It would seem that least a couple of the innovations in this year’s list of thirty-four innovators presenting at PhoCusWright’s second Travel Innovation Summit have some application to long tail travel companies.
For me, this is an important indication that perhaps the industry in general is starting to pay some attention to this important, yet highly under appreciated segment of the travel landscape.
The two innovators are Goby and TourAbout. Let’s take a quick look at why I think these two could really add value to small tourism companies.
When you first visit the Goby website, you will probably be surprised at how simple it looks.
It is definitely not like any travel website I’ve seen. It’s dramatic lack of clutter, banner and side banners, and a booking engine are refreshingly different.
What you will find is a search box with three drop down lists that ask what? where? when?
I suppose when you distill the travel experience into three questions, those are the ones that you would probably ask.
So, I gave it a try. In my example (in honour of the upcoming Twilight movie) I thought I would see if I could find any sightseeing tours in Forks, Washington.
I searched for tours in Forks and found several results. Unfortunately, none of them really fit the bill, but where there is a gap, there is an opportunity. Goby has done a nice job of creating a metasearch engine around “Things to do” product.
The fundamental problem is that unlike airline and hotel metasearch, there is no standard product display or delivery, so creating screen scrappers and aggregating scripts that can read and normalize obscure tour products is a real challenge.
Opening up Goby to tour operators to add their own products (similar to Google Local) could go a long way to feeding the index and providing tour operators with a new way to market their tours and activities while driving direct to operator bookings.
Another clear opportunity would be to work on driving some common data sharing standards around those already being developed by the OpenTravel Alliance.
TourAbout is taking a different tact. The original Tourabout site is a lead generating site that is similar to, but slightly more traditional in its delivery then, the Goby model.
The real innovation for TourAbout is its Social Marketplace system. I had the opportunity, thanks to co-founder Carl Jackson, to review the platform a few weeks ago and I was so impressed I actually included it in a presentation that I did at the Adventure Travel World Summit.
The concept is simple, and one that I have been advocating for some time; engage with potential customers by building social equity through the sharing of expertise.
The opportunity for operators is two fold: firstly, the operator gets to create a profile page that allows them to showcase their tours, their areas of expertise, and humanizes them.
Secondly, the operators get to answer questions posted by travellers that fit their areas of expertise and build relationships both passively and actively.
The social marketplace allows independent operators to overcome a major hurdle with marketing, primarily the question of credibility. By answering questions in the marketplace, the operator builds social equity and credibility.
Although, like all things, it will take time for an operator to build this equity, the benefit of the TourAbout solution is that it brings the travellers (aka customers), consolidates the messaging, and provides the operator with a single place to manage their on-line reputation and profile.
Is it likely that an operator will use TourAbout as their sole means of communicating with travellers? I doubt it, but it is, as far as I am aware, the only site of its kind that provides this level of collaboration and interactivity.
So, will either Goby or TourAbout win the “Best of Show” for the Travel Innovation Summit 2009.
As much as I would hope so, my experience has been that applications that promote emerging markets like tours and activities or independent operators are generally not “sexy” enough.
But, hey, I have been wrong before.
In my books, both of these innovations are winners because they both promote a segment of the tourism industry that never gets enough attention.
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About Stephen Joyce
“Opening up Goby to tour operators to add their own products (similar to Google Local) could go a long way to feeding the index and providing tour operators with a new way to market their tours and activities while driving direct to operator bookings.”
Visit http://www.getyourguide.com and see the implementation of the idea
Stephen,
Thanks for the mention of Goby. I like your idea of allowing tour operators (or anyone else for that matter) to provide data directly. Part of what our technology does is create structured data about a web pages (for example, the location, the topic or the date of the object/page in question). High quality structured data is often not available but when it is, it would be great to get it “pre-structured”.
We believe one of the reasons structured content is so rarely available is that there are few tools to make use of that data to create a better user experience. So often there is no incentive for data owners to produce that information. When more sophisticated search experiences are available that reward that kind of data production (perhaps in the form of better findability or ranking), more people will make the investment required to produce that kind of data, and at Goby we’re trying to do our part to move that day forward 8).
Mark, I saw your presentation at TI summit and was giddy with excitement… Have been using it ever since and applaud the efforts to make “my” search response more relevant to my query. My question (relative to this article) is, how do you incentivize TOs to take the leap and spend the time to feed content into your system? Moreover, since TO content (price) is sometimes quite dynamic – how do you (or they) keep the content up to date?
Hi Greg – Glad you are finding Goby useful! Goby’s primary data acquisition method is through web crawling. In these cases we don’t necessarily have a relationship with a travel operator, and so no work is required from them at all, and our data will be as current as our last crawl, similar to Google. If a particular travel operator wanted a more direct route to providing us with enhanced data we can certainly accommodate that, but it’s not required.