Travel Weekly Blog

Three points

1] The large travel companies (tour operators etc) (excluding the online only companies) have an online channel vs offline channel % approximately the same / only just lower than UK broadband penetration (both in the 40-60% range)

Hence they wouldn't get ROI from investment in online booking as their web booking % is unlikely to be higher than UK broadband penetration. Only the suppliers who have gone online only have a higher % of transactions online.

All the investment now is in online marketing.... advertising, content sites, communities, social media.... as that is where you can make your money stretch further. Unfortunately it is also more sexy to suggest a social project than a booking engine overhaul.... its like the old criticism of developers who use a new technology in their solutions in order to learn that technology (rather than because the project required it)

2] Personally I blame Apple. They have set the bar SO high in terms of consumer expectation on how things could / should work - that anything else in comparison looks weak.

3] When I started out in travel ecommerce we did most aspects ourselves - design, marketing, content, project management, technology choices etc. Now at the larger companies there are teams of people each with their own dedicated responsibilities. i.e. someone doing PPC marketing is unlikely to also do backend technology. This has created many people who don't have a fully rounded view of what it takes to succeed in travel ecommerce as they have not been exposed to all aspects. Means that there is a lot less room for individual visionaries within the larger companies - and teams of people each with only a sub-set of skills end up designing by committee and creating a mess.

Great comments Alex, thanks.

On point 1 - surely one of the aims of improving the online booking process is to bring down the proportion of sales that are never completed (the people that give up in frustration). So you'd potentially see some ROI from it? Though whether it would be enough to justify investment is another question.

For all my blogging and Twittering, I agree that it's 'unfortunate' SM can be weighted over an engine overhaul. All the marketing work in the world is no good if the people you drive to your site give up in the middle of a booking.

I think the general rule of thumb for many of us (by which I mean internet savvy travellers) is to book online for the simple stuff, and use a travel agent for the complex stuff. I'll use flight here, as tours and hotels aren't really as variable and complex...

Round-the-world flights is a classic example. There have been attempts to create online booking engines for these on line, but none are satisfactory. Far easier to phone someone up and get them to battle through all the permutations.

Not everyone knows where to look though, and those who don't book travel regularly are likely to be bewildered by the sheer amount of choice. Using a travel agent cuts out the noise.

Frustration comes from the inability to deal with those who are very flexible; finding the flight advertised for £xyz can be a needle in a haystack job. The mindset is still fixed on people wanting to fly to a definite destination on definite dates. Price matrixes and the likes of Skyscanner go some way to solving this, but most of the time it's a case of continually entering dates in a trial and error method.

The golden goose (at least for me) is to be able to produce a booking engine that can list the flights by price, rather than date. If Johnny Airline has a limited amount of seats available for £xyz, I want to be able to click on that price, with it giving me a list of dates when it is available. From there I can pick the one that suits me most.

It's even harder for RTW flights due to the high level of customisation. I don't know the technology enough to know what the best solution is in terms of online booking - and until someone can make it simple to get the best deal for my almost unreasonable needs, I'll bug a long-suffering travel agent and make them go through hundreds of potential combinations.

On point 1, the question is what happens if the online booking process is found lacking.

If the likely outcome is that the customer gets on the phone (or goes to a travel agent) and books the same product...... this is just a channel loss - and the ROI on it is very different to where the customer goes and buys a different (but comparable) product from a competitor.

If you are just measuring return based on channel efficiency (online vs travel agent / phone) there is less R of the ROI (after a certain point of online sales) to make online booking investments worthwhile (currently)

Thats a very good analysis Alex. It is more evident in the flights reservation side of travel business. Almost a good 30% of our retail travel clients are those who already have checked their fares online. Later they simply call us or visit our office and buy it from us. Most of the times the online quotes of our competitors are matched by us. A lot of our clients are willing to pay a bit more as far as they have someone to talk to. To summarise, a lot of online bookings are partly attempted only to determine the going rates. That information is used to ensure they are not paying too much to their local agents. With tight margins and high advertisement expenses, how can an online agent justify their investment on ecommerce?

We supply online booking software for the self catering industry. The major problem most property owners have come accross is that most software is not flexible enough to handle all the different possibilities. A simple example most booking engines cannot handle this scenario. you want to discount a mid week stay but you have a min night stay policy of 2 nights. By discounting the nightly rate over the 5 potential nights you leave yourself open to someone sneaking in and booking a 2 night stay ;which after fixed costs will leave you worse off.
Until all booking engines can be flexible enough to handle as many possibilities as the apartment owner can think of online booking in this industry will be slow to penetrate the mass of current non participants.