Round Holes & Square Pegs
How can online travel services adapt the differences between travelers
When we start to think about the depth of information we can provide for travelers, what the purposes and context of their travels are becomes a necessary preamble question to answer.
One way to see to it is to ask why people travel. A vacation to relax and a trip of site-seeing, or a shuttle among business trips can lead to very different decision making procedures and final decision patterns. For example, the key factors for a relaxing vacation are usually the comfort of the hotel / villa and services. The traveler would hope the area around the accommodation to be beautiful and quiet, which doesn’t necessarily qualify for a tourism site. Hence the typical decision making procedure could be: firstly find a place to stay based on the quality of accommodation or fitness for such relaxing stay, then deal with flights and visa. And the rest of the trip would be left for improvising.
On the other hand, however, if the traveler is aiming for a trip of site-seeing, the decision procedure would be completely different. One would start with collecting information and deciding which points of interests (POI) to add to his itinerary. It is quite likely the traveler would not pay much attention on accommodation before the whole itinerary is completed. And when it comes to deciding where to stay, he/she would give high priority to pricing over service and quality, or at least try to gain balance among these aspects.
Similarly, we can illustrate various decision making processes for other initiatives of travels, such as tours among business trips, travels centered with a major course (e.g. to watch a FIFA World Cup match in Rio de Janeiro), et cetera.
We can go through every other aspects of a travel, such as the relationship between/among the company, the age and status (student, employee, manager, etc.), what kind of destination, and so on so forth; and analyze the differences in other dimensions such as the acceptance of cost, willingness to make detailed plans, et cetera. However, I prefer to cut the discussion and present a semi-conclusion, which reads
Many major elements of a travel can have impacts on the procedure of decision making and final decisions achieved for the travel.
Traditional online travel agencies and services were trying to make value from these various and tedious procedures. Some cut in the business from the information angle by providing detailed, selected, opinion-rendered, or wide-ranged information, gained by editors or average users, to help with the decision making (e.g. Lonely Planet, TripAdvisor, Trippy, etc.); some merely focus on the sales of business products after users’ decisions are made (e.g. booking, skyscanner, priceline, peak, etc.). Explorations facilitated with advanced interaction features have been tested to mix recommendation and business sales (however, we couldn’t find many successful examples).
Among these different attempts, we can see examples where attention was paid merely to one specific type of travelers. JetSetter for instance, has focused on high quality residences for relaxed vacations. Although last-minute deals on JetSetter lowers the prices, they still are quite expensive. Obviously normal tourists won’t enjoy their offers, but those who are eager for a relax have voted by their real bookings.
Another interesting fact about JetSetter is that above 50 percent of JetSetter users didn’t have a plan about the vacation until they were attracted to make an reservation. Not only does this fact supports previous theory about decision making process differences, but brings an inspiration of a new chance of business: make an easy yet deterministic decision, and save the planning for later. Elegant design of the deals and planning assistances is required to make that magic happen.
Now that we see how different decisions can be between different types of travelers, and how interesting the business could become according to such differences, it is essential to realize the root of these differences lies deep with the raw motivation of a travel, and results in very different appearance on the surface. Hence I’d rather differentiate them with big words such as “ecosystems”, which lead to the next big question:
Given that supports for travelers actually belong to various ecosystems, how do we build a service which integrates all these ecosystems?
I’m still seek for the answer to that question.