The net is great for one-shot travel services, like booking a budget airline seat with Easyjet. You know what to expect from the moment you go online to book the flight to the moment you get off the plane at your destination. We all know what a plane does so there’s no expectations to manage there.
Similarly, if you’re booking a hotel with a specific chain, like the Hyatt or Hilton, then it’s pretty easy to choose a room, look at the photos, read the info, and feel generally assured by the brand name that you’re going to get something decent for your money. Similarly, using airfare aggregators works well because all airlines are pretty similar – it’s an almost identical product offered by lots of companies who compete on price or service.
Where the net breaks down with travel is in managing complexity. Take finding a hotel room in an unfamiliar city when you can’t afford to stay at the Hilton, which I tried to do recently for Hanoi in Vietnam. I want to take my girlfriend there for a romantic weekend but we’re pretty poor right now…so, off to the Net to find me a bargain hotel.
Search for “Hanoi hotels” on Google and you’ll get scores of aggregator hotel sites like hotelclub.com or tripadvisor.com. That theoretically saves me some time. But… they all feature different hotels. And they don’t have clear information about each hotel. The photos are tiny or non-existent. It’s not clear which photo is of the superior room and which one is of the deluxe room. And sometimes you can find the same hotel at different prices on two different sites. In short – there’s no definitive travel site to which you can go.
Straight away, the user is plunged into a stressful and complex situation. We all want to get the best deal, but now we’re stuck schlepping between sites trying to find the best value for money, but on this site the photos are better while on that sire it’s cheaper. Then there are customer comments, which I personally place great store by in terms of judging a hotel. But there needs to be a volume of comments for them to be useful. Hotel listings are usually so lacking in basic photos of each of their room types and facilities, that I have little confidence in any of them. It’s frankly shocking that in 2005, hotels still allow themselves to be represented online like this. Bottom line – selecting a hotel can become an arduous, time-consuming process.
Even when you do select the hotel, most aggregator sites only provide very limited direct booking i.e. you can’t purchase your room there and then. You have to go through a laborious process of sending your application in and being informed by email 24 hours later whether or not you’ve got the room. This causes even more stress, especially if you’re trying to book during a peak time. After going through the laborious process of selecting a hotel, you’re then told you can’t have it.
I’ve recently suffered a couple of shocking online hotel bookings where the actual booking process was quite smooth but when we arrived at the hotel on both occasions we found it to be a building site. Or rather, one was a building site and one hadn’t been fully rebuilt adter being damaged in the tsunami last year. Was there a single mention of this on either aggregator site I booked with – one of whom was Expedia? No. Was there any mention by the real, human staff I talked to by email to make my booking about this? No. No doubt the aggregator would blame it on the hotel for not notifying them, and the hotel would blame the aggregator for not asking for updated information, but, frankly, I don’t care. I don’t care about the chain of command of how I book my hotel. All I know is I’ve paid good money upfront and I’m standing in the middle of a building site. [N.B. Expedia offered a US$25 voucher as compenssation when we complained, which was frankly insulting].
So, what can be done? The fact that Google and Yahoo seem to be about to make major moves into the travel sector bodes well for whittling down this complexity. It strikes me the aggregators need to be aggregated – if you look around at these sites, you soon realise it’s the same handful of databases that are underlying virtually all of them. Get all those together on one site would help.
But the most crucial part is also the least sexy part – making sure all the information on the site is up to date and comprehensive and leaves no room for confusion about what you get for your money and what your room looks like. Because if the customer feels secure that they know what they’re getting, they are much more likely to buy. Hotels need to stop the “will this do?” mentality they seem to have towards representing themselves online and go the extra distance to reassure visitors. What pains me here is that it’s easy for hotels to ensure this information is in place – all it requires is a bit of thought from people at the hotel and the aggregator to see their own online offerings from the customer’s perspective and how they use it. This rehacking and enhancing of existing services should be the definition of Web 2.0. Forget mashups and other prettily useless applicatons – let’s worry about how to get all the right information to the user in an easily digestible format.
Perhaps travel aggregation needs to be approached from a different angle, because aggregator sites are all pretty awful anyway. Perhaps someone like Google or Yahoo needs to take on the Herculean task of building a centralised, global hotel booking database that creates the information about hotels itself rather than relying on the hotels themselves to provide poor photos and copy. If Amazon can take millions of store photos for A9, it seems to me that the idea of a giant hotel database from Yahoo or Google isn’t so farfetched. Perhaps it would start off as a meta-aggregator and then shape and replace the info in its own mould over time. Perhaps it would be Internet Connected Components, bringing together several services into one wholly integrated model, This is in part what aggregators are doing already – but a new version needs to continually pare down the information on offer. Provide less sources but more quality information. I don’t need infinite choice, I need 5 good choices I can trust.
Moreover, if Google or Yahoo could provide a booking engine that is super simple for individual hotels to plug into and offer direct booking, the shift in online booking revenue would be vast. Add to that engine the usual customer comments and Flickr like photo sharing of that hotel, and you start to get to something interesting.
Most importantly, it’s got to be simple. The problem with most aggregator sites at the moment is that they are a barely controlled riot on the webpage. Kayak.com‘s relatively new offering is a lot easier on the eye, but it’s an exception. Usually, there are so many options and links, most of which that go through to another aggregator partner or whatever. There’s very little tailored help with solving a specific query. I want a hotel search like Google’s front page. I want to be able to go a site and type in “Hanoi”, “$60 or less” and the dates I need, and get back a list of the Top 10 rated hotels in that price range by customers and by the aggregator staff themselves, with nice big clear photos of each room and the bathroom, all the location details, breakfast, facilities etc, and then press a big red button saying Buy Online Now!. And I also want a guarantee that if I get there and they are drilling large hole in the room next door, that I am going to get a full refund and an upgrade to compensate me for my inconvenience. All the hotel has to do then is deliver on what they’ve promised me on the webpage. Which shouldn’t be difficult, because that’s their business.
Web users need a travel site they can trust to give them the right information and the best deals to ensure they get what they pay for. It’s a very simple concept that clearly needs a lot of effort to execute properly – the only baffling thing is that it hasn’t happened already. There must be thousands of people just like me who get frustrated at trying to find and book a hotel bargain online – and a huge amount of money not getting spent in the process.
[End note: I am now going to try something technologically clever. I'm going to link to Microsoft blogger Robert Scoble and see if he notices this post by picking it up in his RSS feeds. Mr Scoble has written some great stuff recently about disruption and influentials in the tech industry - I'm hoping he might notice this post, agree with some of my points and wave it under someone's nose at MSN. Worth a try...]
More on online hotel booking:
Spike | Google | Amazon UK | Amazon US | Wikipedia
Open Directory | Technorati: online hotel booking
