Trip Planner puts the cat amongst the pigeons. And the pigeons in the air conditioning
October 27, 2005
This blog has a natural leaning towards the travel business (for example, this and this ). Maybe I’ll just hand it over to that sector permanently.
Yesterday, Rohit Bhargava, vice-pres, at Ogilvy PR, riffed on the future of the online travel business.
He talked about the competition faced by the major online travel players, the rise of aggregator sites and the importance of the emotive network sites I mentioned earlier.
He sees a huge opportunity for a single travel site, encompassing both user content and ticketing (I paraphrase) and wonders:
An OTA [Online Travel Agent] focused on including real voices of consumers to review hotel properties, share deals and frequent flier tips, and even trade discount certificates … what would that look like? It’s an intriguing possibility, and one that I think will describe the online travel sites which are still around after a few years.
No sooner had Rohit’s post popped into my aggregator than I went for a long and enjoyable coffee break with Fergus Burns of Nooked where we talked, amongst other things, about the value of consumer feedback and how desirable it becomes when you are researching travel and leisure products.
But what’s this? Just a few hours later, the blogosphere is abuzz with talk of Yahoo!’s latest travel feature (here, but still in beta).
Trip Planner is a new tool that helps you organize your travel research from Yahoo! Travel and all over the Web to a trip plan. Save hotels, attractions, and useful web sites into your trip plan, then add your own notes, tags, driving directions and more.
And here’s the really significant part as far as I am concerned.
When you’re done, you can share your trip with a few friends or with the entire Yahoo! Travel community.
In other words, travellers looking for recommendations can follow precisely in your footsteps while avoiding the same pot holes, steering clear of the rotten hotels you discovered and giving rip-off tourist traps a wide berth.
The major online travel agencies can not afford to ignore the significance of this. Offline travel agencies, which partly exist to steer the wary vacationer through unfamiliar territory, should be thoroughly alarmed. And individual travel suppliers must also pay hawk-like attention.
The more closely consumer feedback becomes knitted into the purchasing experience, the clearer the threat of reputation damage to the bottom line. If you are providing a less-than-stellar service.
I had a quick look at some of the Yahoo! travel itineraries this morning and it didn’t take long to track down this gem about a hotel in California.
The shower turned cold after 5 minutes, pigeons nested in the wall air conditioning unit, and the room shook whenever they started the laundry…I will never stay here again and will never recommend this hotel to anyone.
Now, thanks to emotive networks and the rise of services such as Yahoo!’s Trip Planner, she can actively dissuade future customers from across the globe from ever setting foot through that door. .
Comments
2 Responses to “Trip Planner puts the cat amongst the pigeons. And the pigeons in the air conditioning”
Great point Neil - efforts like Yahoo’s are giving each of us a chance to have the insider knowledge of places from a “friend” who’s been there before. Add in the ability Yahoo offers to tag photos of hotel properties you have uploaded into Flickr, and it’s easy to see how this could fast become the #1 resource for online travel information seekers. Looks like the old days of the misleading hotel brochure or website with artistically retouched photos may soon be over …
Great point Neil - efforts like Yahoo’s are giving each of us a chance to have the insider knowledge of places from a “friend” who’s been there before. Add in the ability Yahoo offers to tag photos of hotel properties you have uploaded into Flickr, and it’s easy to see how this could fast become the #1 resource for online travel information seekers. Looks like the old days of the misleading hotel brochure or website with artistically retouched photos may soon be over …