The Woolworths question: should the trade worry about non-travel distributors?
April 10, 2008
Competition from outside the travel sector has been on the trade's mind for years, so it's interesting to read that three out of bed bank hotelconnect.com's seven top distributors are non-travel.
Hotelconnect.com's commercial manager spoke of 'gaps in the distribution channel' and said that agents who fail to promote city breaks are 'driving clients into the arms of aggregation sites' - with obvious effects on commission.
In recent years white label deals have made it easy for generalist retail brands to slap their logo on existing travel technology. See for instance:
It's been said before, but retail and media face some similar challenges, as the internet continues to disrupt their traditional reliance on one channel (the high street and print respectively).
Here in the meeja we distribute through our own print and online properties. We send out email products. We syndicate content through RSS feeds, podcast and video directories and so on. We use social networks and micro-blogging services such as Twitter. We're sweating channels (and yes, it stings a bit).
What causes that analogy to break down is that content producers like us control the multitude of channels, while agents are one of the channels and have to compete with the rest.
But - without wishing to sound like Alan Sugar - that's business. New guys will always come onto the scene, and the way to beat them will always be to have a better proposition, well marketed.
And that brings us back to familiar themes: going for niche, yield-over-volume business; providing personal touches; getting product training. The stuff, in short, that Woolworths could never do...
Nathan Midgley, web producer
Nathan Midgley
Martin Couzins
