Not all aspects of the move towards Uberfied industry are applicable to tourism and hospitality, according to a debate held at the ITB Convention in Berlin.
The debate, moderated by Gene Quinn, CEO and co-founder of Tnooz, looked at what consolidation would mean for surviving OTAs. Quinn opened the debate with a brief talk about the new reality of the tourism industry.
He said the starting points were mobile meeting omni-channel selling; the enablement of new players, products, and models due to technology; the emergence of the API economy; an evolution in the distribution landscape, and the evolving of the travel merchandising.
Looking ahead to the future, Quinn said, “The distribution landscape will evolve in a way we could never have predicted 25 years ago when the Internet first hit.”
Leith Stevens, vice-president of business development at Actourex, said said that expecting a technological innovation like Uber to revolutionise the hotel industry may be a fallacy. He said, “You need transport and lodging everywhere. It's a commodity. I would use Uber almost anywhere where it's offered. But buying tours and activities are different. If I want to go to an art museum or a theme park, it's a different experience and they are different products.”
He added, “People engage in tours and activities once or twice a year so building a brand is expensive. Uber and AirBnB are not technological innovations. They've really brought together some APIs that already existed. But the real innovation was connecting two people that hadn't connected before in a reliable way. Can that happen for us on a global scale? Maybe it can't.”
Quinn and Stevens were joined on stage by Riko van Santen, vice-president of digital strategy and distribution for Kempinski Hotels; and Raphael Klingmann, co-founder of Xapix.io.
Van Santen said that Kempinski Hotels had done work in reassessing what a customer loyalty program should consist of. The result of this has been that the chain has moved away from the 'free night's stay' offer that had been commonplace to a more experiential offer.
He said that this move was something that customers wanted, adding, “With the new social media landscape, we want our guests to be our loyalty ambassadors. We don't think the free night is something people want to share but an experience is.
So instead of giving a free night, we want to give them an experience. With social media, they can share it and be the brand ambassadors. We really rely more on user-generated content to do that.”
The speakers were also asked to give their predictions of where the industry would be three years from now. Stevens predicted that companies like Uber would continue to expand into arranging activities. “They'll be starting to look into the distribution points for tours activities,” he said,
“and the many ways that they can be accessed by travelling customers. I would like to see those tours and activities not just ancillary, but more core. The big thing that needs to change is that we need to be able to do that at the last minute. No one wants to book an outdoor activity if it might be raining.”
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