travel tech insights

The travel industry has to be one of the best examples of everything old becoming new again. Imagine England in the year 1841: the telegraph was a less than ten years old; the telephone was still twenty five years away; railroads were transforming the countryside but steamships were nowhere in sight. Things were certainly very different back when Thomas Cook opened the doors to his travel company and began selling single day excursions from Leicester to Loughborough.  Since then, through steamships, airlines and the Internet, Thomas Cook Group – like many other travel companies during that passage of time – has thrived on change and transformed many times. Currently, creative people continue to reinvent the travel industry. For those planning to join them with an innovative travel company or travel technology provider of their own, here are top start-up tips to help them along the way.

In a recent blog we discussed how travel companies can derive benefits from Big Data, analytics and advanced reports in four operational areas:  

What is advanced reporting in today’s travel industry? In this article it's defined as leveraging Big Data and data analytics to make smarter and faster strategic, operational, marketing and sales decisions. Big Data? It means there’s a huge amount of travel data available to mine for insights on: strategy; service offerings; pricing; marketing and user personalization. While every travel agency owner or manager would agree better information can only help to improve performance, odds are they are also part of the 81% that have no business intelligence (BI) solution in their travel business. 

As noted in an earlier post, there are compelling reasons for travel companies to invest in enterprise resource planning systems. These range from a desire to cut operational costs through automation; be able to exchange data with travel partners more quickly and easily; increase revenues with better visibility into sales activities; and improve customer experiences with more sales and transaction automation. However, achieving these benefits is only possible if a wise choice is made. Since good advice is often overlooked or quickly forgotten, this post aims to make a more lasting impact by focusing on steps guaranteed to produce what no one wants: a disastrous selection.

The benefits of a responsive travel website are so compelling there’s no point in even trying to make the case companies in the travel industry can succeed without one. No doubt some are trying, but they’ve put themselves in roughly the same position as a brick-and-mortar store operating with inconvenient parking and accepting just one type of credit card. Perhaps some succeed in the short term, but those companies suffer an economic loss from missed profits. Since a website with responsive design is one that recognizes a visitor’s device and changes page configurations for best viewing, it stands to reason a nonresponsive site can never achieve the same user experience.