The Rise of the Online Vacation Agency

http://blog.kangacruise.com/2012/10/the-rise-of-the-online-vacation-agency/

by kmax12 • 14 years ago

42 13 14 years ago

blog.kangacruise.com

Author here. This is a somewhat of a follow on to another article, "Innovation in the Cruise industry... Where is it?" that you might also find interesting: http://blog.kangacruise.com/2012/09/innovation-in-the-cruise...

Happy to get a little more into the specifics if anyone's interested. It took us a long time to get out of the "better ui, kill the travel agent" mindset that's prevalent among travel startups. The greater complexity of vacation sales really seems to throw most of the precedent set by online travel agencies (Expedia) and meta-searches (Kayak) out the window.

aed• 14 years ago

Colin - this is awesome and I just recently began working on an idea based on many of the same observations you've made. Just shot you an email to the contact@ address!

jph• 14 years ago

I love this idea and fully agree with it. My friends are currently planning a vacation for a large group of us, which involves flights, hotels, and events, as well as coming up with options for a range of budgets, interests, and family needs like child care. Online vacation agencies would be a huge help and well worth paying IMHO.

tstegart• 14 years ago

Are you sure people don't book a vacation online? It seems the weakest part of the argument. I booked my last vacation almost completely online, albeit from different vendors. The flight was booked online, then the hotel (also online), and finally my car, online. The only time I've used a travel agent is when I travel to places that aren't online, such as Kenya, where I needed a local agent to find a driver and map out a route.

enjo• 14 years ago

They cited numbers, and I tend to believe them. Particularly for certain segments (like cruises). We booked a cruise in 2011 and it most definitely required an agent. There are just to many options and to much to weed through, the agents (who are free for me to use even) are just too easy for such a vacation.

I'm not even sure this is something that needs to be disrupted. My experience with actual people for booking these things has been fantastic. It's low stakes and relatively easy...I'm not sure online is better.

fooandbarify• 14 years ago

If you look at the linked report it says that online segments are growing in all of air, rail, car rentals and hotels--"vacations" are just not growing as a segment online. I think what tstegart might be saying is that it's not obvious which aspects of "vacation" are left, when all of those pieces can be booked individually.

I agree with regard to whether or not this needs to be disrupted--I do some work for a local travel agency and the level of service they provide is remarkable (it would be very difficult for me to save money by booking the same trips myself online, without even accounting for the time it would take me).

malandrew• 14 years ago

I'd love to see something for longer trips that can be modified on the fly. I've done three 1-month long trips in my life where I went from city to city. They required a lot of planning and research, but often while traveling you'd learn of new options and have to quickly plan to incorporate those experiences into your current itinerary. Being able to quickly adjust your itinerary of a multi-hop vacation while en route would be nice.

Related to this would be a nearest neighbor point of interest discovery tool. Often its easy to find what is interesting to do in a particular location, but its much more difficult to explore options that are a day trip to an overnight trip away from that anchor point. My experience has been that the day trips or overnight trips with a return to the origin point at the most memorable.

Some examples:

-- Vacationing in Praia do Forte in Bahia, but taking a day trip to Mangue Seco.

-- Passing through São Luis do Maranhão and taking a three day trip to Barreirinhas, and from Barreirinhas, taking a day trip to Lençois Maranheses.

-- Day trip to Interloken from Zürich (I wish we had done an overnight trip, but we didn't plan on that and missed out)

-- Day trip from Amsterdam to a spa by the beach (unlike the other three, this one was not worth it and I wish I had known that before)

At the end of the day a great vacation often resembles a bunch of nodes in a graph, with edges being formed on the basis of financial cost, time cost and value of that destination/activity/hotel/restaurant to me. Find me the best route between node A and node B in the graph that maximizes happiness (According to my criteria) while minimizing cost and travel time.

Another reason it's valuable for this to be centralized is that it avoids the issue of being sent to some boring activity or place because you don't know that the local person may be recommending a venue on the basis that its his brother or cousins business. This happens surprisingly often.

unreal37• 14 years ago

I haven't used a travel agent in about 10 years, and I vacation 2-3 times a year. Not sure how they can justify that vacations are not booked online. In fact, no one asks me when I am booking a flight or hotel online whether it is for business or vacation...

I guess if you are looking into pre-packaged resorts, where its a charter plane, resort, and even airport transfers included (Transat Vacations, Sunwing Vacations, etc) then maybe that's true that people still us agents for those... I still see agents advertising those in malls.

But I bet that segment of the market is declining year over year for the past 10 years. So yes, its a low percentage of a shrinking market.

As for cruises, the market is still overwhelmingly older and retired people[1]. Another market it will be hard to disrupt with technology.

Not to be all pessimistic, but there's a reason things are the way they are I guess.

[1] http://www.cruisemarketwatch.com/market/

dagw• 14 years ago

The market that I still see isn't pre-packaged, but custom packaged. When you have 7 people flying from 3 different air ports, need reservations various restaurant for three evenings and tickets to particular sporting event. Companies that can fix all that and more with one super efficient point of contact still offer value that many people are willing to pay extra for.

Agent99• 14 years ago

I’ve booked family cruise vacations each of the last 5 years. Each year I’ve done all the research online including deciding on point of departure, cruise line and the specific ship on sites such as expedia, vacations to go, and the individual cruise line websites. Despite this online research, I still book with a travel agent because they seem able to match or beat online prices, book multiple rooms near each other, and sometimes obtain larger room credits. If it were possible to accomplish all of the above without an agent at a lower cost I would do so.

abhimir• 14 years ago

You guys might want to check out cruisewise.com, they have been doing something very similar

Tichy• 14 years ago

To me planning holidays is hell. How do you come up with places to travel to? So I think this makes sense, naturally I think about it every time I have to plan a new vacation.

fingerprinter• 14 years ago

Two thoughts

1. I worked for a cruise booking company (a deplorable company and industry, just FYI, but that is a story for another day). I wrote their systems for integrating with Sabre and then the UI. The industry just plain sucks. The scams, the "discounts", the different prices. Not to mention that getting the data is a nightmare (it might have changed, I've been out of that for some time now). I honestly felt terrible about what I did nearly everyday. There was always "another tweak" to get more money out of the customer, some additional fee or service charge. It was unbelievable.

I don't know kangacruise and I wish them luck. I hope they can wade through the crap industry and make a nice experience that gets the user a fair price.

2. In the past 5 years I've taken at least 3 vacations a year plus at least 10-15 business trips. Conservatively, say 35 trips, many of them international. Not once did I consult a travel agent. I considered it once for a more involved trip, but when I saw that they weren't really bringing much to the table, I left and did it all myself. It wasn't hard. Perhaps having to loop in three different sites is annoying, but unless there was an overly compelling reason to use a travel agent, I wouldn't even consider it.

At this point in time, I feel travel agents are mostly for older folks or someone with more money than sense. I don't know if you can actually create a market (yes, I feel you would have to create it...it wouldn't form naturally) which is always an uphill battle.

The Rise of the Online Vacation Agency

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