I guess if someone had been asked 20 years ago what an OTA 1 might look like, few people would have the answer – until Booking and Expedia did it in 1996 and Ctrip followed in 1999, and showed the way.

It’s a testament to these three that two decades on, they are still on top of their game and ruling the online travel industry which, according to Phocuswright, made up $638 billion of the $1.4 trillion gross travel bookings in 2018.

By any standard, it’s still a small share of the total market so there’s plenty of headroom for growth for the trio, as well as the numerous other players that have made and, in some cases, barged their way into the industry.

WiT Singapore 2019 theme urges the industry to take a bird’s eye view of trends and imagine what the future of travel will look like in the next decade.

So when John Wroughton Brown, CEO of Agoda, was asked at the first Skift Forum Asia held this week in Singapore what OTA 4.0 would look like, as he spoke about the evolution of the OTA model from 1.0 to 2.0 and now at 3.0, he was honest enough to say he didn’t know.

What’s clear is, it will look very different from what it is today and if it took more than 20 years to get from 1.0 to 3.0, 4.0 will happen way sooner and, to all intents and purposes, it is already taking shape before our very eyes – just that usually at the moment when history is being made, we rarely see it except on hindsight.

So let’s take a bird’s eye view of the industry as it stands today and extrapolate current trends into the future into what could be – which, by the way, is the theme of the WiT Singapore conference happening Oct 14-16: “2020 and Beyond: A Bird’s Eye View”.

The OTA is not dead. It will just look different.

First up, the good news. The OTA is not dead. It will just look very different as each find their own path, whether with better tech, new verticals or new customer segments or an all-in-one model.

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