Online travel booking sites are talking a lot these days about the ‘connected trip’ as the key piece for the future of online travel agencies, and a way to fight back against both Google’s increasing reach and direct sales pushes by hotels and airlines.
What the leaders of Booking, Expedia and others are talking about is taking responsibility for a client’s whole trip, and making it work somehow. If the flight to Paris is delayed so that you’ll miss the dinner reservation, or the onward flight, it’s up to them to rearrange all the other pieces to minimize or avoid the damage. If it sounds a bit like what old-fashioned travel agents did, especially the big ones, it’s no coincidence.
What’s driving the push is a big squeeze on an industry that got very big, very fast, and left lots of smaller companies on the sidelines. Not enough anymore to sell cheap plane tickets; the major sites sell everything, including hotels, tours, car rentals.
And online searches represent a large part of how they get customers. Being high up the list in a Google search is important, and valuable enough to pay for in many cases. And now, Google itself has become the big competition. First it began helpfully highlighting all your reservation info, scraped from Gmail, in your calendar, your inbox, and now in Google Maps. And the Google travel search tools consistently come higher in the search list.
At the same time, hotels and airlines have pushed customers to book directly, promising best rates and various other inducements; that way they keep for themselves the commission that would go to the agency. But, as Booking CEO Glenn Fogel told Skift, you can’t expect United to change your dinner reservation if your plane is stuck on the tarmac.
His take: “If you ever had a flight you had to change, then you have to change the pickup at the airport, you have to change your restaurant reservation because you’re not going to land in time to actually make that business dinner that you were planning to make. Those things that we can do ourselves in the future in this connected trip seamlessly, frictionlessly, now create a much better experience that will build the loyalty, that will have people come back to us direct. That’s the win.”
We’ll all be waiting to see how this works out.
