house each after 2 years work.

However the Dopplr folk are heavyweight web / mobile people. This was a golden opportunity to reach further than being able to buy a house. And I bet the VCs were wishing for more too.

But that is life. I think the Dopplr folk have done well. I know how tough this game is within the current hyper competitive online travel market and the travel industry conditions.

Expectations are tough to manage – I feel bad when we have only grown to be 3 times as large this year as we were last year. Most other people would be jumping for joy!


Finally
Oh, here for a bit of fun, is a Dopplr parody (created by Mahalo in 2007)

!

Spent a day in the company of independent high street travel agents at the Advantage Conference. Good to compare a travel industry conference that focusses on the offline travel industry with the upbeat momentum and drive often found at online travel industry conferences.

I want to focus just on one session – the leisure travel best practice session. The idea, as announced 4 months ago via press release, was to “contact with fellow members and …. learn from each other”. Last year 87% of delegates rated the sharing best practice session as excellent or good.

Some people  argue that best practices stifle innovation but I believe that best practices should be followed and once you have them mastered then you can innovate.

LowCostDeals.co.uk – Website
LowCostDeals is a website setup by Aspen Travel. They were presenting about how important it was for agents to have a website. In particular they seem to be doing many of the actions I have been going on for years about on this blog – Facebook page, active (ish) on Twitter, they have a blog, a monthly email newsletter, they do evening live chat web events (6 pm) to discuss certain destinations etc.

On the surface this all about generating desire (rather than the historical reactive role of travel agents to service existing desire for a travel product). Great!

They do 1 million GBP per month turnover (about 1.5 million USD) and have a 10 to 1 ROI on their web investments (on 40,000 unique visitors per month)

From a web marketing perspective their activity looks pretty average but I wish I had their ROI!

One comment stood out. They are attracting customers from far and wide…. not just where they are geographically based.

Advantage have 700 travel agent members. In my view if all Advantage members followed the same strategy (rather than just one or two) there would be so much online noise that not all 700 could succeed. They would all be shouting for attention and individual members would suffer.

Advantage can support 700 geographic niches (split into business and leisure travel) but online can probably only support a fraction of that number (but each agent would be larger). Catchment areas will be so much larger for online local agents than local ones trading more traditionally.

But perhaps the Advantage consortium would be better served by having fewer, but larger, agents as members? I am sure Advantage head office know how this online concept will work out so that must be their strategic intention even if that isn’t how they present it to their current members.

Or perhaps they just suggested a web example as they need it to show relevancy but hadn’t considered the implications of wide adoption of their advice.


Holiday Travel – ATOL
Holiday Travel gave us an example of where they have applied for their own ATOL (basically a license to create travel packages including flights).

Holiday Travel are no longer a travel agent but a tour operator. This has meant that their margins (on tours) are now 15-20% (with some at 25%). This is great too.

In the long term, insufficient margin exists in the UK travel industry for a UK travel agent to buy a product from a UK tour operator for an overseas destination. You don’t need two UK margin layers. Hence this step is in the right direction for agents to follow in order to grow their margins.

ATOL sales are 20% of their business (unclear if by revenue, profit or bookings – but assume revenue I think)

A benefit of their ATOL is that they can create their own single price packages, joining together multiple components. Agents, selling the same package, would have to price up (to the customer) each individual component. This opaque pricing style is common online and permits a little cross subsidy and margin inflation.

This was a nice case study…. but unusually Holiday Travel, I believe, had purchased their ATOL themselves (rather than buying one from Advantage head office). Meant that the Advantage guy (moderating) had to jump in at the end to say that they sold ATOLs too…. at competitive prices. Well if they were that competitive then their members would have brought via them, wouldn’t they!

So muse on what would happen if all these agent members of Advantage become tour operators. They won’t of course as being a tour operator is tough (you need to do safety checks on your suppliers, have all sorts of insurances, a 24 hour phone number etc etc… its not just a legal change but much more complex than that).

Why would all these members need to stay as Advantage members? If these small agents really want to be tour operators there are alternatives – they can become TOPP insured, they could join TTA etc etc. A whole range of opportunities become available to them that are not available as a travel agent consortium member.

Also being a tour operator is a completely different concept to being an agent.

Agents have a single customer in front of them at any time – hence you have to have great supplier networks and reservation systems to search 10,000 products to find a handful that match the one customer in front of you. Its all about search.

Tour operators have a much more of a marketing challenge. You have 10 tours. You must find the 1000 customers who are looking for those 10 tours. Marketing, marketing, marketing.

If Advantage were running a network of 700 tour operators (rather than 700 travel agents) they would need to massively alter their reservation system and supplier relationship strategy.

Again, wonder why then that Advantage offered up this as a great best practice for other agents to follow. Great for that business yes, but not great for Advantage.


Finally
I enjoyed the day. Felt a little alien going to a travel conference where there was hardly any mention of online travel at all. But these business people are entrepreneurs just like us travel startup people. We need to respect them as they have years of experience. Their main challenge is being locked into local, geographic sales areas when us online lot can sell over the entire country (or multiple countries) without any real issues.

Where we differ is that online travel people tend to start with the principle that they are passionate about the web and then look to setup an online business. The offline travel folk tend to come to the web as just another marketing channel. They have no passion for it.

Which is why I am sat here at 9.30 writing a blog post and the rest of the conference is enjoying the gala dinner. Ummm – perhaps they are right afterall!

In the UK there are plans to alter how travel purchase protection works. All the discussion so far has been on the mechanics of the protection.

I am still confused as to the reasons behind needing all this bureaucracy in the first place. Doesn’t consumer travel insurance, the Package travel regulations 1992 and credit card companies provide sufficient cover already?

To me, these are the factors that are involved:

1. Protect the travel agent from supplier failure
2. Protect suppliers from travel agent failure (not something the retail travel trade press mention too much)
3. Protect consumers from any failure within the booking process
4. Protect consumers from any failure/cancellation within an interlinked chain of trip components (e.g. a package) – for example if the supplier sells both a flight and accommodation, any alternation to one should be compatible with the other
5. Ensure that consumers can be repatriated in case of airline failure
6. Keep the government off the back of the travel industry – as if we don’t self regulate, the UK government / European Union may create their own solution (such as enhancements to the package travel regulations currently in place)
7. Keep a the credit card companies off the back of the travel industry (not sure that is working!)
8. Empire building by the national bodies (ABTA etc).
9. Complexity over time – the system has been added to and added to. Systems rarely become simpler over time.

We have to remember when proposing adjustments to the protection system that consumers now have a very credible alternative. They can book direct (via the web) both to remote destinations and with airlines. I would expect that any change to the protection system will just add complexity and cost to the existing travel industry players making the protected system even less competitive vs the direct, less protected, system.

Before consumer advocates suggest that consumers must have protection – well yes – but that could be fully provided by the travel insurance system. Insurance companies are in a great position to understand and put a value on risk. That is what they do. Also consumers understand the concept of insurance and won’t have to figure out in detail which bits of their trip are covered and which aren’t. Insurance could be enhanced to cover it all.

Easy!

Further reading: Article from the BBC covering 5 consumer laws you really ought to know

Apparently sex sells. For a suitable for work version as to why this may be, I suggest you go and read the appropriate Wikipedia article about it.


The Visit Denmark example
VisitDenmark used the concept of a one night stand (between a Danish lady and a tourist) for a buzz campaign via youtube. Video got a million plays (and has now been taken down)

Here is another version of it

The storyline was that this lady had a baby (conceived by a tourist) and now was looking for the father. If someone can help me understand how that promotes Denmark as a tourism destination please do add in the comments!

Being youtube got some good reactions already!

Is buzz by iteself helpful? Or does buzz have to reinforce an existing message?

For further coverage:

• Revolution magazine – Visit Denmark video hoax prompts backlash
• Nick Burcher – including screenshot of the microsite that was created (no longer live)

Perhaps they want to promote the concept of tourists being able to pick up Danish girls – which is a destination attribute not often highlighted by government backed tourist boards!


The Westin example
The Westin resort on Aruba is offering people (couples presumably) a 300 USD “conception credit” towards their next stay if they can conceive a child while staying between Sept 1 to Dec 19 2009.

This offer seems to have got the social media networks up in arms too (mainly complaining about the PR).

Analysis
I don’t particularly like either social media oriented campaign. The Visit Denmark one in particular seems badly conceived (!). I guess when we watch TV we know what is news, what is real and what is advertising. When companies blur that distinction in order to promote a brand this tends to confuse us so we react negatively once we find out it was a hoax.

The Westin example just seems in poor taste.

What do you think?

I admire Zappos, the online shoe shop, recently acquired by Amazon for 928 million USD.

What a ridiculous price for a shoe shop!

Online trading has an unusual way of altering our perception of size. A good friend runs an online garden centre selling all sorts of garden kit in the UK market. It is easy to be a web snob when you know a company only employs a handful of people but that would be so wrong. We calculated that actually they are doing the turnover of 10 physical garden centre shops. This places them as the largest online garden centre within the UK. And growing.

[Side fact, one of the founders learnt their skills in online travel and joined the online garden centre industry because its less competitive than online travel (and an opportunity came up). He is in the process of demolishing that sector. Online travel is so competitive you become very strong at all sorts of skills - that if you join another industry you could easily be super successful. Go Go Go (and leave online travel for us!)]

So yeah, a shoe shop, but a 928 million USD shoe shop. Easy to underestimate if you just look at their website.

I have no idea what makes Zappos worth that much. I don’t have an MBA!

It could be their physical product distribution mechanism (that us online travel folk we have so little understanding of):

Or could it be their customer service / social media?

Their online service is legendary. Bing it (is that a verb!?) to find out more. People rant and rave about their service levels.

Wow. How do we recreate that in travel? Tricky challenge.

I am not a customer service expert but I do answer customer enquiries so am still on front line support. Hence this comes from my practical experience, not anything that is suggested as industry standard.

Here are the 4 levels of customer service you can offer (as measured by customer expectation):

• Poor – slow, wrong, poorly explained
• Average – customer happy to get answer. Not that exciting though
• Over deliver – customer excited with your answer – exceeds their expectation. If you keep this up over a couple of customer service experiences the chances are they will tell someone else how good you are. At this level, even on a once only customer service experience, the customer will likely suggest you by word of mouth – IF someone else asks them who they suggest.
• Super amazing – the customer receives such great service that they feel they have to immediately tell someone about it.

The odd thing with the super amazing level is that if you only give 5% of your service experiences at that level (and all other service is at average level) you will still create such positive word of mouth than you don’t need to over deliver on every occasion.

Hence, to me, customer service is about having a system where those would would appreciate the super amazing level of service (and likely tell others about it) should be given it. I think this is where corporate customer service goes wrong – they feel they have to give everyone the same level of service and that is it.

The problem with travel is it is too costly to over deliver on customer service.

Take shoes (Zappos). Really there isn’t much you can do when someone has an issue with a 200 USD pair of shoes. At a maximum you could give that customer some compensation costing you twice what the original revenue was. Overall though it isn’t a big thing, financially.

Say someone has a delay on their 200 USD flight hence miss a connection to a 10,000 USD cruise. Superb customer service would indicate that you should compensate them for their cruise (as in the customer’s mind, you have lost that for them). Being realistic, that is so never going to happen.

Hence it is all well and good looking at companies like Zappos and reflecting how to bring their customer service ideals into our own businesses – but the reality is that within travel it is just very hard to do so.

We are trying in my business. But over delivery and super amazing service levels require doing custom web developments (often taking 2-5 days or more of developer time) and then charging nothing for it. Sometimes though these developments get put in a different order to what we announce. Our customers then get grumpy at our free development services because we took a week or two longer than we originally thought. Impossible to win.

Oh to be selling shoes.

Mike Butcher of Techcrunch Europe fame has written an interesting article published via the Guardian website.

Read the article

The premise is that now is a great time to launch a startup. This lines sums up the article:

Why, the real entrepreneurs who have been waiting in the wings for the perfect conditions for a startup: a downturn.

Ummm….. not sure I agree it is as easy as that.

I would qualify the article, now is a great time to launch a startup BUT ONLY if you are already financially cheerful.

Running a startup is a horrible experience. I am on number 3 now from my own backing, and have worked for 4 failed VC supported startups.  All require weekend working, long hours and pressure (emotional and financial). I happen to thrive on that but not everyone does (including my close family)

Here are my 6 failures (I am not proud of them, just mention them to let you know I am scarred too):

• 1996 - A software company where we taught languages to kids (CD software written in Delphi). As the developer I learnt a lot about software production (and usability testing with children) but we didn’t reprint the original run of French, English and Spanish CDs. Broke even then closed.
• 1997 - Set up a business offering home based computer training / support – launched successfully in the Southampton / Hampshire (UK) area – Much like the Geek squad but on a local basis.  No investment so no loss. I was too young to understand “Go big or go home”. Opportunity missed.
• 1999 - CTO of a Durlacher backed concept to provide an online health service website. Interesting research into the sites of the time and pitching experience, but ended in failure.
• 2000 – Backpacking arrival packages – concept of selling arrival packages to backpackers (e.g. airport transfer, 2 nights accommodation). Company continues today (without me) but sells tours rather than backpacker services.
• 2001-2002 – Head of web design for Andbook, founded by Hilton International, Accor and Le Meridien (Forte). We created a multi hotel chain B2C website at the same time as Opodo launched a similar concept (backed by various European airlines). Our vision was to create an SME focussed business travel portal but funding fell through (due in part to to 9/11, although that could have been a convenient excuse). Few million GBP loss but personally it was a great boost to my confidence for working at the highest levels within the travel industry. Expensive lessons (paid for by someone else!)
• 2004 - Consultant to a hotel distribution marketplace with VC backing. Basically I had to tell the investors to shut up shop. Less said the better. Not fun and my invoice is still unpaid (another expensive lesson)

Thankfully we are trading fairly happily now with TourCMS.  Oh, and a weekend project I created a few years ago got reviewed on Techcrunch US. That is geek success! I should be happy

My war wounds go deep.

So yeah, now may be a great time to setup a new business, but probably best if you are already financially stable. Mike should have made that clear. Running a startup is easier when your startup doesn’t have to pay your rent/mortgage.

One problem we have with trading in a recession is understanding whether sales volume is impacted most by product quality, state of the online travel industry (poor) or our own marketing attempts. The recession (particularly strong within the travel industry) adds a factor that can create a great deal of complexity to understanding the numbers (as with startups you tend not to have other years to compare with)

If you are considering setting up an online travel startup right now think really carefully what you are doing and what you are risking. I have seen a number of our customers (tour operators) spend too long working on creating their websites and not getting trading early enough. In an industry where companies with long trading histories are going under it is imperative to get money coming in ASAP.

So listen to people like Mike Butcher from Techcrunch Europe, but bear in mind that a startup is a tough, tough, concept, regardless of recession or not. Not for the faint-hearted.

What is deemed to be acceptable in terms of travel website image editing / image use?

When I say acceptable, I really mean in terms of industry ethics (which should be global) rather than the UK trade descriptions act, which also has a part to play.

What is the consumer expectation that the travel product/service exactly matches the image – and to what level of detail should there be an exact match?

Nearly always acceptable

• Adjusting colour qualities
• Cropping an image (unless cropping something out of the image that could be bad, but how do you judge that?)

Marginal cases / unknowns

• Removing people (to better show a product) unless you are removing people in order to make somewhere seem less crowded?
• Removing boats from a picture of a bay. But would it be acceptable if sometimes the bay was empty, just not on the occasion the photographer visited?
• Service delivery method – e.g. the photo is of a minibus (capacity 15) but a coach (capacity 50) is used in reality. Or where a white water rafting company changes the brand of raft used – do all websites images have to be updated too?
• Adjusting the sky to make the weather look better, perfect, etc

Not acceptable

• An image that since alterations at a property (e.g. a hotel changes) no longer reflects the true image? Changing the colour of the awning probably is OK so tricky drawing the line?
• Where a product attribute is shown (such as a swimming pool) but the pool is no longer in use (different to the minbus / coach question as the product is not present as per the image, rather than delivered differently?)

What do you think?

Does it make any difference if it is a general destination photograph vs a product specific one? Does anyone have a guidelines that suggest not to use images that are over 3 years old?

Trying to write some guidelines so need a little help.

Thomas Cook Airlines has announced three exciting new destinations to its winter 2009/2010 and Summer 2010 programmes from Leeds Bradford International Airport (LBIA)

Passengers will now be able to head for the sun this winter with the addition of Sharm el Sheikh in Egypt (03 November to 27 April) and Monastir, Tunisia (01 to 22 November and 7 March to 25 April).

New for next Summer, Thomas Cook is offering the popular beach resorts of Antalya in Turkey and Sharm el Sheikh in Egypt. Both destinations are available from 04 May to the 26 October 2010.

As now common within the travel industry, the press release was accompanied with a youtube video:

Read the press release

Take the current homepage, pretty much like most homepages for airlines.
I know because I have worked on a few (!)….

Lets muse what a fresh design from scratch would look like – howabout this version from Dustin Curtis?

[Reproduced with permission]



Or howabout this Google style version from Thijs Jacobs?

[Via Flickr, Creative Commons]



Airline website design is more politics than design

The AA UX designer, in response to Dustin’s proposed design, stated that..

the group running AA.com consists of at least 200 people spread out amongst many different groups, including QA, product planning, business analysis, code development, site operations, project planning and user experience.

We have a lot of people touching the site and a lot more with their own vested interests in how the site presents its content and functionality.

Simply doing a home page redesign is a piece of cake. I have got six of them in my archives.

But doing the design isn’t the hard part, and I think that’s what a lot of outsiders don’t really get, probably because many of them actually do belong to small, just-get-it-done, organizations. But those who work in enterprise-level situations realize the momentum even a simple redesign must overcome.

The AA UX guy is right. Corporate web projects come with their own set of rules and processes. As one UX designer who works on large scale travel websites keeps reminding me, the UX design of a travel website often ends up reflecting the structure of the organisation behind the site, not the structure of how the user has built their mental model, hence the problems.

I would love a forward thinking airline to take these two designs (and their existing design) and create mockups and put them past some usability testing. Any innovative airlines out there want to back some research?
Read American Airlines’s full response to Dustin Curtis’s redesign from Dustin’s blog