In Rohit Bhargava ‘s Blog , Influentail Interactive, on the post “The Future of the Online Travel Industry”, he brings up some important points about how the online travel industry has developed and is being challenged by chanes in the in the industry and how people shop for travel.
the opportunity for any of the many competitors in this space is increasingly concentrated in two areas:1. Corporate travel (exclusive deals, recurring sales, full price tickets, etc.)
2. Package deals (last minute deals, book everything at once, specials)The big three know this. Each has last minute deals and dedicated corporate travel areas. Yet amidst all these challenges, there is hope in the fact that the passion for travel and travel deals is strong and driving the popularity of consumer driven discussion sites such as FlyerTalk. The site has thousands of posts from travellers helping others, trading discount certificates, and talking about customer service experiences. TripAdvisor is one of the most frequently trafficked sites from search engines due to its high rankings for just about any location or hotel-based keyword search. Each of these sites is hugely influential because they feature real voices sharing real insights.
My view is that the opportunity in the online travel industry is for a single travel site to emerge as the authority in pulling these two types of sites together, to follow a user through from browsing to buying.
It will be interesting to watch how online travel services change and evolve. I’ll be talking more about this soon.