travel tech insights

If there’s one segment of the travel industry most impacted by trends or fads in today’s travel landscape, it’s tour operators. Because tours, activities, and other excursions can vary widely depending on location, supplier networks, and customer demand, the tour operator facet of the travel industry is a variant rich enterprise which can result in increasing complexity when it comes to sourcing products and services. Plus, the recent push for individualization, personalization, and unique tour and travel experiences means tour operators must deploy powerful software solutions to meet the needs of a fluctuating customer base that craves authenticity in how and where they travel.

As one can imagine, the drive for more intimate, specifically-tailored tours and activities and the growth of new and emerging markets across the globe - not to mention the continued fragmentation of the travel industry’s customer pool - means tour operators must work harder than ever before satisfy customers and grow their businesses.

The old is now new again. It’s a cliche, yes, but it’s also a profound truth in the context of the resurgence of travel agents in today’s global travel industry. In a time when so much of travel engagement takes place online or in the digital sphere, many travelers are returning to more traditional travel agencies to help plan and curate their travel and tourism experiences.

A recent report from the travel industry advocacy group EyeforTravel asked 183 respondents across all omareas of the global travel industry landscape about what facet of the travel industry keeps them up most nights. It’s an interesting question, especially given how volatile and variant-rich today’s travel industry can be taken into account the sheer volume of suppliers and network partners. Even so, the overwhelming response to this question was the need to stay ahead of technology and keep pace with the development of new digital platforms or methods of doing business. And this is especially true for mobile bookings and ability of today’s traveler to source, research, and complete bookings on devices no bigger than the palm of their hand.

In fact, EyeforTravel’s May 2016 survey and resulting report identified a number of interesting statistics regarding the continued development of mobile technology that can be applied to travel agents, tour operators, product and service providers, and even consumers.

With the first month of 2017 nearly behind us, there have been numerous articles about the trends, storylines, and narratives likely to emerge in the travel industry during the next year; in fact, we’ve recently published a handful of entries along similar lines in order to discover where the travel industry is headed and why 2016 was such a critical year across nearly all touch points of the travel landscape. While these forecasts and predictions are interesting in terms of plotting what 2017 might look like, they offer very little in terms practical changes to the industry in specific or targeted areas.

While the idea of booking travel accommodations is most certainly a broad topic, travel bookings are poised to undergo some significant shifts in the coming year, both through the adoption of intelligent search and booking engines, but also in terms of how travel companies position themselves between suppliers and customers in the booking process. In addition, other elements such as the continued growth of mobile technology, emergence of new markets, and further fragmentation of the travel market all add up to some fundamental changes in the way customers complete bookings and travel companies facilitate them.

It’s a trend you see all too frequently in today’s global travel industry: a traveler lands at an online travel agency’s website with the intent to complete a booking, but then leaves the site empty-handed. This can happen for any number of reasons, but the result is the same regardless: the traveler is unfulfilled by their digital interaction with the OTA, and the OTA misses an opportunity to forge a potentially long-term relationship with the customer.

It’s a problem many OTAs face in today’s travel industry, especially as online and mobile capabilities become cheaper to source and easier to deploy. The expectation that an OTA will operate a robust online travel booking platform is also putting pressure on OTAs to leverage fast, powerful web-based resources travelers can access 24/7 across any number of applications or contexts, be it laptops, smartphones, mobile devices, and more.