Two years can seem like forever, especially in interactive travel.
When I penned my first column 24 months ago, electronic travel agents got the same commission as human ones. PCTravel and Destination Florida were household names. And Microsoft made software.
And so, as I take a moment to reflect on my last 50 columns, I can’t help feeling as if this is my 500th installment of this feature instead. Like the industry I’ve covered, the column has come of age in a relatively short time.
In July 1996, I went after travel agents, describing their relationship with airlines as “profitably parasitic.”
“Commissions. Kickbacks. All-you-can-eat shrimp. What a life it’s been,” I mused. In their final crisis, I wrote, retailers must reinvent themselves or perish trying.
The words did not sit well with agents, but I’m pleased that they heeded my advice. More retailers are online today than ever before.
Soon afterward, I blasted folks in the interactive travel business for nursing an inferiority complex. In January, 1997, I called on readers to answer those “lies and half-truths about interactive travel.” Among the misperceptions: that there’s no electronic substitute for a real, honest-to-goodness, accredited travel agent.
There were two eloquent, if indirect, responses to my criticism. In the first interview given after an initial public offering last year, Preview Travel’s president and CEO Ken Orton confidently declared in this column, “We will dominate.” So much for feeling inferior.
And this February, the Justice Department approved a proposal by 10 online travel service providers to create a trade association called the Interactive Travel Services Association, granting our industry another degree of legitimacy.
Over the years, the most difficult columns to write have been ones that mention Biztravel.com. Before I became ITR’s columnist, I edited the e-zine on the biztravel.com domain. I worked day and night and recruited every journalist that was worth having. A few months before the previous owner sold the domain name and business to its current owner, I left the project.
It’s gratifying to see how much Biztravel.com’s editorial section resembles what I created more than two years ago. However, when I read about the latest $10 million round of venture capital financing, I wonder how much those shares I was promised by Biztravel.com’s previous owner would be worth today.
It probably goes without saying that interactive travel can be a business of broken promises and shattered dreams. I’m thinking of Microsoft Corp.’s ambitious Mungo Park, of PC Travel, and of Destination Florida, all of which expired during my tenure as ITR columnist.
But death is not necessarily final in cyberspace. Destination Florida rose from the ashes in March as Go2orlando. Within two months of closing shop, owner Tribune Co. had picked up the pieces of the failed venture and regrouped.
Fortunately, the failures are eclipsed by the optimism of entrepreneurs such as Jennie Bettles, the former Intel executive I profiled in October. Bettles’ SameSky project went head-to-head with Mungo Park and survived. When you’re as outgunned and outfinanced as Bettles was, you’ve got to differentiate your product with heart and soul. That’s the only way to win.
Bettles’ success came as welcome news to the few of us who aren’t on the payrolls of big corporations. Some pundits were predicting late last year that the industry would consolidate to only one or two players in each market segment, but I happily took note of contrarians like Bettles and Malcolm Kaufman of On the Road, a small, subscriber-based site aimed at business travelers, who are proving everyone wrong.
In a business that Forrester Research predicts will hit $7.4 billion for leisure travel alone within the next four years – double that if you account for business travel – it is reassuring to know that those earnings won’t get carved up between two or three interactive travel conglomerates. At least not all of them.
The industry has changed in ways no one anticipated. Ditto this column. Careful readers will notice that its name became “Inside Interactive Travel” last July – from “CounterPoint” – to reflect a kinder, gentler, and more mature approach to the business.
My editors and I decided that interactive travel needed a thoughtful critic more than it did a loose cannon. Those of you who miss my wild side are invited to point your browsers at Abcnews.com’s travel section, where my rants and raves appear weekly under the Crabby Traveler banner.
I can’t wait to see what the next two years will bring…
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