OCTO Connectivity Standards

Industry Standards are everywhere. You don’t think about it in everyday life, but they make almost everything around you work, much of which would be almost impossible without them.?

Language and currency might be the most obvious. But it's everywhere. Your keyboard, electricity and cables, the internet, the pipes, wires, wood or bricks in your house. I could list 100 without breaking a sweat. I won’t.?

The example probably most often used is railroad gauges (tracks). I just read the history of standard-gauge railway tracks. I wouldn’t recommend it. Save that 20 mins for something more productive like TikTok.

It’s mostly the fault of entrepreneurs. When new inventions pop up, early entrepreneurs are in a race to differentiate their products and get market share.?

It's no different in travel. The first travel seller, TravelCo1 comes along and sells a City Bus Tour - offering an Adult or a Child ticket. TravelCo2 thinks they’re cleverer than that, and they come up with a ‘Senior’ ticket. TravelCo3 thinks they’ll go a step further and add options - so a morning tour with a coffee, and an afternoon with an ice cream. TravelCo4 says we’ll do all of the above and allow customers to add some popcorn, one size for kids and one for adults.

This is all happening just on the “Unit” or “Passenger” variable, but the same happens across all parts of the product information and the booking process as everybody tries to get ahead of their competitors. Each iteration usually breaks everything that was built on the previous one.

It goes on for years, and across hundreds and thousands of companies, each trying to get ahead, and each with no short-term incentive to think about the benefit to the industry as a whole.

Eventually, distribution of all of these products just gets impossibly complicated (2022). The market leaders are (mistakenly) happy with the situation. It’s expensive to maintain the mess of connections and things are constantly breaking, but the complexity also keeps the competitors away. To enter the market in a meaningful way, a reseller has to spend hundreds or thousands of developer hours just to start with a good enough selection of connected products.

In travel Experiences, there are hundreds of ‘connected’ resellers, each connecting to a few dozen of the 100-200 ResTechs and direct to operators. Each connection is built one-to-one.

This is a terrible situation for an industry to find itself.

1. Companies are so focused on maintaining connectivity with their products that they have no time for innovation - things which actually benefit customers (which increases profit)
2. The market leaders feel like their deep connectivity is a differentiator, so they focus on protecting that rather than improving their product.
3. New entrants don’t enter the market, because it's just too complicated (expensive). There are thousands of resellers who would love to get connected if things were simple.?

- Hotels are a great example. All hotels should be selling all local travel experiences. They don’t, aside from concierges largely working with a handful of direct products in each market, and it's mostly offline. We all know hotels should be the most important distribution channel, both for pre-arrival and in-destination sales.

- Platforms and Companies like Uber and Amazon should be selling experiences. So should Walmart and Ebay. I could go on.

- And then we have Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and Tiktok. All of them are ideal platforms to sell travel experiences, but all of them need to keep customers within their apps, and without simple connectivity, it's never going to happen.

The solution, of course is a set of standards. Simple, and well designed, covering all of the basics so that connections can be simplified, and costs to maintain connectivity can be slashed. All those newly out-of-work developers and connectivity managers can then be repurposed to build things that actually help customers. Stuff that moves them ahead and expands the market, rather than just maintain outdated connections just for the sake of it.

There are so many great ideas out there, which haven’t come to fruition. So many start-ups in the space don't make it, because its just too difficult to get to a minimum viable product.

The point of all of this is to create a bigger pie, and re-energize innovation. We all know that Experiences is the most important part of travel (vs. Hotels, Air and all that other nonsense), but until the sector makes it easier to operate in, the focus will remain elsewhere.

The good news is that the solution is here. The industry has come together to form OCTO. You can join today.

See the Press Release for more info, and reach out if you’d like to chat about it.