Are you Afraid Yet?

Google purchases ITA?

Who cares.  We’re travel agents.   We know our clients and offer them personalized service.  They’ll never book online.

Why should you care?

Because now it’s official.  There is going to be a major shift in the way the majority of travel is sold….and you’re not going to be part of it.

And if you’re not at least a little bit worried about that, then I suspect you haven’t fully considered the implications.

Selling Travel in Person vs. Online: The Current Situation

To understand how the industry is about to shift, it’s important that we understand the current situation.

What is the traditional role of a Travel Agent?  Once you strip away all the extras, the traditional travel agent takes the information they have about their clients and matches it to the information they have about suppliers.  A travel agent is, in its simplest form, a Processor of Information.

Online Travel Agencies (OTA’s) work in a similar fashion, but on a different scale.  They take the information a potential client enters (date, destination, duration) and match it to information from suppliers (price, distance, time, quality).   An Online Travel Agency is, therefore, also a Processor of Information.

Sure, an OTA is fast and convenient but a travel agent is much more thorough and personable.  Which is system is better?  We can argue all day about it, but according to the statistics I’ve seen it hovers around 50/50 as far as customer usage is concerned.

When you boil it down, both travel agents and OTA’s are Processors of Information, they just do it in a different way.

This is how we’ve (somewhat) happily coexisted for the last decade or so.

The Game Changer

But what if something came along to change this game?  What if the world’s fastest, largest, most comprehensive Processor of Information got into the travel business?  What if they processed so much information, were so complex and so intuitive that they could be fast, convenient, thorough and personable, all at the same time?

What if they had an unlimited marketing budget?  What if the smartest young minds in the world were lining up to work there the moment they left university?  What if they controlled virtually every bit of information ever written or sent on the web?  What if they already had half a billion visits every day?

Then, what if they went out and bought the most powerful online travel metasearch engine.

Oh wait, they just did.

Why should we be concerned?

A brief look into the not-so-distant future:

Joe Smith needs to go to London.  “I’d better call my travel agent after my next meeting,” he thinks.

While he’s waiting for the meeting to start, he’s thinking about what he’ll need to pack.  “I’d better check to see what the weather is like,” he thinks as he pulls up Google.

This isn’t the old Google 2010; this is the much smarter Google 2012. Google recognizes that Joe doesn’t live in London, so he must be thinking of traveling there.  Along with finding the weather, it scrapes all the travel opinion websites and compares the results to Joe’s past Google searches.  Using its complex algorithms to collate the information, Google comes back with this response to Joe’s simple search for the weather:

“London is currently 15 degrees Celsius and cloudy.   The Hilton Main Street Hotel is located 2 blocks from the Big Bank Building.  For the best views, Google will book you a room on the South facing side higher than Floor 18 so you can see over top the building across the street.  Corner rooms offer the most space and have double sinks and soaker tubs.  They are currently offering a special Google Discount Rate to Hilton Honors members and this rate fits within the Acme Sales Corporate Travel Policy.  There is a highly rated Sushi restaurant across the street.  Click here to confirm booking.”

“That’s exactly what I need,” thinks Joe.  As he confirms the booking, he wonders how Google made such a perfect recommendation.

He’s forgotten that he searched for his client, Big Bank, on Google last week.   He doesn’t make the connection to the Hilton Honors statement he receives in his Gmail account.  He doesn’t know that Google has searched his Linkedin profile to learn that he works at Acme Sales and has automatically applied Acme’s corporate travel policy to the booking.  He wouldn’t have guessed Google was paying attention when he reserved a table online at his favorite local sushi restaurant last month.

“You’ll need flights as well,” pops up the next message from Google.  “And while you’re at it, why don’t you fill out our Google Traveler Profile Form so next time we can apply even more preferences.”

Five minutes after looking for the weather, Joe now has the perfect trip booked.  “Oh well, I guess I don’t have to call my travel agent after all,” he says to himself as he leaves for his meeting.

The Beginning of the End of the Generalist Travel Agent

How would you stack up against this new reality?

Can you ever be this efficient?  This proactive?  Will you ever know this much about your client?  Are you this convenient?  This knowledgeable? This intuitive? This inexpensive?   Will your technology hold up to Google’s?

If your specialty is “The World and everything in it” you will not be able to keep up.

The Good News

Google has entered the travel world and will soon become your competition.   Granted, they’re not quite there yet but the purchase of ITA was the last piece of the puzzle.  There are bound to be some privacy issues that they’ll have to deal with and some technical reworking behind the scenes, but make no mistake, this is coming.

“Google is not interested in selling travel,” they say.  So what.  Does it matter whether they sell it or whether they outsource it to a third party?  Either way, we won’t be getting it.

That’s the bad news.  The good news is that travel agents will still have the opportunity to succeed in the new post-Google Travel world.

They’ll just need to reinvent themselves.  Over the next few posts, we are going to investigate what it will take to do just that.

You should visit the Reinventing the Agent Facebook page to ensure you don’t miss anything good.