on 21 June 2010If someone told you that they aggregate things and someone else told you that they curate things, would you know the difference?
In the travel business, these two ways of distributing products and services to travelers are quite different.
The problem is that travelers are generally unaware of the difference and, as a result, don’t understand what they are getting when they look for experiences through a curator or an aggregator.
Let’s first define the terms. According to Oxford, the term “aggregate” means:
verb /agrigayt/ combine into a whole.
verb select, organize, and look after the items in (a collection or exhibition).
Already you can see that the verbs mean entirely different things. Aggregation implies combining a variety of objects to create a whole, whereas curation implies selection, organization, and care.
In the travel business, aggregation is very much the combining of distinct sources of product and delivering it as a single unified list of products from which the traveler can choose the best product for their needs.
In the case of airlines and hotels, this would be done using a combination of direct connects and GDS connections. When a traveler searches for a given location and time of year, the system scours through the various sources for the best matches and displays the results.
The system makes no judgments on the quality or appropriateness of the product but rather provides an unbiased (or so it would seem) list of matching results. In the case of the aggregator, the accountability of the product or service delivered is usually left to the supplier who actually provides the service since, in most cases, the aggregator will make it clear that they do not take responsibility for the deliver of the service.
Curation is a very different approach to delivering products to consumers. Although there may be an aggregation component to the curation process, primarly for the purposes of sourcing the products for curation, the curator is then responsible for selecting the products that they feel are the best fit for their customers, organizing them, and maintaining them in the collection.
When a traveler searches for experiences from a curated source, they are relying on the experience and expertise of the curator to ensure quality, viability, and credibility of the source.
In the case of curation, the customer may not even know the source until after the booking is made relying entirely on the reputation of the curator. It’s a little bit like the old saying “Any friend of Jim, is a friend of mine”.
To the traveler, it may be difficult to know whether a travel site is an aggregator or a curator just by looking at it. One way, I have found is to look at their tag line or mission statement and see if they fall into either of these criteria:
- The site is most likely an aggregator if it claims to have the largest number of sources (ie. hotels, flights, car, whatever), promotes the number of locations or properties/flights (ie. 50,000+ hotels), and offers customer reviews but does not provide it’s own reviews/editorial. Many online agencies and metasearch sites like Expedia, Travelocity, and Kayak would fall into this classification.
- The site is most likely a curator if it claims the best selection of products from reputable sources, promotes the quality of the products over the quantity, offers a combination of customer reviews and editorial, and manages & updates the source content directly. Many experiential travel sites like Viator, isango!, Kijubi, Expedia’s Activities/Attractions, TravelDragon, and others would fall into this category. The reason why most of these sites curate is partly because aggregation of content for experiential product is almost impossible given the lack of standard distribution standards and systems. Curation does occur in other more traditional segments such as hotels. The Mr & Mrs Smith site, for example, would be considered a curation site for selected boutique hotels.
In the end, the two methods for distribution offer their own benefits. Aggregation will most likely offer the most number of choices and require the consumer to filter and sort based on their preferences.
Curation, on the other hand, will provide a fewer number of choices defined by the curator’s preferences and presented as a collection. Both options are valid and serve consumers in different ways.
How effective the two options are depends a lot on the reputation of the brand and the trust the consumer has with the site. In the end, both approaches provide consumers with choice and that is never a bad thing.
Pic: Espos.de on Flickr and Shopkitson.
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“The system makes no judgments on the quality or appropriateness of the product but rather provides an unbiased (or so it would seem) list of matching results.”
Stephen: You list OTAs as falling into the category. As you know, au contraire. OTAs make judgments, have preferences and are not unbiased. (Neither are offline travel agencies unbiased.)
So it seems there is a helluva light of overlap between curation and aggregation websites. Many difference, too, granted.
Maybe what consumers REALLY need to know is that many aggregation websites have plenty of curator attributes and prejudices.
You’re right. It’s hard to paint everything either black or white. In most cases, travel sites are a combination of aggregation and curation. I don’t think there are any sites that are purely aggregation. In most cases there are underlying business relationships that affect listing and pricing but in most cases, this is done by rules that affect the data on a broad scale. The curation is much more obvious in its approach.
Great post..and agree that aggregation vs curation has a lot of shades of grey with overlaps.
But they are two different strategies to present products to consumers. What is interesting to me is which strategy works better for different products/services.
Here’s a theory: products with little differentiation (such as domestic flights) are better served by aggregation. Let the consumer pick/filter based on what’s important to them. Where as products/services that are more complex and have numerous price points (e.g. cruises, vacation home rentals) are better served by curation by an expert to help reduce the number of options for consumers.
This is a great topic. To the category of curators, I would also add the high profile travel media companies, travel writers and magazines, as well as tour suppliers.
There’s a lot of discussion about this in the media world as well, e.g. http://www.businessinsider.com/content-is-no-longer-king-curation-is-king-2010-6?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+typepad%2Falleyinsider%2Fsilicon_alley_insider+%28Silicon+Alley+Insider%29&utm_content=FaceBook and http://www.steverubel.com/the-next-big-trend-its-all-about-curation. I think both are here to stay, even though some (e.g. Rupert Murdoch) are strongly opposed to them.
Both aggregation and curation are tools to deal with the ever-exploding volumes of information that are being created. But I don’t see the two alternatives as completely mutually exclusive. For example, Goby is both – we aggregate (in the form of a search index), but curate in that we only let certain sites into our index, based on our estimation of the quality & relevance of their content to our mission…..it’s possible to combine the best of both approaches. In different use cases, as you say, one approach may be more effective than the other – but the combination is powerful indeed.
While I agree that curation is where we as an industry need to be, there are many requirements that must be met to achieve this, among others (if we dont want to stay in the realm of pre packaging – oops – I meant pre curating – for a pre defined niche market) we need to be able to identify specific customer requirements (hard and soft) and be able to apply those in a standardised method to our content and pricing.
There can be no curation without prior aggregation of some kind.
Today we already see examples of solutions that provide normalization of the broadest content available paired with the means to apply variables to that content to dynamically “curate” based on individual customer, commercial or other criteria. (eg. Travelport Universal API)
Dynamic real time packaging with GDS and or charter/low cost/tour op groups flighs, tour operator hotel, destination services, local car rental company etc. is also a reality (eg. Tourport Leisure solution in Germany/EMEA)
So the technology exists, where are we in terms of identifying the right “meta” information from our customer and using that to curate on the fly the right package, to show the real value for THIS specific customer?
We need to get away from a pure price discussion and into a value discussion. Our industry needs to move from “My trip was cheaper than yours” to “I got JUST what I have always been looking for, and the best part of it was that I could afford it, too”.
More share of wallet, happier repeat customers, healthy industry.
That’s an excellent comment Olaf, I couldn’t agree with you more. The only caveat is that in order to allow for aggregation (prior to curation or dynamic packaging), there has to be access to the broadest possible range of products for travelers. This means accessing inventory for the unique, specialized, and in destination products. If we talk about value based travel, there also needs to be shift away from the old model of departure/return date & destination airport as the first step in the booking cycle. I think that curation will continue to exist as long as long tail supply is invisible to larger aggregation.
If we leave for one second the discussion on what is curation vs aggregation or other similar definitions, the original question – not answered – is: “Do travelers really know or care?”
I think this is a bigger question – do travellers know the technical differente between Expedia and Kayak? Booking.com and Mr&Mrs Smith?
I can relate to tens of friends explaining Expedia as a “flight search engine, they will look for the best airline tickets for you”. I’ve never been able to explain to non-IT people the difference between Expedia and Kayak. They think both “find the best airline tickets”.
Consequence: if they don’t know, then they can’t care. Which leaves only brand as the real differentiator.
I think recently Expedia tried to position a tagline “where you book matters”, I guess precisely to focus on the brand as THE differentiator – as there is nothing else left to play in the big OTA wars? Are we down to Coke vs Pepsi?
Thanks Stephan (eh! like, to a fellow Canuck!)
Value based travel is truly the objective, so the data models need to support relevant “meta” information tagging and mapping of the same from the product to the persona. It will then come down to “who truly understands the customer’s needs and can articulte them in the correct meta set”
There are some interesting products and concepts surfacing that will facilitate this shift and open opportunity for new consultancy/sales channels and leverage social selling but INCLUDE the existing sales channels and POS’. I believe that 2011 will bring a surge of innovation to the industry in terms of APPs