Seemingly crushing news for startups and event organisers trading on the word “innovation” with an industry veteran claiming there is no such thing in the sector.
A former-CEO of Asian GDS Abacus and a Cathay Pacific exec for 20 years, Don Birch says about 95% of new travel projects (skunkworks inside establish corporates or startups) are just playing with or fixing an existing problem rather than doing something “truly innovative” or groundbreaking .
This is no innovation, it’s “creativity”, he surmises.
When pushed on what was the last innovative move he saw in travel, Birch (now MD of consultancy China Opportunity Partners) shrugs, stays silent.
But he explains further. Game-changing projects (“proper innovation”) generally happen outside of travel and all we are seeing in this particular sector are those willing to re-engineer or find a solution to something that already exists.
Is the latter what is now masquerading as innovation? Perhaps…
Using a strange but relevant comparison, Morten Lund, serial investor, a founder of Everbread and fellow member of a panel at WebinTravel, agrees.
Citing how critics often gush how Vincent van Gogh was a fabulously innovative artist, Lund says the reality was that the Dutch painter was actually just creating the same forms and style as many of the “other painters he was hanging around with”.
Not innovative at all, he suggests.
So provocative words from Birch and Lund (and slightly ironic, in a way, as Everbread is trying to make a big play in Singapore this week), but perhaps simply a question of semantics and nuances of language.
Nevertheless, “travel creativity” doesn’t sound as sexy as “travel innovation”.
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It’s certainly true that pretty much everything in travel that is said to be ‘innovative’ is actually just a new way to approach an existing problem. A lot of the time it’s merely putting a new UX on top of an old system or a new layer of business rules on top of some old ones. There’s nothing wrong with that though! Online travel is about selling a destination or a product and there will always be better ways to present this to users and gain a better conversion rate as a result.
Travel has got a lot of problems and pain points that can be improved through UI enhancement and conversion rate optimisation…
Innovation is happening in the travel space but it’s generally in smaller companies and often those providing services to travel companies, rather than directly to consumers, which is why it often gets overlooked.
Birch seems short on answers, and solutions to the lack of innovation he claims.
Ewen
Very interesting! This sounds like that chap in New York in 1800 and something who said that everything worthwhile had already been invented and promptly resigned. I don’t know the difference twixt “innovative” and “creative” – what I do know, is what has been really useful in helping me on a day to day basis, such include: Google Earth, wegolo/ skyscanner (that is, a pudding website with low cost types – global)and expedia (for checking consolidated fares).
I do think that an awful lot, these days, seems to be just “variations on a theme”.
That said, the most innovative and creative person, in travel generally (and who, incidentally, has never received any award for it and is always simply lambasted) is of course, Michael O’Leary.
Agree with Don, that those businesses who have not created a new category have not truly creative an “innovation”. As Don says “those willing to re-engineer” or act innovatively “to improving existing services”, and i too think that this is distinct from creating an “innovation”.
Tripit.com created a new category of “online travel planning”. i think this is an innovation given the idea was successfully taken up by the market. (there were 20 other tripname sites, but Tripit will own the category hence the innovation) If it didn’t work it would have just been an idea, not an innovation.
wotif’s original 14 day booking window still stands out as an innovation, i.e. “last minute accom”. most other hotel sites etc rely on seo, sem, affiliates – as a lot less risky way to build the business. This is fair enough and makes a lot of sense for most companies. As Glenn Fogel pointed out in WIT interview http://bit.ly/dxQOMY quoting a story “…a man face down in the dust with an arrow in his back. He was the first mover”.
i agree with Morton in principle but not with the Van Gogh analogy. Because Van Gogh he was poor and never made any money from his paintings. if he was doing the same as everyone else then he would have sold his painting, but he didn’t. So I don’t agree with Morton on this one – because the subsequent success of the Van Gogh brand is evidence of innovation because he became synonymous with the style/category, but unfortunately for him, of only after his time. #AheadOfHisTime #badluckvincent
Don, I and the Australian Tax Office disagree…albeit via Australian R&D legislation that is now up in the air! Jokes aside our efforts to produce the first cruise maps and virtual cruises to motivate consumers to step aboard did pass a key “innovation” test for our R&D claims. Creating a new category is often a route to success but innovation does occur outside that framework. Would also like a reminder on true GDS innovation in the past decade.
It’s more fair to say that there hasn’t been any innovation, with a capital I, in the last ten years. TripIt may be the exception.
Here’s my take on what the barriers are:
http://gillespie411.wordpress.com/2010/10/14/four-barriers-to-travel-innovation/
And a 30-second video to help inspire innovators everywhere:
http://gillespie411.wordpress.com/2010/10/15/tacos-inspiration-for-travel-innovation/
As a consumer I have to agree that there is a lack of innovation in travel. I have written about this before. I mean how many more hotel and flight comparison sites do we need???
Creative yes, innovative no.
New devices, New consumer expectations, new technologies, those who are the ones who allow better solutions to old problems.
It is the Technology that drives Innovation, and adapting those new
technologies sometimes is as far as it gets…
(and it still looks like crap)
This is a daft criticism to level at any industry. Of course most innovation isn’t “ground-breaking” – that’s kind of the point of being ground-breaking.
If ground-breaking things happened every day either they wouldn’t be ground-breaking (by definition) or we’d all be rushing around with our heads on fire.
And why isn’t fixing an existing problem innovative?