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. 

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Some people ask me what it is like working in the Internet industry (or the Internet end of the travel industry….. depending how you look at where the edges are). Would I suggest that they (who are say early twenties) start out in the travel web industry and what advice do I have?

Its a tricky question - when I started out there was a great deal of opportunity. We, in our mid-twenties, would pretty much (with little experience) jump straight into senior jobs - perhaps creating an entire website for a company - then doing the online marketing etc. As new staff joined web teams in larger companies - these new staff tended to join in more junior positions.

So you have ended up with today most of the senior level roles at travel companies been filled by people in the mid to late thirties. Compare this to comparable senior roles in other industries (such as medicine, law, architecture etc) - where they tend to be in their fifties or sixties.

People like me joined the travel web industry at the just the right time (late 1990s). New entrants though are having to join at junior levels and then work their way up the career ladder. This is slightly unfortunate for a couple of reasons:

• Often when companies are looking to fill a senior position they are looking for more experience than available internally - so can tend to recruit from external sources. This is pretty bad if you are in a junior role in a large company as it limits opportunities above you. If you see roles being advertised that are above your current rank - think for a while why your company hasn’t created an environment where you could have picked up the experience yourself so you could have applied.
• If you start as a junior role you tend to become quite specialist - you may just be doing online marketing or just be doing product image manipulation in the content management system (CMS). Us lot who started 10 years ago did a bit of everything - so became “jack of all trades” - which is something new entrants to our industry get little experience of. You need to be a “jack of all trades” to become an effective ecommerce manager or director.
• We are not retiring - if you look at medicine and your boss is in his fifties or sixties - you can pretty much guess (hope) that he or she may retire in the next few years. However if your boss is in his mid thirties or forties - and he has no where above him to get promoted to (or has no desire to be promoted) - then you are not going to move upwards either. The initial web generation are not retiring. (They don’t need to get promoted either - because their pay is increasing year on year - without having to change role….. which is quite a satisfactory situation if you happen to have one of those jobs!)

In summary therefore - yes - the Internet industry is a wonderful industry to be in (or the Internet end of the travel industry) - but make sure you don’t get stuck in a junior role in a large company. There is no way up! (unless the company you are working for understands the impact of this problem on staff morale and retention - and has created an appropriate environment where people can develop skills and experience outside of their specialist roles - perhaps through job rotation or internal training)

I have been thinking recently about how far ahead companies should be thinking with website planning. What about next year? What about the year after that?

Planning vs return on investment
Both are important

Planning: Understanding what you are going to do when. In IT terms this is a “roadmap”. In larger companies everyone talks about “the 5 year plan” - but smaller companies tend to plan for the web in shorter cycles. For example, I plan developments on our software upto 4 months ahead. We are only planned upto end of Feb at a detailed level. I have ideas for post February - but nothing set yet. The advantage of these shorter planning cycles is that we can react much faster to changes in the marketplace and customer needs. Its not that we are doing nothing post February - just that we have no need to plan for it yet.

Return on investment: This is a principle of “When are you going to get your money back from the costs of undertaking the project in the first place?”. Return on investment (ROI) calculations form a key part to the long term planning process at larger travel companies (where every development decision is made like an investment decision) - but smaller travel companies don’t tend to undertake ROI calculations that much. They just say “we have 2 staff - lets keep them busy 100%” - rather than “If we spend £30,000 GBP on this (60,000 USD) we could make £100,000 GBP (200,000 USD) sales next season - so we had better get some temporary staff (or a web design agency) to help out.

Return on investment calculations for websites tend to be worked out over 3 time periods:

• Anything related to search engine optimisation (where return will be made through sales from customers finding the site through organic search engine results) - 1 year. Some may push this out further - but frankly SEO can change so much - you had better be expecting to cover your costs in the first year - and anything after that is a bonus
• Web developments (and design changes) - 3 years
• Back end changes (reservation system etc) - 5 years

[These are my numbers - not used by anyone I know incidentally]

Examples & questions

Long term planning
I was asked to comment about the URL structure of a new development that went live this week. I pointed out that the URL structure wasn’t ideally future proofed nor would it make it easy to enhance the functionality in the future with additional products. The person I was speaking to said that project cost was a factor - and they had made the decision to go this route - to “just get it working” - and were going to worry about the longer term consequences later. In this kind of situation I would prefer to spend more time getting the foundations right - and then build on top. It may make the upfront cost higher - but the long term return from that development will be higher. A difficult balance though.

User generated content
Say you are looking at adding some more “customer experience feedback” type functionality. You know the kind of thing - people putting up videos of their holidays or reviewing their trip etc. The problem with this functionality is that it could be an entire year (or 2) before it begins to make sense.

First you have to tell everyone you have this new functionality - then people have to, the next year, travel on their holiday, then they need to come back and review or upload videos / photos etc. This whole piece of work will not have immediate impact on sales as soon as it is launched - indeed it may take 18 months to even begin to pull its weight on the website. How many website marketing executives are prepared to wait 18 months for something they have spent a great deal of money on to find out if it works or not? Not many!!!

(This is often why people launch their user generated content ideas on new websites - so they can capture content without their main site looking so empty - then, once they have some good content, they can feature it back on their main site)

Alternative principles
Another principle that you need to be aware of is the concept of “Fail fast”. This is an agile development principle (Agile is a method to run development projects that some developers like to use). In essence “Fail fast” means learning as quickly as you can whether something will work or not. In the example I gave above about not knowing if your new “user generated content” feature will work for 18 months….. this is an example of failing slowly. By failing quickly you know when to stop spending more time or effort on something - and you can move onto the next thing.

Getting the right mix in your roadmap
When you are developing your roadmap of developments it is important that you include those that deliver a return now (or over the coming months) and also those that have a more long term outlook. If you just do short term developments you may be OK today - but over the long term your more forward looking competitors will have built their long term developments up - and taken the lead. Of course you may need your short term developments to succeed so you still have a business while your longer term plans are building up!

Incidentally this is why you are seeing a few acquisitions at the moment for web based travel content companies. It isn’t for today - but for tomorrow - when these tools and systems will deliver their return.

Why I don’t like web design agencies
I don’t like web design agencies. They are OK when used as what I call a “resource extension” i.e. they are providing more staff for your team on a short term basis - but they can become a real cost overhead when used instead of an internal web team.

One of the reasons why I don’t like agencies is that I don’t believe they really get into this long term planning or ROI discussion. They tend to be very good at delivering a project in 3 months - that looks great - and delivers for today. But once they have your website live they go and move onto their next project - and never have to live with the consequences of the decisions they have arbitrarily made during the design process.

To better explain what I mean, I once worked for a web based hotel distribution company. We had a really difficult to work with booking engine that we just struggled and struggled to make better. We knew it was a bit of a pig - but we could do very little about it. This was 7 years ago. Customers were not booking, we had invested a great deal of money into it - and there seemed very few options (except for start again). However, between us, we came up with all sorts of ideas for how to make a poorly designed booking engine work better. We were forced into thinking about minute percentages of conversion uplift - and what the costs of achieving them were. This took us into areas that web design agencies were not going to consider.

Likewise, you have to wonder whether agencies code their work to assist with future maintenance. If you are in a situation where an agency is doing the project and then it is being passed to the internal team to manage going forwards - you can pretty much guarantee that there are going to be these awful hacks in the code to “get it working during the project” that you will then spend the next 2 years worrying about as your internal teams struggle to make any real changes to the system. It is not that agencies want to deliver bad code - but they are forced to meet their deadlines (they want to retain a reputation for that). Also agency staff tend to get very good at working on “greenfield” developments - where projects are done “completely new” - rather than maintaining code over its lifetime (3-5 years) - so they just don’t understand how difficult making maintainable websites and code is. They just have no experience of it.

Summary

• You need a long term plan (for example a 2 year roadmap)
• Your roadmap needs to contain projects that have both a short and a long term return
• Always consider the long term consequences of that “I will just put this up on the site and see what happens” development
• Ensure that with any design or development you have undertaken by an agency - that you understand the kind of thinking they are going through while delivering it. They will work how you want them to work - you need to drive this!

Eurostar, the London to Paris train company, have today “moved house” and trains are now running to St Pancras station rather than to London Waterloo.

This is pretty big news in the UK - St Pancras is a wonderful station and has just completed a major refit. Take a look at the nice virtual tour (complete with virtual humans).

So from now onwards Eurostar trains will be running into this station. Well from now onwards until February 28th next year. And then again from the 1st of March.

Lets see what happens if we put in February 29th 2008….

Umm…… oh dear

I hope this isn’t a backend system error rather than a JavaScript validation problem. Otherwise this may not be a quick fix. 

Thanks to The Register for the tip

I have written about the Opodo EscapeMap system a couple of times before - both times positively. In essence it is a Google map based system for geographically navigating special offers. It is actually quite nice and I expect is working fairly well for them.

Previous posts: Comparing the Travelocity ExperienceFinder, Opodo EscapeMap and various solutions from Expedia and back in August when they first launched.

Special offer API
In my last coverage I mentioned that Opodo, one of Europe’s largest online travel agencies, managed to leave a nice API open letting anyone come and “collect” Opodo’s special offer data - all nicely formatted in XML. Not a major sin - but I would have made the API a little more secure from simple viewing using a combination of JavaScript obfuscation and XML encryption (and a daily changing key). This wouldn’t be foolproof, but it would stop people like me from messing around.

Example XML response (works best in Firefox, but go view source in IE if you get an error page)

Why is this data exposure wrong?
A competitor could take advantage of this data freely given by Opodo - by incorporating that data into their own revenue management system - so competitors can see how their offers compare to Opodo’s and adjust their own offers in response. This kind of data is gold dust. You could easily look out for the latest change in Opodo special offers and immediately react with your own offers to the destinations they are pushing that week….

As I know that various people from Opodo have read that post I am surprised that they have not changed their system yet (they have had 4 months). Maybe they don’t realise what competitors get up to with this kind of data! Maybe it was just PR people who read the post!

What now?
I was searching for Opodo EscapeMap via Google and I noticed something a little odd:

Yep - if you search as above - what you get is now a nice error message coming up in the Google results.

A couple of points about this:

1. There should be a robots.txt file on http://escapemap.opodo.co.uk -  that would sort Google out within a few days
2. The PHP server(s) running Escape Map should have their error messages turned off. At the moment the messages are going to the end user - which is really bad (it is a simple configuration switch on the web server!)
3. One reason exposing PHP errors is bad is because you can see where the error line is. It is in a file called getMapSearch.php - which is an incorrectly located include file. Include files really need to be out of the webserver public space - otherwise, if you accidentally misconfigure your server (like Facebook did in August this year), you can expose your core, proprietary, code (or things like database passwords etc). Opodo could also try using pre-compiled (encoded) PHP…. which absolutely stops code leaks in situations like server mis-configurations
4. This is really not very good for search engine optimisation - knowing how much companies like Opodo spend on SEO and online marketing - I am amazed that no one is picking up on this.

I am not trying to pick on Opodo specifically however these kinds of examples can really show us all how important good quality control is. People in marketing and web development teams need to understand each others jobs - and what kind of things to look out for when putting new functionality live.

These kinds of problems didn’t happen in the “old days” (I am a bit young to reminisce) - when a site of this size would be run be a small team of people - all with good all round experience. Now when you have hundreds of people responsible for a website - everyone only works in their own section - and never gets the full picture - and may never have actually worked in other areas.

For example, the person responsible for revenue management within Opodo is probably really happy that users can now navigate special offers easily. However they are probably scratching their heads wondering how competitors are reacting so quickly to their new offers!

Very interesting and informative article in The Register today about the European Union (EU) Unfair Commercial Practices Directive (going live in the UK in April 08, but rest of Europe from January 08). (Yes I really did just say “Very interesting” and law in the same sentence!). Read the full article

From a web perspective, areas that it will cover are:

• “Astroturfing” - for example paying bloggers to write positive statements about your company or product on their blogs (or negative about a competitor). This will now be illegal within Europe.
• Competitors writing reviews on product review websites while pretending to be a consumer. This will now be illegal within Europe
• Perhaps also writing anonymous comments on blogs - where there is some form of commercial impact. This may help Travolution who seem to be having fun and games with anonymous comments at the moment.
• Anywhere that a company falsely claims to be a consumer
• Perhaps also the couple of travel industry blogs - written semi-anonymously. If these are commercial blogs (they take advertising) then do they have to state who is writing them?

This won’t just cover companies but also individuals (who are technically “sole traders” when they add advertising to their websites)

I have once placed advertising with 3rd party bloggers as a form of astroturfing. I used the PayPerPost marketplace. I believe that in order to form an opinion on something it helps to try things first hand. Anyway, looks like that may be illegal now (when done without stating that the reason the blogger mentioned your product is because they were paid and the post is actually an advert). PayPerPost are a marmite company - you either love it or hate it.

The factor that will be used to determine whether a commercial practice is unfair will be based on the effect on the average consumer’s decision to buy. I assume this covers both a positive and negative effect.

Yeah yeah yeah - I am not a lawyer. If I was, I wouldn’t be giving advice via a blog.

Go and read the article on The Register - that really is written by a lawyer!

Lets say you run a website on behalf of a tour operator - and this website - much like most tour operator websites - focuses on describing, promoting and selling that operator’s travel products. This is what I call a “product website“.

However one aspect of running a product website is that you are constantly having to promote your website in order to ensure that people travelling to that part of the world appreciate that your website exists.

The alternative is to produce what I call a “research website“.

A research website is one where users come to first….. in order to understand more about the destination that they are travelling to. Once they have undertaken their research they will then enter “product evaluation and buying” mode - and your products, along with other products from other websites, will be considered.

Key points about research focussed websites:

• Users tend to share knowledge about the existence of websites that are informative (rather more than websites that sell product). For example - oh you are going to Greenland - have you seen this website? It is really good.
• Journalists, guide books and non-commercial websites like to link to (or mention) websites that don’t have a 100% commercial feel (people link to this blog for example, but we do commercial things on this website as well - but people still link because hopefully these blog postings have some value)
• Not every tour operator can have a leading “research website”. We know that users go from site to site during the product evaluation phase of their purchase - but they won’t go from research website to research website - unless the first ones they go to are not very informative. (FYI - I normally like to back these kinds of statements up with facts - but I don’t have any on this one - this is an intuition and judgement call). Incidentally, because not every tour operator can have a “best research website” title - there is a long term competitive advantage to getting a website into this state - as it is uneconomic for a competitor to replicate in the future.
• You will be better trusted as a destination expert.
• You may learn about products that you are not currently selling. For example many small tour operators who run guided tours don’t sell hotel only reservations for hotels in their area. This though is the market that many larger tour operators are only in - therefore there is demand for these products from consumers.
• Users will come back to your website again and again….. without you even having to remind them. Your website will become “bookmarkable”.
• Your website will rank better within search engines!
• Your user booking conversion percentages will go down. The question you will have to ask is would you prefer 4% conversion on 10,000 visitors or 2% on 30,000. I would go for the 2% on 30,000 - because I know I can monetise the other new visitors anyway. Besides 2% of 30,000 is a larger number of bookings! (OK - you have to be careful with conversion numbers if you are doing Pay Per Click - but apart from that - who really cares about this number anyway? I just care whether a user, on every visit, achieved what they came to the website for - if they came to find your telephone number - and they found the telephone number - that is a success)

I will cover what makes a good research website at some future time - this is a slightly tricky subject as it is destination specific although there are some good general ideas out there.

I also have to be fairly careful to not give away too many new ideas - unless someone else has done it first in which case I can report on what people are doing. (I give my good new ideas to clients in return for money!)

Today I thought I would try to get out my crystal ball and divine what the future of online travel may be in 5-10 years time. Scary thought….. and I will probably be wrong - but, hey, being wrong has never put me off in the past.

To start I thought that I needed to find some guidance on how to read my crystal ball - or crystallomancy as it is actually called. The best advice I found was:

• The images may not be very clear, especially at first. You may see shapes and silhouettes rather than sharp pictures.
• The most important thing to emphasise for a beginner is not to expect immediate results. It is not a TV.

Further information on how to read crystal balls

5 years ago

• Airline websites sold flights.
• Hotel chain websites sold hotel reservations.
• Tour operators sold holidays.
• Newspapers / magazines reviewed destinations and sometimes products. They had a strong revenue source from travel product advertising.
• Review websites published reviews (although there were only a few around)

Now

• Airline websites sell flights, hotels & car hire.
• Hotel chain websites sell hotels.
• Tour operators sell flights, hotels & car hire.
• Newspapers / magazines sell flights, hotels & car hire and have “reviews”. Much reduced income from travel product advertising due to falling subscriber numbers.
• Review websites sell flights, hotels & car hire

+2 years

Websites will be difficult to differentiate - they will all be the same and have the same product. It will be difficult to tell if a company started as an airline, a tour operator or even a newspaper. At this point the least profitable websites (and hence companies) will close down / merge because they won’t be able to keep up with the web design arms race.

• Airline websites sell flights, hotels & car hire - and have “reviews”
• Hotel chain websites….. er not sure
• Tour operators sell flights, hotels & car hire - and have “reviews”
• Newspapers / magazines will have reduced their travel website investments because they will get squeezed out (or maybe they could win because they have less overheads than traditional travel companies who will struggle to get rid of their excess staff quickly enough to compete effectively)
• Review websites (and destination information sites) will have all been purchased by suppliers or big travel companies (as a step to try to retain competitive advantage)

Tim Hughes suggests we are almost there already….. with the TripAdvisor recent launch looking just like an OTA.

+ 10 years

The industry will be moving away from HTML / page based web design towards rich websites that can be experienced fully from within your own home (rather than within your computer) - such as the successor to flash / flex or whatever turns out to win the technology battle a generation after that. Hence older HTML / page based websites that have been “hanging on” will suddenly require massive investment in order to retain position…… and it will be an investment that few companies will be in a position to make. This change in technology will force the change in the travel industry. Remember travel is about experiences…. so will need to stay at the forefront of this technology shift.

Large online travel agents will be the worst hit….. They will be “Amazonafied” - meaning that just one or two will remain. Who needs to find another book ordering website when you already have an account with Amazon and they deliver an acceptable service?

Second worst hit will be large tour operators that are mainly just reselling other people’s products. They will struggle to find sufficient “valued added” to differentiate themselves. The suppliers they have been working with for years will be moving to direct sell (companies that currently work as ground handlers or incoming tour operators will compete directly)

Airlines will go back to being airlines (however there will be little money in flights - as the money will be made on selling extras - which these airlines won’t be selling when sold via the OTAs). Hard times ahead financially although consumer demand will continue to increase so someone will solve this. (Probably one of the handful of vertically integrated online travel agents will own their own airline - and make that work profitably)

Meta search websites - this will be the next big area. In the world where you have a very small number of large travel websites (OTAs) (2-5) the meta search websites will be powerful (like Google is powerful for search today, without actually selling you the product). These metasearch websites will list hotels (who won’t need to be in chains because they can be found through these metasearch websites without having to be part of a larger group), tours (from tour operators who don’t need distribution now, except to these meta search companies), flights, car hire etc. They will form a single shopping experience which, when coupled with a “single industry payment service” such as that launched by Amadeus recently, may compete with the remaining OTAs. However I expect there will be a number of niche meta search websites….. focused around industry segment, destination, activity etc…. Meta search companies will be what replaces medium sized tour operators with their product specialisations. Don’t rely on the fact that there will be thousands of these companies. The technology will be too expensive…. I expect 20-100 of these companies to exist in the world….

Small tour operators - will continue as usual. Will thrive as through removal of marketing issues they will be able to focus on providing great products and services. Metasearch companies will assist small tour operators. Look out for more entrepreneurs here.

Travel technology - collapsed as an industry. In an industry with less large travel companies - who is going to support the required research & development to remain competitive? If there are only 5 companies that need systems, then will there need to be 50 system providers?

Did I miss out travel agents? Yes. I get grief each time I mention that they are doomed….. and I thought I would save myself the bother this time. If you are an agent - jump onto the meta search bandwagon. This is pretty much what you do already right now - except you need to throw technology at the problem not people. Meta search companies will be just like agents - except legally they won’t be selling product - so they will be more like today’s affiliates than today’s agents.

Lastly
One of the problems with projections like this is that they can become self fulfilling. By that I mean that because we think something is going to happen - we make plans for our own companies taking into account the eventuality that it will take place as expected. Once all these plans are in action in multiple companies the initial proposal occurs naturally. Therefore I would suggest you question my projections very carefully. I am not an industry expert by any means. I just do web design & development!

Its not often that I read articles on travel industry news websites where I disagree as strongly as I have done today.

Mind you, its not often that anyone publishes anything vaguely interesting about travel ecommerce on any travel industry news website (it is all technology company product news - or news about travel products - which frankly I don’t need to fill my brain with) - so I don’t get much opportunity to agree or disagree with anything. (oh gawd, I see this post is going the wrong way already) (on a side note - if you talk to the web or system teams within large travel companies -  none of them read either the physical trade press nor online travel industry news sites - and Travolution doesn’t even penetrate very well - none of these media are relevant to their jobs - although Travolution would be a good read if they knew about it….)

Today TravelMole have published a report by Jeremy Skidmore, a well respected UK / Australia / US travel industry journalist that I have shared a stage with at a conference a while back. He normally talks a lot of sense. The title of their article - “Learn how to sell or fail” (registration required).

In the article Jeremy is reporting from the Elite travel group conference in Jerez (Elite are a consortium of UK travel agents). Most of what he has written is in quotes.

Lets get to the beef.

Travel agents are in a sales industry and if they do not learn how to sell, they will be left behind, delegates were told.

In an entertaining presentation, Beachcomber Tours UK sales manager Sarah Archer used videos to portray how life had changed for agents and warned they needed to move with the times.

“Direct sell tour operators are a big threat to traditional travel agents and tour operators because they are offering the same product for a lower price, so how do you beat them?,” she asked.

“You face up to the challenge. You must sell and get sales training for your staff. Use your experience and high level of customer service. Learn how to judge your clients’ body language and what to say to make a sale.  

Why do I consider this to be so wrong? It is like going into a candlestick factory and doing a “time and motion” study. Yes - you may end up designing a more efficient candlestick factory…. but what you ought to be doing is moving to selling lightbulbs!

My theory (that I have been pushing for a few years) is that there is a core difference between a travel agent and a tour operator.

In essence a travel agent (especially a high street one, or one working with a selected list of customers) has the full attention of one customer at any one time. Their challenge is to find an appropriate product for that individual customer. Hence travel agent systems are about “search” and “sales”. They need to have access, via technology, to multiple product providers - so if someone comes in wanting a villa in Turkey or a trip to Las Vegas they can sell it…. if that is what that individual customer wants.

In reverse, a tour operator has a shortlist of product. Maybe they only sell trips to Las Vegas. They have a marketing challenge…. because the challenge is to find customers who want to go to Las Vegas. They have to find customers that match their product. This is the reverse mentality to travel agents. Its a marketing problem.

So, yes, travel agents can survive (maybe) - but not by getting better at selling (and it is patronising to agents to tell them that to survive they need to get better at selling - because normally they are pretty damm good already). What they need to be focussing on is creating environments where customers can buy from them and getting the right customers to visit these environments (it could be a website, a shop, a call centre etc). They need to learn to market not learn to sell.

Oh well, I guess I won’t be asked to speak at any travel agent conferences in the near future….

Any more rants like this - and I will probably have to go and write for Travel Rants!

Online travel has evolved to be significant within the industry and has evened up the marketplace for consumers - you can now find large and small travel companies willing to sell to customers direct - some based in a customer’s own country, some based in their destination country.

However I was asked a travel related question by a client a couple of days ago and I couldn’t think where on the web I would go to ask it…..

The question I was asked was:

We currently run minibus trips based in the UK - but travelling around Europe. We are a small company and we use a supplier with a couple of minibuses. We are looking into growing our operations beyond what our current supplier can handle - do you know anyone with Europe based minibuses that can provide drivers / leaders?

To me this looks like the classic case of needing a wide network of travel industry contacts that can be used to ask, and hopefully find, an answer. This is exactly the kind of contact book that small tour operators (meaning those with less than 20 staff) don’t naturally have but should be possible to find on the web….

A couple of thoughts:

• The question could be asked via Linkedin - would that work?
• There may be an existing forum, website or email group that supports this kind of discussion (but if there is, it hasn’t come across my radar)
• Do industry bodies keep track of what products / services companies offer - and what are needed - and therefore who could be “matched” (a bit like a dating service)?

So - do you know where someone could go to get this question answered?

This may be a business opportunity as there is a potential business need to match small tour operators with potential suppliers. The ideal solution would be web based in order to reach out to all the small companies it would need to in order to reach critical mass.

In recent times much travel technology investment (including websites) has tended to be in the large travel company sector. This is probably because there is a defined business need - and the number of clients to reach critical mass remains fairly low. In the small tour operator world you need many small clients in order to have sustainable business whereas for larger travel technology companies you just need a few, but high booking volume, clients.

However, for someone willing to give this a go - you could build a solution around this business problem as highlighted above…. unless someone has got there first…. (in which case comment below!)