The problem of Travel

The problem of Travel

When I wrote that I am leaving the Travel industry, I mentioned that it has changed in the last 10 years and moved from a “what problem should we solve” state, to being very much aligned on the problem space. I should probably expand on this and explain why that is, and why this creates a problem.

What do we talk about when we talk about Travel?

From the customer view, this can mean any number of activities and needs - all related to their trip. We often talk about the different phases of the Travel journey:

Dreaming - Planing - Booking - Experiencing - Reminiscing

The activities here will revolve around collaboration, searching, making decisions, tracking prices, asking for advice, making lists, booking, making changes, taking a flight, etc.? Note that this covers a huge space, and often spans a significant amount of time (from first inclination to travel, till returning home).?

The commercial view is somewhat different. When we talk about Travel, most people roughly divide the space into the following rough verticals: Air Travel (flights), Accommodation (Hotels, B&B, AirBnB, etc.), Ground Transportation (rental cars, trains, taxi, ride hailing, etc.), Dining and Tours & Activities.?

Together they define what most people will need for most of their trips and will end up spending money on.?

Back in 2010, tools existed for all of the different needs - some were early and rough (Uber was only a year old, AirBnB was a year out of YC), some were well established but didn’t adjust to the mobile world. Many tools and products were very local, which is one of the main barrier for international travel. And so, there was a lot of “white space” for teams to tackle all stages and needs, on a new platform. And they all did. The 2011 winners of PhocusWright Innovator covered the gamut - from voice technology (Eva, acquired by booking), through Hipmunk (a new Flight search) to gtrot (social-local-mobile, the buzzword of 2011). Essentially, it was about applying new technology to all the problems.

Fast forward to ca. 2018, and almost every vertical has a well established cohort of products, all available to customers at their fingertip, all available globally. That was the point the industry, which for years focused on unbundling, went back to it’s previous model - bundling. Specifically, everyone in the industry asked themselves “how can I solve *all* of those problems, at once”. At once.

The user problem is obvious - planning a trip still takes a significant amount of time, and requires using a number of tools. Any of your favorite flight search engine (Google flight, right?), your favorite accommodation search (Booking.com or AirBnB, depending on the destination and travel type), taxi booking, a “things-to-do” tool - you end up with likely a handful of apps, none of them support half decent collaboration and without a shred of interoperability. There is a clear user need for something better, but it can’t come at the expense of the coverage, convenience and price competitiveness of any of those excellent tools you already know and love.

And therein lies the problem - each of the companies mentioned above (and many more) have spent a decade building something that works really well. Booking.com excels in Hotel search and has a formidable coverage, and an amazing customer support team. Google Flights has fantastic UX and is backed by unique technology that makes it ultra fast (and along the way enables a set of unique features). AirBnB has exploded a niche segment (non-hotel accommodation). GetYourGuide defined the Tours & Activities. And now they all want to build that unicorn, magical, “One tool to rule them all” solution. At Google we called it One Travel, at Booking it is the Connected Trip. Regardless the name, there exist a shared ?δ?α.?

So, how do you go about building the Connected Trip if you are Booking and have an excellent Hotels product (with unparalleled breadth and depth) or if you are Google and have a unique Flight Search product?

The answer in both of those cases (and I imagine it’s the same for Trip.com, Expedia and AirBnB) is the same - “build all the other verticals and then connect them all together”. The way you go about it is different if you are Booking (acquire, partner) or Google (build all the things), but the challenges are the same:

• Patience - it takes time to build a great product in a new vertical. Google Flights was an overnight success…. Five years in the making (and building on a couple of decades of expertise and technology acquired from ITA Software).?
• “Integration” is not a way to build a product - unless you start from a clear vision of how the end product looks like, you will likely build (or acquire) a number of product that are incompatible and the end results shows more seams than surfaces (this topic likely deserves a post of it’s own)

My conclusion at this time is that the “One tool to rule them all” is not in sight. It is inconceivable that a new entrant will start from the end product, and manage to build all the missing parts for a wonderful cohesive experience in which each of the components is even a fighting distance from the best in class. It is equally unlikely that any of the incumbents will manage to build all the missing pieces and create a great user experience.?

Lastly, what kind of company could actually solve the Travel problem??

It needs to be a company that is not shy about investing in operations - Travel is messy, the space is naturally embedded in the physical world, which means that a mix of tools and human labor is needed to build a thorough dataset for any of those verticals, and handle the real world problems that occur (and not having a way to support your customer when they arrive late in the evening to their accommodation and find out that it is closed/full/not at all what they ordered is killer).

It equally needs to be a company that doesn't measure everything through a commercial lens. There are parts of the user journey that don’t lead to conversion (or hard to measure), there are user needs that are non-commercial by definitions (information needs, collaboration), and within some vertials there is an inherent tension between commercial and non-commercial information (e.g. recommending a visit to a public park may be the best option for some users, though it can’t be monetized).

I can think of only one company that could, maybe, cover both of those equally well, and luckily for all of the existing incumbents, that company has not yet decided to enter the Travel space seriously.?