When I caught up with Tim Hughes, vice president marketing of Agoda in Bangkok, the unexpected had just happened in the Rugby World Cup currently taking place in the UK.
Japan had snatched victory from the jaws of what seemed to be sure defeat by the South Africans " with a score of 34 to 32 " the winning points scored after time had expired.
Now I am no rugby fan but I even know shocking that is " it prompted the Guardian to proclaim in this article, “Japan beat South Africa in greatest Rugby World Cup shock ever”.
Hughes: “The magic in online travel is the nuance, it’s a game of inches.”
Hughes had watched the match in an Irish bar in Bangkok, surrounded by every nationality except Japanese. “We all just hugged each other, we were so happy for the Japanese.”
And that to Hughes is what online travel is all about " a game of inches. “The magic in online travel is the nuance, it’s a game of inches. The core of every OTA is the same " get customer to site, convert, repeat. The winner is the one who can exploit the difference, and can consistently do that and do that a lot.”
Hughes, who had his own blog, BOOT (Business Of Online Travel), before he came to Bangkok to join Agoda, said technology had delivered a lot of what it had promised in providing more options to more customers. At the same time, it has made travel distribution more complex with different types of intermediaries and shifting business models.
For instance, meta-searches now offer instant booking which means they are bleeding into the OTA space. Agoda pulled out its content from Trivago two months ago, for instance. At the time, CEO Rob Rosenstein said Agoda regularly reviews its performance marketing channels and cuts “the least attractive ones now and then to remain focused.”
Hughes also spoke of how the rise of online travel changed broke the link between how consumers research and how they book travel.
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