For years, it looked as though the travel agent had gone the way of the milkman. As online booking sites soared in popularity, travel agents became the butt of jokes. But the travel agent has been given a reprieve, as travelers are starting to need vacations from planning their vacations.

“Not only are customers confused and frustrated by new airline fees and events, but they are bombarded by social media,” said John Clifford, president of the luxury travel consultancy InternationalTravelManagement.com. “Everyone is trying to tell you where you should stay, where you should eat, what you should do.”

A study by Forrester Research found that the number of leisure travelers who enjoyed using the Web to plan and book their vacations dropped from 53 percent in 2007 to 47 percent in 2010. And in an American Society of Travel Agents (ASTA) survey, 44 percent of agents said that they had more clients in 2010 than they’d had the previous year, with the strongest rebound in rail and hotel reservations.

Travelers “don’t have hours to spend on research to compare multiple flights, multiple cruises, multiple packages,” said Henry Harteveldt, a travel industry analyst at Forrester Research. “It’s not unlike doing your taxes. Depending on who you are, what your priorities are, there are some people who will choose to do it themselves or to use a professional.”

Get the full story at The Washington Post

via hotelmarketing.com

This has been an ongoing theme and somewhat bogus debate now for years. The original argument that travel agents will all disappear was made in the early days of the web, mostly by people not familiar with the travel industry.

While the vast number of order takers for airline tickets have indeed gone the way of the milkman, the remaining number are the ones who actually deserve the name travel agent or counselor.

What has helped spur this return is the evolution of online travel from being almost exclusively about air bookings to more involved transactions and ultimately trip planning. Those are much more complex functions that traditional OTA have not solved particularly well.

Now, that we are in the reality of web 2.0 travel intermediaries, be they traditional travel agents using web based tools or new online entrants offering trip planning tools integrated with social media will have a role to play in the marketplace.

Will there be a wholesale return to traditional travel agents by millions of web savvy travelers, I highly doubt it. Will those who master social web tools combined with specific knowledge of destinations and products thrive, sure they will.

Is to me what sums up the basics of a successful blueprint for social web engagement. In this excellent interview with Adam Wallace, New Media Marketing Manager, of the Roger Smith Hotel in Manhattan in my opinion deservedly called a Social Media Rock Star – we learn a lot about what makes them the gold standard of a solid and successful commitment by a hotel to social media. First and foremost it is about the culture, which in this case, as it should, starts at the very top with the CEO. From that the rest follows, including the team approach where the voice of the brand is expressed by a number of different people who know exactly what it is about and how to engage with the community. This also allows the time necessary for the overall social web marketing effort to be divided among a team. In addition, as Adam mentions, the social effort is fully integrated into their overall online marketing, again a necessary strategy for success.

What I especially like, is the comment about where the ROI fits into the overall picture. It certainly has a place and is a necessary requirement, but it definitely should not be the first priority or initial focus for a social strategy to be successful and sustained over time. I am sure they would not have continued for six years with this effort if it hadn’t shown tangible and measurable results along the way. What many people – especially in the executive suite – don’t seem to realize is that financial ROI of a social web marketing effort is achieved only over time. The Roger Smith Hotel, it seems has made a continuous commitment during a difficult economic time for the hotel industry and in a very competitive marketplace like Manhattan and has managed to be successful because of it. To me that is solid proof of the ROI resulting from this exemplary social web effort. The lessons that can be learned from this are clear and they apply not only to hotels but any organization in travel and tourism that wants to be where the conversation about their brand takes place whether they are listening or not and that happens to be on the social web.

This guest post is an editorial in Hotelmarketing.com re-published here:

Apple filed a patent this month for a future iPhone app called iTravel that like the Google/ITA rumors has the potential to become a game changer for the travel industry, or how Steve Jobs would put it “revolutionize travel.”

By Markus Busch

The folks at Patently Apple fan website did a great job going through an Apple patent filed this month, uncovering drawings for an Apple iPhone app called iTravel, which would basically app-ify the entire travel process.

Unlike with most OTAs, travel for Apple is not just searching and booking. In the true fashion of an innovator with a track record of getting things right (mostly), Apple is looking at travel as a whole, planning to create value by turning a once frustrating shopping experience into an easy, intuitive, and enjoyable one.

Based on a combination of iPhone hardware and apps, Apple iTravel wants to manage your entire travel process, from planning, searching, reviewing and booking flights, hotels, car rentals, trains and bus journeys, including identifying yourself at airports for baggage handling and boarding passes – technically in a similar fashion as the iPhone-based payment system adopted by Starbucks.

While electronic ticketing and check-in via mobile devices are already available in many countries, putting the whole travel experience in one slick application is the innovation here and a huge business opportunity, especially coming from a travel outsider like Apple, who already successfully disrupted industries like music and phones.

Who will deliver the travel content?

That’s the big question, that nobody can answer today, as iTravel is currently only at patent stage.

But unlike Google, who regularly states that it does not want to get into the transaction side of the travel business (read: not directly compete with its AdWords travel customers), it is likely that Apple will want to own the transaction, as the travel shop will become a central part of the whole iTravel experience, very much like Apple’s iTunes and iBooks (on iPad) store.

And if iTunes and iBooks serve as a hint in which direction supply partnerships may go, Apple will work with a few selected certified aggregators to provide content for iTravel. Like the GDS, Pegasus, hotel chains and hotel bed banks, and travel fulfillment service providers like TRX . But most likely not individual hotels, the same way as musicians and writers have no direct access to iTunes or iBooks.

Still, for hotel marketers Apple iTravel could simply mean another, highly potential distribution channel, creating more competition and thereby options in a hotel distribution environment currently marked by concentration and steady increases in cost of sale.

And how about OTAs as content provider? Not very likely, as Apple’s iTravel will be in direct competition with companies like Expedia and Co. In fact, OTAs have all reason to be worried, as the patent Apple is proposing is a very timely one, and would certainly be welcomed by many travelers around the globe.

But for now, the only thing we know is that Apple plans to get into travel – the question is just when and how.

Oh, and one more thing … starting this Summer, Apple will be busy revolutionizing online advertising with iAds. What a great fit for travel, one of the biggest online advertisers.

Read also “iTravel: Apple’s Future Travel Centric App for the iPhone” at Patently Apple

Markus Busch is the Editor/Publisher of Hotelmarketing.com and can be reached at markus.busch ‘at’ hotelmarketing.com.

Here’s my brief recent interview with FOX Business on the topic of how both business and leisure travelers can use the vast number of apps on their smartphones for pre-trip planning, booking, check-in and during the trip with location aware apps as well as for social sharing. Had much more to talk about but the news about the latest runaway Toyota on that same day shortened the segment!

PhoCusWright has a lot more research and specific reports on the mobile market and its impact on the travel industry, including a brief special report I wrote last year on the iPhone and travel, with reviews of some of the many travel apps. Together with, and related to the social web, mobile is definitely a key area to watch with more innovation coming on stream and network speed improvements with the introduction of 4G.

Of course, widget are nothing new on blogs or sites but I found this new one introduced by VisualDNA adds an interesting twist that should make it much more fun for site visitors to use. Here’s Stephen Fry telling you how it works:

As a matter of fact, you can try it out right here on this blog. Just at bit down on the right hand side is an attractive selection of pictures to click on. Based on the clicks the tool will determine your preferences, or travel related DNA and offer the products it determines are most relevant to you.

There are different shop options and the widget can be personalized. If you’re interested in having your own, just go to http://shops.visualdna.com and click “Create a shop”, you should then be prompted for an access code. Please enter “buhlerworksvisualdnashops” and you should be able to set up a PRO shop of your own.

Reads the title of the  Travolution blog post guest written by Mark Seall which I found very thought provoking.

I thought it might be useful to repeat my comments here as well:

If the major travel players are indeed aware of the fast changing environment they are operating in, it isn’t reflected in how their web presence looks like and how they market their product. It all comes along fairly conservatively.

The discussion reminds me of this recent article in The New Yorker magazine  by Malcolm Gladwell. The innovators (Davids) of the first phase have in only a few years become the legacy players (Goliaths). It seems the next group of market entrants ready to challenge them are entering the scene under the web 2.0 banner generally describing the social web and the tools it brings along.

With recommendations by friends and relatives having been a major influence factor of travel decisions for decades now, it is only normal that with these new social tools being developed and introduced in the marketplace, this key element will be turbo-charged to a new degree.

The innovators who are capitalizing on this part of the travel process are challenging the established players as they themselves did when entering the scene more than a decade ago automating the first and easier part, the transaction which we all know is not where travel process begins. The game is on. Should be interesting to watch who the new winners will be.

By the way a similar discussion on the topic of legacy OTAs has been held recently on Dennis Schaal’s blog here. Great stuff.

Old Media Strikes Back is the title of an article on Newsweek.com by Daniel Lyons writing about why Hulu, the venture founded by NBC and Fox is winning the online video race. This has made me realize certain similarities with the travel industry based on his lead in:

As the worlds of technology and media collide, the same contest keeps getting played out over and over again: lumbering old-media companies take on nimble new-media upstarts, and usually the new-media guys win, since it’s easier for them to figure out the content business than it is for the content companies to figure out the techie stuff involved in launching an Internet business.

We can replace “media” with “travel” and come to pretty much the same conclusion. Twelve or so years ago when the web first started to impact business, it was the new outsider tech start-ups like Expedia and Priceline that pioneered online travel. It was way before any of the traditional travel industry players entered the fray. The same was true in Europe and Asia.

It was again the case a few years ago, when travel 2.0 – the phase we’re presently in with online travel research and planning moving online – was ushered in not by the OTAs, the traditional tour operators or destination marketing organizations (DMO) but start-up companies like Uptake, Tripbase, Travelmuse, Triporati and others.

This seems to confirm how hard it is for established companies to break out of the status quo, innovate and, if necessary, change business models. While this might be understandable, what I do not understand why there are not more ventures where these new players are being sought out by the traditionalists to cooperate. This is especially true for DMOs who do not have to fear being a competitor to these companies but a potential partner. The only thing they need to fear is becoming irrelevant in a few years time by not being innovative enough and have their role being assumed more and more by the new disruptors and innovators.

TripIt Opens API, Third-Party Devs Pounce; Travel Sites Lag reads the headline in MarketingVOX today. What struck me most is the last part “Travel Sites Lag”. The same thing can be said about the API’s already available and being developed by the new innovators for travel planning like Tripbase, Uptake, Travelmuse as well as others and DMOs.

At last week’s Canada-e-Connect conference, I made a strong plea in my presentation for exactly such integration and co-operation in what is fast becoming the new focal point in online travel, the research and planning process that preceeds the actual booking. This is where 95% of the activity happens and it’s about much more than search, the present pre-occupation by the online players. It’s in this space, which PhoCusWright has termed the “Perfect Storm” where the most exciting developments will occur over the next few years. Today’s online travel consumers demand no less than a vastly improved experience in the pre-trip phase, an experience that integrates social media, social networks, UGC, etc. all the elements that need to be integrated to offer this improved experience.

For destinations – which are at the core of the planning process – this has important implications. Rather than trying to develop all this themselves, which most of them are not capable of doing anyway as part of their web development, new and forward looking partnerships need to be developed with the innovators who are already working on making it happen. The travel industry today still lives in too many silos without enough cross communications.

The conversation which is happening among the traveling public as consumers needs to start happening in the industry itself and that goes beyond the usual good will expressed at conferences but in the strategic planning and day-to-day tactics the various players deploy on a permanent basis. As the wisdom of crowd effect is important in the public at large, it can and should be applied more within the industry itself.

and what an conference it was. Under the very appropriate theme,

The Perfect Storm

applicable not only for the travel industry but the global economy itself, which despite the turmoil it is undergoing now and for some time in the near future will produce innovative winners, close to one thousand participants gathered in Hollywood and it became clear right from Philip Wolf’s opening speech, that for the next few days this was the focal point of the global travel industry.

All the major players were there and as is custom, represented by their CEO or senior executives. The action and conversations were non-stop, the deal making permanent across the venue. Having myself participated in a dozen of these events, this set the new standard for travel conferences in terms of quality of production value, quality of attendees, session planning and overall organization and execution. I readily admit my bias, but my own opinion was confirmed time and again by other participants.

This year a new event was added,

with 32 companies, chosen from many more applicants, presenting their innovative ventures to a critical audience who voted on the presentations with hand held rating devices to decide the six finalists with the opportunity to present on Center Stage to the main audience later in the conference.

The presenting companies could roughly be categorized as providers of technology solutions for vacation rentals, mobile travel and trip planning tools. Of particular interest to me were the latter as this is an area of web based travel I am most interested in.

UpTake

Helps people to find out what to book not how to book which is the easy part. Statistics show that 35 sites are visited before booking. That can hardly be voluntary! There is too much content on the web to make a sensible, easy decision. There are 1000 reviews for the Hollywood Renaissance Hotel alone! They are a search and filter engine not a site that creates new UGC. Not flights based but any transport mode.

UpTake has Top Google ranking for many of their destinations. Very deep database for local attractions. Aggregate / Analyze / Filter based on semantics “sentiment extraction” from data based on ontology. This helps them to get the top ranking on the search engines.

Triporati

Discovery is not search! Every trip starts with the planning. Preference based selection, including rankings.
1200 destinations. Map based presentation of selections. Integration of external data like YouTube, photos etc.
Live feed for events. Travel reviews from TripAdviser. Facebook application for friend preferences and suitability of possible travel companions. Collaboration engine for different personal and group profiles. Ultimately it makes the user decide which destination is most suitable.

TravelMuse

95% happens before the booking! How true, and up to now most of the online travel industry has focused on the 5%.

Site looks like a magazine. Inspirational. Where & What. Excellent functionality for saving trip related information including external search results. They have added a travel widget for third party site placement. Uptake is one of these sites. Items can be drag&dropped into the travel plan and can be viewed by all trip participants. Friend’s input & research can be used and added as well. Excellent tool also for travel partners.

PlanetEye

This Canadian based venture is aggregating content and adding relevancy and personalization. Local travel experts are providing most of the content. Data display is based on ranking by reviews. Personal profile allows for differentiation in the results presented. Booking integration and restaurant reservations are another feature.

Your Tour.com (still in closed beta)

This is a preferences based system with a price calculation engine. Reality: Manual itinerary creation even in web 2.0. Their system is a “virtual travel agent” for mass-customization based on B2B licensing. It lists DMOs as partners with hotel chains Booking.com and content provider Lonely Planet.

Demo of beta version included multi-destination, dynamic packaging. Starts with a build me a tour screen. Includes activities for each day, maps based. Slider based preferences ranking. Reminds me of the EuroVacations model! True dynamic packaging.

NileGuide

Personalized travel recommendations. Customized destination guide with current and relevant information can be collected and printed as a PDF. Content, search, and booking are integrated. Lots of cool tools including reviews for accommodation and restaurants, all map based. Slider based activity selector. In addition to PDF they will have an iPhone delivered guide in Q1-09

These are all innovators in what TravelMuse correctly calls the 95% of the process that happens before a leisure trip that has largely been neglected up to now by the major online travel companies who are all focused on the remaining 5%, where the transaction takes place.

It remains to be seen how many will survive as the pressure to produce revenues is huge and at least the immediate prospects uncertain. What is certain, technology will continue to provide the tools essential to make the DREAM – LEARN – PLAN – GO process more integrated, less time consuming and even fun. It should be possible to monetize it to make these sites a commercial success.

In a later post I will discuss the issue of the effect these developments have on the role of DMOs in this process as they traditionally have played their role here and not in the transaction of travel. It’s clear that the industry moves in the direction of integrated services delivery to consumers. The perfect storm indeed!

is what SwissMiss – my favorite design blogger – called this site and she’s right. TripKick.com lists hotel room reviews that allow you to find the best hotel room with a lot of details about each property. So, no more sleeping next to the ice machine or elevator shaft but in the room with the nicest bathrooms or view over the bay.