Anyone heard of TET.org? They produce standards for travel businesses [US]:

Here they are (details from the TET website)

Code 1: A TET seal holder shall never use deceptive practices and shall be guided by: truth, accuracy, honesty, fairness and integrity in its activities.

• A TET seal holder shall obey all laws and regulations and shall avoid any conduct or activity which would cause unjust harm to others.
• A TET seal holder shall not engage in any act or omission of a dishonest, deceitful or fraudulent nature in the conduct of business activities.
• A TET seal holder shall conduct its/his/her dealings in a civil, courteous and professional manner.

Code 2: A TET seal holder shall exercise truth, honesty, integrity and fair dealings with customers.

• A TET seal holder shall provide complete, accurate and informative materials, agreements, documents, information (print, electronic media, television, radio or otherwise) to its customers and/or to consumers. Informative materials, agreements, documents, information (print, electronic media, television, radio or otherwise) produced and/or utilized by a TET seal holder shall not contain false, misleading or incomplete information.
• When a TET seal holder utilizes marketing materials and agreements with its customers (print, electronic media, television, radio or otherwise), it shall contain sufficient information to enable the customer to make an informed purchasing decision and which are clear and understandable.
• A TET seal holder provide communications and information to its customers in a prompt and timely manner.

Code 3: A TET seal holder’s relationship with its customers.

• A TET seal holder will promptly respond to any customer complaints.
• A TET seal holder will issue agreed upon refunds in a timely manner.
• A TET seal holder will treat every client transaction confidentially and not disclose any information without permission of the customer, unless required by law.
• A TET seal holder agrees to work diligently to fairly resolve any complaint or dispute with a customer. 

I don’t know what to think of these standards. They look pretty sensible to me - but I have never seen a travel website with a TET logo. Anyone know of one?

Let me see if I can do a followup with the TET organisation. What questions do you have about these standards? Do you think that putting a badge on your website helps convince consumers that your site is better managed?

More information from the TET website

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As I mentioned before, I am not that excited by any of the new meta-search travel websites that are out there. The reason for this is that they tend to just have data from the top hotel distribution companies, a few car hire operators and the top airlines. They are also interested in making money from meta-search - which - although a sensible idea for a business (!) - results in a less than perfect meta-search solution.

Just to be clear - I define meta-search differently to price-comparison. Most price-comparison sites are also meta-search sites - but not all meta-search sites have price comparison functionality (Google is an example of the latter)

My objectives for a perfect meta-search

• A distributed technology based on data standards (no single point of failure or control)
• No single commercial entity responsible for its management
• Anyone with travel products should be able to join in - either as a product provider - or as a meta-search consumer

What is my big idea?

The principle would be that all travel websites (providers & suppliers) would have, in a standard location on their website, a data file that describes their products, prices, availability and other commercial data. This data standard could be based on the Open Travel standards - however frankly their standards are just too bulky and complex for a less skilled developer to generate. They are great for highly paid developers found in the leading travel companies - but not those affordable by smaller companies. The standards need to be as clear as the RSS XML standard.

What you could now have is e.g. 10,000 product description & availability files dispersed around the web.

(It is possible to simplify the data standards if they only need to contain sufficient information for marketing purposes - the problem with the Open Travel standards is that they contain sufficient information for a sale to take place - which is why the data burden becomes too heavy)

How would a meta-search work

A meta search company is unlikely to want to work with every travel provider - they could choose a subset of the 10,000. They would import that data and create whatever search they want with it (meta-search, price comparison, inspiration based search etc). Another meta-search company would choose a different subset and so on (A ski meta-search would take ski products etc)

Consumer desktop tools could be created where a consumer could say “I am going to Egypt” - and they would, for a couple of months, pull in the Egyptian data feeds.

Think RSS / web feeds - you have an entire industry of aggregators and software providers. This is what the travel industry needs. It would make best use of the what the web can offer us….

This is the semantic web for travel.

Benefits

• Make the playing field more open for smaller travel companies
• Would deliver technical stability to the online travel industry and ensure that no single large travel company could take full control of the web (which is the status quo larger companies want to maintain)
• Provides a platform for other ideas that no one has even thought of yet

This idea is a chicken and egg problem. Step 1 would be to convince Open Travel that they need to produce data standards that developers like me can actually develop against and that focus on marketing rather than sales…..

One of the reasons I got into blogging is that it is a convenient way to learn new stuff. I tend to come from a business / technology / web user perspective on much of what I write….. as this is where my experience counts.

Today however I thought we would cover a topic that is very important in travel ecommerce - but one I have very little understanding of - currency exchange rate hedging. As a result I have asked Kevin Gyateng from Corporate FX to explain the key issues. 

I am going to start with a fact faced by any company dealing with international payments.
 
For a company operating on 10% profit margins, a 1% weakening of its reporting currency will erase 10% of its profits.  (The same 1% move for a company working on 20% margins would see 5% profit reduction, and 5% margins a 20% profit reduction).
 
This is an issue that I find is pertinent to the travel industry where bookings can be priced and costed based on today’s conditions but due for settlement months later.  Within that period of time exchange rate fluctuations can significantly alter the cost of the booking made months ago.  In the first 5 months of 2008, the Pound has fallen by over 10% against the Euro.  Connect this reality with the mathematical fact presented above, and it paints a worrying picture for the financial performance of companies exposed to Euro payments.
 
Most companies that I speak to say that they are happy with the pure profit margin generated by their products.  When I ask why they do not take exchange rates out of the question and hedge, the typical response is “I don’t know enough about currency markets and I don’t like to gamble”.  I typically interpret this to mean, “if I hedge now and the exchange rate improves, then I have lost out”.  For me that is the gamble.  A refusal to fix exchange rates at the time of winning holiday sales, and hence securing your profit margins suggests a desire to enhance profits through currency gains, and ignores the effect of downside moves in exchange rates.
 
While it is true that surcharges can be added to compensate for currency fluctuations, this can affect the relationship between your business and the customer and can negatively affect the word-of-mouth reputation of your service.
 
In these increasingly competitive times, success is determined by companies that employ effective hedging strategies.

I know that surcharges are seen as very unpopular - Travel Rants recently wrote about surcharges from the consumer perspective - and listed the 15 UK companies that the UK trade organisation ABTA have so far permitted to add surcharges this season.

If you would like to contact Kevin to talk about hedging….. here are his details:

Kevin Gyateng
SmartFX Team
Corporate FX Ltd
T: +44 (0)20 7743 7010
E: KevinGyateng@corporatefx.co.uk
W: http://www.corporatefx.co.uk

The UK Government, through the Foreign & Commonwealth Office, have launched a new web based service called “Locate”. The principle is that travellers register their details on the site and the UK Government can keep an eye out for you whilst you are abroad.

http://www.fco.gov.uk/en/travelling-and-living-overseas/Locate/

Benefits of registering with LOCATE? 

• if a major catastrophe occurs we’ll have an instant record of your details so we can contact you to make sure you’re OK and provide advice
• if family and friends need to get in touch with you we can help them to find you

We’re confident Locate will improve our ability to provide help in crisis situations and reduce delay and worry in times of stress for family and friends at home.

I don’t believe this is for travel like a ”fly and flop” trip to Spain but for a whole class of other travellers. For example those travelling (or staying in) countries where British people tend to register with the local British embassy anyway (in order to be part of official evacuation plans and notification lists).

I would have definitely registered with the LOCATE service prior to planning some of my adventures.

I have twice come in contact with the Foreign Office whilst abroad - once in Yemen where we needed a diesel fuel drop arranged off the Yemeni coast and once in Iran following being hijacked by a military group and arrested on spying charges (although on the Iran occasion it wasn’t the UK embassy but another country’s, for diplomatic reasons). Therefore anything that assists the Foreign Office with the co-ordination of people like me should be supported 100%.

What is missing?

This system, although an interesting first step, needs to have a “registration API”. We could then, as part of a reservation system, have an “automatic notify” tickbox…. and send the data through systematically. That would be much neater.

(And if you are wondering why I think like this, many of the TourCMS customers are adventure travel companies - hence having seamless integration with LOCATE would be very helpful indeed)

See also Travolution

TripKick has just launched (in the last few days) and it looks like a website that is worth a quick look at.

URL: http://www.tripkick.com/
Concept: Not just hotel reviews - but community generated room level reviews

For example, rooms in the Clift Hotel (San Francisco)

Wow this is going to be a challenge….  firstly there is a great deal of data and secondly hotels just are not setup for taking bookings for specific rooms - so even if you know what room you want there may be a challenge in booking it.

As a quick recap to those unfamiliar with hotel operations, hotels tend to sell in one of three ways:

• By the room - for example small hotels and Bed & Breakfasts. e.g. the Sea View room,  the Blue room etc
• By the room type - for example “double room”, “twin room” etc (tend to be mainly medium sized hotels)
• By the rate type - for example corporate rate, special rate for company ABC etc (often how the big hotels distribute)

Room level review information, instead of being useful to consumers, may actually be very interesting indeed to two constituencies:

• The hotel owner - as now you can find out which rooms could be yield managed differently to other rooms
• Tour operators making group bookings - sometimes in a group you have premium and non-premium guests…. although they may be all in the same room type. Now you can, when allocating rooms to guests, determine which people should go where (assumes that you have a tour leader in the group at checkin!)  

So the TripKick idea could work…. but I wonder whether it is just “too much information”. However it is early days - and computers should be ideal at determining what data would be of interest to users - hence maybe TripKick will succeed with this.

They should probably look towards the trade for monetisation though (either as an additional data set to conventional hotel review websites - or to hotel owners / tour operators - to inform their operational decisions)

One to keep an eye on as in the first week a website is live it is hardly fair to give a thumbs up / thumbs down quite yet!

I love the letters page of some of the travel industry trade press. It is where people who haven’t found blogs get to vent their frustration about various aspects of the industry.

One letter that grabbed my attention this week was in Travel Weekly. It was written as “Name and address withheld”….. which I find a rather unattractive way of publishing. I know publishing “with name” is hard…. indeed I was talking to someone the other day who had commented recently on a blog….. and they mentioned that they had felt very exposed…. well yes - and I feel exposed every time I publish…. it is just something you have to learn to live with.

So what did the letter say?

Extra time not on in travel agency

I have worked in the travel industry for several years for a top high-street travel agency. I enjoy the work and always meet my targets.

Does this mean that the targets are not set high enough?

But I have major concerns about employees being continually asked to work beyond their normal hours. We constantly leave work late, sometimes after 7pm in a day that should finish at 5.30pm. This gives the company several hours’ free work per employee every week.

Umm…. You are the company - the company is you. I worry about any employee that refers to their place of work in the 3rd party. Maybe it was just the way the letter was written.

When we approach our manager about this problem, the usual answer is: “There is nothing I or your employer will do to reimburse you for your personal time”.

Well yes. The manager is right. However, if you have asked your manager more than once…. maybe you should look at how you are asking - or whether you are asking the right manager - or even if you are asking the right question.

It is difficult for us to leave on time because if a customer comes into the store after 5pm, it can take upto two hours to complete a sale.

This is the line that made me want to write this response. Firstly - your customers want to access your experience and knowledge at a time that suits them. If they themselves are at work all day…. then of course they want to come to see you after they have finished. Going back to the point about working hours….. maybe you can start a “late” shop shift (perhaps starting later in the morning for days that you work late)….. You could form a rota with the other staff at the shop to ensure late coverage.

However, what really interests me is the line about it taking upto 2 hours to complete a sale. What are they doing in that 2 hours? Is this product research, customer decision time or just struggling to get through to the product supplier (e.g. a tour operator) in order to check on some specific detail on behalf of the client. I would love to know how this 2 hours breaks down.

If you ask the customer to come back tomorrow they might go to another shop, so I never refuse an enquiry.

The attitude is correct. I like this attitude because I like to bend over backwards to ensure that a client is served 100% (although my business is a slightly different one). However, it does show a slight lack of confidence in this agent’s own approach to sales. What could the agent do to ensure that they can “close” the sale quickly - but deal with the transaction the next day during office hours? (or incentivise the customer to return the next day).

The travel web industry
I am not a great fan of this “long work hours” mentality that many people believe goes hand in hand with working in a travel technology or web company. However I think this high street travel agent ought to consider how their competitors (probably online travel websites) are working flat out to put them out of business. The battle isn’t pretty - and likely the most focussed on “winning” will come out with a job in +5 years time.

Many web design agencies - and other service companies - will work an “all nighter” in order to meet a deadline and not let down a client….. and at the technology end of the travel industry….. working late at night is a common period…. as uninterupted time is when most work gets achieved (and when upgrades can be scheduled) 

So yes - if you have a family - then working until 7pm when you are expecting to work until 5.30 pm isn’t what you want….. so the challenge is to create a business environment where, if your customers want you “after office hours” then the manager should be creating staff work time processes that support this.

This may require a redesign of how a high street travel agent operates. I believe that some form of high street presence will still be available going forwards - but only those that are fully focussed on being available when customers want them. Shutting at 5.30pm just won’t be good enough. In fact, in high street travel agencies of the future… this maybe the opening time!

A few weeks ago I read an interesting opinion piece in the New Media Age (a UK industry news magazine for web agency types).

In the article, David White, Head of European Operations at Efficient Frontier, made some well made comments about how search marketing is executed:

“In an attempt to optimise bid positions, many agencies have huge teams of people, both on and offshore, using spreadsheets and pivot tables to manually analyse keyword positions”

Yes.

“This is a very tedious job, it’s time-consuming, boring, complicated and very easy to get wrong. So it’s little surprise that these organisations are enduring record levels of staff churn”

He concludes (after further thoughts which are worth a read, available in the original article)

“Search marketing is now so complex it’s akin to the financial markets and, as a result, its experts are market analysts, not marketers. It’s the mathematical experts who will create the highly complex pay-per-click campaigns that are required to deliver incremental value”

I absolutely agree 100%.

I remember about 6 years ago (end of 2002) working for a client (a hotel distribution dot com no longer trading - they sold out to another hotel distribution company a while back - hence I am able to recount this story!).

My brief was to create reporting systems and put in place a pay per click campaign in 7 different European languages…. across what was then Overture, eSpotting and some other “odds and ends” of PPC opportunities. The budget for the campaign was “multi million Euros”. (The assumption was we would get the money back…. rather than it being pure spend - hence a budget is fairly meaningless)

Being a technical person rather than a marketing guy, my initial reaction was that we needed to build a bid management system…. because I realised that we had too much data to handle “humanely”. (yeah I meant that!). We were managing several hundred thousand search terms per engine - and were advertising, across all languages and marketplaces, across 7 or so engines. Yikes.

I built a system that basically merged data available from the PPC engines with subsequent conversion data coming from our booking system. For example I would know that London would convert differently to Manchester…. but that a Manchester hotel booking wouldn’t be worth as much as London…. so the system would devise what we should bid in order to attain a certain revenue projection. Mind you, we still had to edit bid prices by hand in the PPC engines…. which was pretty much what I spent all day doing.

We were also looking at merchant model vs reservation model percentages….. as if you could find some cities that would have a higher proportion of hotels that we sold “upfront” to consumers… that money would be in the bank before we had to pay for the search engine advertising bill… hence would generate positive cash flow. Our analysis model also took into account aspects such as different commission collection percentages for different cities… some cities we struggled, on reservation model bookings, to collect what was owed to us!

Actually, what I have written above is what should have happened.

What really happened is that the director of marketing person (the client) wanted me to quit development on the bid system…. and go a “marketing lead” route…. they kept on saying “just get the search terms up….. we will sort it all out later”.

In the end that is exactly what we did…. the terms went up…. money started flying out…. bookings started flying in…. and the only analysis we had was a weekly excel document with the headline numbers. On some weeks we “won” other weeks we lost badly… but we had no idea what was working and what wasn’t.

My work ceased with them. Now I won’t do any PPC unless someone does it mathematically….. (actually I don’t really do PPC work now!)

If I were working in a travel company, if you have a web savvy financial controller - I would prefer to give the PPC marketing to them rather than to a marketing person…. I expect you would get more success with it.

p.s. I have worked for at least 4 hotel booking distribution companies or big hotel agencies…. unless you know me personally - you probably will not be able to guess which one I am talking about…. so don’t jump to conclusions!

One of my “daily routine” sites is the del.icio.us homepage (now owned by Yahoo). Although I don’t use their service for bookmarking purposes I find that they often have, in their top 12 listing, a website or article that I will find interesting.

I have once got to 2nd on the delicious homepage listing….. for a web based application that I developed…. so I know what it takes (that was just following Techcrunch reviewing it). I remember that when I got to 2nd on the page (which updates every hour) I was at a client’s office - and had to ask a developer there to screenshot it! Thanks Paul (he always complains that he is never mentioned on this blog!)

Anyway, the other day, I was paying one of my regular visits…. and there was a UK based tour operator at the top of the list. Wow - that is pretty good going!

The page that hit the top was from Direct Villas Florida - link to the listed page - link to their homepage

Direct Villas Florida are a UK based Florida villa rental company (yeah - the name is a bit of a giveaway). This is a fairly competitive sector (as most are in travel) and was interested to see how they are using their blog to get themselves known.

Perky’s Bat Tower (Florida)

The answer is for one of their blog posts they listed 12 interesting images of structures in Florida that were either unfinished or abandoned. I am sure they must have done something else to promote this page (than just publish it) - but in essence the top page was just a gallery of images.

Go to the page now (worth 30 seconds of you time!)

Making major changes to a travel reservation system is hard work for all involved. I know - I have project managed quite a few in my time.

To give you a sense of scale, one project I PMed for a leading UK tour operator took 8 months from start of planning to go live…. and involved over 50 IT, commercial, ecommerce and legal people. And that was just for a new holiday search! (OK, search is important, I know that)

However, one thing that I have learnt from all of my reservation system change management experience is that it really isn’t a spectator sport.

The problem stems from the meetings (and trust me, there will be meetings…… indeed as the project manager you are often in meetings about meetings….. which are OK - it is the meetings about meetings about meetings that you have to watch out for!).

By sounding confident that everything will turn out OK (and no PM really likes to not sound confident because then you look unprofessional - besides - the PM cop out is that its all in the risk log that has been escalated through the agreed channels so no need to keep mentioning any worries).

This external confidence achieves the trick of bringing everyone with you…. because as soon as you start to sound unconfident… your team will start looking for reasons not to do something (rather why it will be great to do something) - which reduces the overall quality of what is being delivered. However, if the marketing team get to hear of this amazing confidence you have in how the release will go they start to get a bit over excited.

This is dangerous

What happens next is that someone in marketing has a great idea to go and tell the world about how amazing the new system will be ahead of when they should do.

A recent example. Ryanair changed their reservation system over the weekend. Apparently it hasn’t gone exactly to plan (although I don’t know what the plan was, obviously). I have had people comment on this blog about Ryanair’s poor website performance since the upgrade…. and there has been some chatter on consumer blogs about it (see Travel-Rants)

Lets have a look at what Ryanair have to say about it in their two statements…..

• 24th Feb 08 - Ryanair reopens ahead of schedule
• 26th Feb 08 - Ryanair update on web system chcangeover

Our new booking site, like our flights, has arrived under budget and ahead of schedule

Ummm…. Under budget? Either this means the budget was massive - or that they ran out of time to spend it all. I assume the schedule they are referring to is going back live one day earlier than in their final plan…. not the schedule of choosing last weekend over any future weekends.

One of the components that tends to come at the end of a project…. and gets squeezed by everyone else running late - is load testing. This is testing to see what happens when you have a certain number of visitors on the website - or making a booking - at any one time. Load testing is expensive - but not that expensive in the grand scheme of things. I wonder if they ran out of time to do it?

Also load testing has to normally be undertaken on the live infrastructure….. especially if your test infrastructure is not the same kit or equipment as your live production system - or it requires connectivity to a 3rd party system. This means that load testing has to be done in a quiet time (overnight)…. and can be tricky to schedule into a project with many last minute releases coming out prior to launch. It would be fully understandable to miss out load testing when cutting corners to get a project to launch on time… Understandable but probably not a wise idea. (Yes - I have dropped load testing sometimes!)

The additional processing power of the new system improves the website speed for customers, especially during peak booking periods

Sounds like new hardware to me

as we complete the largest ever software changeover undertaken by any airline, anywhere in the world

That sounds big then. This maybe the cause of the problems - if their technology supplier (a well known and respected airline system supplier) haven’t done a project this big…. maybe the quantity of data in Ryanair has busted some of the algorithms used to optimise data management internally. A slow fix this one.

The principal difficulty the website is encountering is the enormous surge of passengers a) who were unable to make bookings over the weekend and b) who are keen to get one of Ryanair’s 1 million x 1 penny (tax inclusive) seats, which are available for travel on Tuesdays and Wednesdays in April, May and June.

Ah…. a self inflicted wound created by the marketing team. In my large system projects we try to leave at least 3-4 weeks between system change and any major marketing push…. because this gives you enough time to, without too much pressure, develop (and test) a further release…. and solve any teething problems.

continued to make significant progress on eliminating many of the software glitches involved in bedding down its new ‘New Skies’ reservations system, which is the background booking engine of Ryanair.com

I have seen a lot of press releases about new system changes…. (normally press releases come out when a project goes well….. not badly!)…. anyway, its a bit rare to see an airline name their system in press release about problems. Are they deflecting attention away from themselves?

The irony is that in writing this blog post I am just a spectator….. and travel technology isn’t a spectator sport.

Next week I will be in London speaking at the forthcoming Travel Technology Show. My presentation will be about legacy travel technology systems. I believe you can still get tickets for my seminar…… (which I am sharing with Ornagh Hoban from Datalex).

The following are some (rather random) musings about the concept of “legacy”……  if you want more, you will have to come to the seminar!

The word “legacy”
The word “legacy” seems to generate a variety of reactions from people:

• The cynics say that calling something “legacy” is an effort by computer industry salesmen to generate artificial churn in order to encourage purchase of unneeded technology
• Those less cynical say that actually, in order for an IT project to move to “legacy mode”, it has to have been successful over a number of years (i.e. fully installed and working) - therefore legacy systems are successful projects

I like both definitions.

The use of legacy that I keep an eye out for is where a developer starts to refer to a system as legacy because they fancy working on a new project (doing greefield code development is easier than maintaining existing systems) - or because they want to use a technology that is more about their CV than about solving real business problems.

The home wordprocessor
I still remember fondly doing wordprocessing about 15 years ago……. you could easily print out a couple of single page letters - perhaps for doing the odd letter to your accountant or other official organisation. That software and hardware would undoubtedly now be called “legacy”.

Roll on 15 years. Today, at home on my flashy new PC, I can still do basic wordprocessing…… and I can print out a letter. This letter has not changed design in 15 years. In between now and then I have purchased 3 or 4 PCs (probably more!). Of course my new PC can do more than the computers from 15 years ago… however most of that new power remains underused.

i.e. In a situation where your business requirements haven’t changed, legacy systems remain sufficient. However, what has happened in travel is that our requirements have changed - we now need to take online reservations and use the power of reservation systems to not just handle transactions - but also manage suppliers, agents and accountants.

Product vs SaaS
This week my anti-virus software on my home PC told me it was getting old (Norton 2007) and it asked me if I would mind moving up to Norton 2008. That sounded like an offer I couldn’t refuse so I duly let my PC upgrade itself. Big mistake.

What followed was 2 days where I basically couldn’t access the Internet. Somehow Norton 2008 has completely clogged up my computer - I believe something to do with the phishing filter checking every single web page I access….. I tried to turn off what I could….. but Norton 2008 has too many switches and configurations and I gave up. (Norton 2007 has one single switch to turn their system on or off). As a result, I have now uninstalled Norton 2008 from my PC…. and phew - my PC is back to going super fast.

This is an example of a product based release strategy gone wrong. So wrong that Norton have lost a customer.

Many tour operators who have systems are based on technology that is aging rapidly. Instead of system suppliers gradually upgrading their legacy systems many have released new products (that you have to purchase from them again). However, because these companies have taken so long to create their new generation solutions it is no longer a simple upgrade from your existing product to their new, flashy, product. Its is a massive IT project. Much like me thinking that Norton 2008 would just be a more recent version of Norton 2007 - it isn’t - it does a lot more - more than I want or need or understand.

Therefore, at this point of time, because the cost of change is so large, you are now open to suggestions from other suppliers because if you are going to go to the upgrade effort - you may as well open up the choice to all appropriate systems on the market.

This situation could have been avoided by the system suppliers. They need to take a more “SaaS” (Software as a Service) based approach. Instead of the mindset being “we have sold you this product, we will now support you using this product, in 2 years time we will release a new product which you can buy from us again” - the approach should be one of constant development and evolution. With this approach, in 5 years time your system will still be current.

If Norton had gradually increased the new features onto my PC I would have probably accepted them - however because the shock of the new software was so great - I rejected it.