0A scene from the future of travel distribution 2007: Mark Spencer is lunching at AeroDome Café, a favourite restaurant chain -- it's a successful affiliate of Mark's travel distribution brand, Hub for One-Stop Travel. Mark had built a successful agency and an online booking engine for large corporate managed accounts; but when an itinerary-processing audit in 2004 revealed extensive duplication, he began to envision a new way to do business: a constellation of many travel players, acting as a distribution hub for every major travel service. An online consortium would achieve economies of scale, eliminate duplication and slash cost, and achieve high transaction volumes by sharing specialised functions, including fulfilllment, call centres, back-office accounting and Passenger Name Record (PNR) processing. Mark began pitching other providers. The hub would comprise hotels, airlines, car rental, restaurants, parking, passenger rail, ground transportation and a cruise line -- and a repository of all their customers' stated preferences, travel histories, and available market data. Each player would operate individually, specialising in the function it does best; but all would be linked by realtime Web architecture, forming a travel powerhouse. Partners in the constellation would share in a customer travel information database that would streamline not only customers' travel shopping, booking and fulfillment, but also the back-office functions and data analysis of the partner businesses. The group soon launched as Hub for One-Stop Travel, or 'HOST' -- and rapidly became a highly visible travel brand. Today, in 2007, Mark is lunching with Janelle Kressler, a technology investment adviser, to review some new ideas. "Proactive, customised, dynamic 'experience' packaging would be a natural for HOST," he began. "That's a mouthful," Janelle replied. "Meaning what?" "Our new analytical tools could determine our members' most sought-after destinations and services. We could predict demand, buy travel components in bulk and search our member data for travellers' interests. We could package unique 'experiences' to appeal to individual customers -- experiences they would love, but are so beyond their ability to package they'd never imagine them on their own! "We hold the 'experience' together with a Super PNR for everything they'll want on their trip -- flight, cab, theater performance, restaurant… We can use broadband and interactive TV to stream previews, and customise interactive responses to the individual. HOST will own most of the inventory, so the higher-margin profits will be ours. And our custom experiences won't be easy to duplicate!" "Score one for travel being more than a commodity!" Janelle responded. To learn more, download the executive summary or the full report in pdf format at the top of this page. |
