Booking Your Vacation in 2020.
How did you book your last vacation to a place you’d never been before?
- You decided you were going to spend $X for the trip.
- You searched for a flight on any one of the hundreds of flight booking sites.
- You searched and found a flight that worked
- You filled out the forms on the webpages and booked the flight.
- The site offered you hotel options and prices.
- You opened a new tab to check out what other customers had to say about the hotels on TripAdvisor.
- You realized you had spent 30 minutes reading horror stories.
- You decided to book the first hotel your gut ‘suggested’ in the first place.
- You filled out the forms on the webpages and booked the hotel.
- You then spent a few hours every day for the next week or so figuring out what activities you would do on the trip. You looked at pictures, read blog posts and discussed with friends.
- You found some activities and filled out the forms with the same information as you had on every other site and booked the activities.
- You forgot you hadn’t figured out transport while on your holiday! Drats! You decided you’d wing transport. There is always a cab within an arm stretch and a wave.
Time spent = 12-15 hours spread out over the course of a few weeks.
But what has changed since we stopped using travel agents? What has changed since that model was disrupted (unbundled) by websites like Expedia, Tripadvisor, travelocity, Hotels.com etc.? We now have
- Rich and open information, in the form of pictures/video/text/speech/real time feeds, on almost every tourist destination in the world. Prices for flights, airline schedules and travel restrictions are also available online.
- There is a LOT of information about you online. Your pictures, pictures of you tagged by friends, comments you’ve made on topics and issues you were passionate about, information on your home purchase including location and demographic data for you/your neighborhood. All that information is also easily tagged to information on the preferences of your friends and family and classmates etc.
- Cognitive computers and machine learning algorithms that can retrieve all this information, draw correlations and determine feasible and delightful outcomes. In seconds.
So what does all that change mean for booking your family vacation in 2020?
- You tell Alexa (or a similar device) to ‘book us a family holiday to Marrakech’. Or you type the same request into a single website or app.
- Alexa digs through your individual calendars, school schedules, bank balance and bill payment history to determine funds availability, flight prices, flight schedules, hotel prices and availability, discounts, weather projections, travel advisory, uber availability patterns, food and tourist notifications, news, Airbnb availability, historic pricing and availability information to predict best time to book, your health records, health insurance restrictions and options etc and a host of other services.
- Alexa tells you the 2 or 3 options that s/he’s found.
- You respond with ‘Book option 3’.
- Alexa books Option 3 because she has your 'vacation fund' account details.
- Alexa sends you an itinerary and you’re ready to have a great time in Morocco!
We're back where we were 15 years ago. Only now we have virtual travel agents. This is already here and it is the natural cycle of industries/business to bundle and unbundle. We just passed the unbundling phase of the travel industry. With the exponential growth in computing power and machine learning we are about to enter the bundling phase.
See you in Marrakech in 2020!
Seyi Fabode is a VP at the Clean Energy Trust. He focuses on and writes about technology, energy and innovation and their impact on the life of the average person. Read more at SeyiFabode.com and tweets @Seyi_Fab. Comment, follow and share articles freely.
Principal Data Scientist at The Kraft Heinz Company
9 年Hi Seyi, I liked your predictions, they make sense from the technology perspective, but I think they are missing out on the human psychology component. The vacation is something personal, that people get excited about, and they often want to play a bigger part in the decision making process. Another major component of the vacation experience, at the opposite end of the customer acquisition funnel that you described, is the vacation experience itself. My prediction, complementary to yours, is that the services offered to people on vacation will expand beyond the location, amenities, and entertainment, into the social dimension. I have developed my startup, https://VacationMingler.com around this idea of making vacations more memorable by facilitating for vacation goers, the discovery of people with similar interests, whose company they will enjoy a immensely. It’s not all about the destination, or the path to get there, it’s also about who is accompanying you along the way (this sounds like marriage advice - I know). I’m curious to hear what you think.