It’s ironic that the latest airline partnerships, which try to squeeze more profits out of passengers by code-sharing, are by and large overlooking the most important electronic opportunity: the Internet. Even as the proposed American Airlines-British Airways alliance fights its way through the courts, sidestepping the savvy demolition efforts of BA archrival Richard Branson of Virgin Atlantic Airways, the AMR Corp. home page reflects precious little of the would-be corporate affair. Long-standing relationships don’t register on other airline Web sites either.
1996
Deutsche Telekom AG’s long awaited privatization, which culminated in a stunning Wall Street debut last week, is bound to rattle the interactive travel industry. What’s a stock offering got to do with interactive travel? Lots. The German telecommunications company raised at least $11.6 billion from the sale of 600 million shares – and also set aside another 23 million shares for employees-to shed part of its debt and become more competitive.
My hat’s off to Garrett Communications and PhoCusWright Inc. for staging a memorable eMMITT ’96 in Orlando. The conference pulled together a diverse group of industry leaders into a surprisingly useful and informative networking opportunity. That’s easy for this columnist to say. After all, my publication co-sponsored eMMITT. But I consider myself uniquely qualified to comment: not only did I fly to Florida from Germany at my own expense and pay for ground transportation and lodging out of my own pocket, I’ve also experienced my fair share of terrible shows.
Ever notice how people like to brag about being first in cyberspace? If it’s not a slogan painted across a Web site, it’s a conversation piece: “I’ve been online since 1990,” or, “We’ve had a presence since 1993.” To all the propellerheads that think they’ve got something to talk about, meet Robert Segelbaum, online pioneer and founder of Airhitch. His company was conceived in 1969 to provide a service that is only now catching on among large industry players. It’s a way for people with flexible schedules, particularly students, to buy cut-rate airline seats that otherwise would remain empty.
Who’s the most dangerous person in the interactive travel business? To peg a monopolistic chief executive like Microsoft’s gazillionaire boy wonder Bill Gates, or even a Sabre or American Express executive, would be easy. But think again. It’s not that these people aren’t dangerous. Their efforts to reshape the industry present a formidable threat to those of us who don’t fit in their tidy version of the future.
Maybe the news of David Lea’s quiet departure from PCTravel, the legendary online agency he helped build, was just coincidentally overshadowed by a far more tragic event. After all, hurricanes like Fran don’t come along every day. The storm devastated the part of North Carolina where Lea is based, toppling trees, decapitating roofs, and – a few miles away – taking big bites out of the fragile shoreline. Still, you can’t help but think that Lea planned to exit unnoticed while nature wrought her vengeance on the Southeastern U.S. He’s the kind of guy who doesn’t like to call attention to himself, who is noticeably uncomfortable when he’s singled out for recognition.
More and more travel agents are banging their heads against their soon-to-be obsolete CRS terminals in frustration. It’s hardly a dignified way to die. The loudest crunch to date was heard this summer, when the Association of Retail Travel Agents and the U.S. Travel Agent Registry begged the U.S. Department of Transportation to freeze the Microsoft-Worldspan plan to sell travel through the Internet. They also petitioned Uncle Sam to reverse the Northwest-KLM action that slashed commissions on cyberspace bookings. Like jilted lovers, the organizations whined about a conspiracy to “abandon the agency distribution system.”
Quick, name the travel industry’s top product. If you answered airline tickets, guess again. If you thought hotel reservations, or cruises, or even software, sorry. No, it’s widgets. We’re apparently selling truckloads of them to unsuspecting consumers, and I’m pleased to be the first to break this exclusive story. The little-known trend first came to my attention after I read a story in the Dallas Business Journal claiming that a “generation of retirees with more places to go and more money to spend than their parents” had given birth to new category-killer travel stores.
Hey, Northwest Airlines. What in the world is wrong with you? When Delta Air Lines capped its travel agency commissions last year, did that look like fun? It must have. Slicing a few percentage points away from what you pay online retailers, as you did last month, is like sending e-mail to every Internet booking engine with the heading, “Please flame us here at Northwest!” You must like that kind of thing. Observers from the trenches of interactive travel know better. But that doesn’t change the fact that your actions set a disturbing industry precedent – due in no small part to the scatterbrained logic you’ve used to justify your decision.
Some travel industry firsts are better left uncelebrated. Delta Air Lines, the first carrier to cap commissions, would rather not be remembered for its infamous move. And partner Virgin Atlantic Airways wouldn’t want the industry to recognize it as the first airline to get nabbed for false advertising on the Web.
The Business Travel Contractors Corporation is dead. Only one airline – Southwest – has signed on to the proposal. Many of the consultants who once stepped forward to endorse the concept have now quietly backed away from it, and there’s a pervasive feeling in the industry that BTCC’s time has come and gone. But before we bid its controversial founder Kevin Mitchell adieu, a few words. A eulogy, if you will.
Everyone makes mistakes. Even American Express, the industry’s undisputed heavy hitter, has been known to strike out every now and then. The Thomas Cook acquisition is one recent example of a bad play. Not initially, when the “suits” promised a “win-win” deal, but later, after it became painfully clear that there was no room for many Thomas Cook employees on the winning team. American Express effectively downsized the value of newly acquired Thomas Cook when it allowed key account managers to leave the corporate marriage.
Logging onto the Internet today is a lot like waking up to find Bobby Ewing in your shower. Fans of the 1980s prime-time soap opera Dallas will recall the memorable moment when scriptwriters revived a dead character by dismissing the previous year as the figment of another character’s imagination. In a climactic shower scene Alfred Hitchcock would have approved of, the audience comes to the sudden realization that “it was all a dream.” Bobby never died; Pamela just dreamed it.
What the hell is going on at Reed Travel Group? Ever since the Internet emerged as a promising new medium, the top-heavy subsidiary of British publishing conglomerate Reed Elsevier Plc., has sent confusing and mixed signals to the industry about its online intentions. It started with what many considered an utterly botched consolidation of Official Airline Guides into the travel group during the early 1990s, which weeded out some of OAG’s most impressive talent.
Should a destination’s marketing efforts focus on creating a single, one-stop Web site or on cultivating lots of little ones? One apparent answer from many who have marketed travel seems clear: collect enough information about an attraction and the visitors will follow, both virtually and in real life. Big catalogs, big adverting campaigns, and big media events are industry institutions. Because the formula works so well in traditional media, why not assume it will do the same online?
Like flesh-eating zombies in a second-rate horror film, travel Web sites never really die. Their un-updated corpses stay preserved on the Internet as colorful monuments to their creators’ folly. The dead sites mingle with the living as they might in a Stephen King novel, and even people with a trained eye often can’t tell the difference between the real thing and an impostor. That’s hardly a new problem for Internet users, who are haunted by an occasional “URL Does Not Exist” error. But it’s reached frightening levels in this industry, where the undead aren’t just tolerated, they’re celebrated.
Like it or not, the European travel industry sees opportunities in the information revolution that American companies are oblivious to. The Europeans were quietly experimenting with smart cards and ticketless travel while the New World’s agents and suppliers bickered about commissions. The Continent rolled out interactive TV-based teletext systems years before the information superhighway got busy. And let’s not forget that the Web was developed in Switzerland, not San Francisco.
Internet users are leaving your Web site – forever. You won’t read about the exodus in most travel trade publications. Nor will you hear about it at a conference or from a colleague. But they’re leaving. In droves. Thousands of them.
A waste of bandwidth. That’s what the travel industry’s collective Internet presence is turning out to be. Look around. The most high-profile Web sites are little more than electronic brochures scripted for the benefit of advertising executives, not Internet users. Cyberspace pioneers never envisioned their network as a single-protocol medium, but that’s exactly what it’s turning into.
The runaway popularity of virtual reality (VR) is undeniably real. Hotels are using it to showcase rooms on their Web pages, and three-dimensional maps will soon point to virtual meeting spaces, virtual rental cars, and virtual destinations. Equally undeniable is the rash of virtual overkill that promises to afflict travel sites-the proverbial VR for VR’s sake.
