Where is the future of travel agents?

A dead-end or a detour?

There is a great debate about the future of travel agents as it has become easier, faster and cheaper for consumers to buy their travel online. While the debate focuses on what can traditional travel agents can do to compete with OTA (Online Travel Agents) and survive in the industry, both are facing the same problem in the long-term: the declining perceived value of their services, the specialized information from which they derive their revenue, as that information becomes increasingly more localized, relevant and current on the Internet. Viewed from that angle, OTA are actually worse off than traditional travel agents as they compete within the same realm than the free specialized information lives in, while the traditional agents retain the advantage of the personal contact dimension with customers. But traditional travel agents face another problem: as there is nothing to physically deliver to the customer any more as tickets, hotel bookings and travel insurance contracts are all delivered electronically, there is no compelling reason for the customer to visit their store or office.

A short history of tourism through words

The guides really dressed up back then!

A good way to check the popularity of something is to count how often people talk about it or write about it, sort of like the trending hashtags on Twitter. If you want to see the trending over several decades, way before the Internet, then the best place to look for words would be in books! Google has indexed over 5 millions books going back a couple centuries and they have a really cool application called “Ngram” which lets you plot the frequency of usage of a word over a long period of time. To better grasp the concept, try the words “war” and “peace”, or “internet”, the graphs will be very obvious to understand.

Destination Thailand: steal market share while they are not looking!

Photo credit: Johan Fantenberg

With the street political protests reaching 200 days, now exceeding that of the 2010 political crisis, with no indication of a resolution in the near future, and the peak tourist season over, destination Thailand is likely to remain depressed through 2014. Visitor numbers and hotel occupancy remained at record low levels throughout the peak tourist season with little hope for improvement going into the low season. Compounding the problem is the marketing void in originating markets caused by the major travel brands shifting their promotion budgets to more predictable alternate destinations.

But this state of affairs unexpectedly benefit both the smaller operators and independent hotels in Thailand and the independent travel agents in the originating markets as the field is left wide open by the large travel brands as they sidelined destination Thailand to shift their focus on other destinations. In good times, it is very difficult and expensive for the small businesses to compete effectively for market share against their larger competitors, so the misfortune of Thailand tourism becomes an opportunity to reach potential visitors who would normally be drawn to the major travel brands by their highly visible marketing.