Over the last couple of years travel experts (including me) have been looking for the holy grail that meet all the requirements we have invented through decades of moving people around the globe. With more than 4.5 billion passengers (2 billion return trips) in the air in 2019 one should believe we have critical mass available.
Reading through thousands of articles, many books and working with companies should have brought me on track to dig out exactly that holy grail buried in trillion of data and dollars. To my deep regrets I have not been able to find it and even less able to locate it.
What is the business?
On the physical side we do not produce any physical products. The only physical actions are the individual traveller (alone or with co-travellers) fighting to arrive at an airport, bus or train station. They have to move through a huge mass of people with luggage until it is transferred to an airline representative, on a shelf or luggage room to get spied on by security and finally enter some kind of tube (plane, wagon or bus) and be treated like cattle on to the next green field to grass. The reverse happens at the destination.
The rest is simply managing bits.
The food chain involves million of people serving these valuable travellers on their trip. At the destination even more millions of people serve the traveller bringing them to their accommodation and the millions serve them there. Decades ago the industry at least handled paper in various forms from valuable (like tickets) for information. Now the only physical paper may be a print-out the traveller brought; everything is in the smartphone.
Why is the outside world dangerous?
The industry tends to look inwards and over the decades few have reviewed and changed infrastructure, let alone invite the outside world in. Layers after layers have been added due to the complexity of the technology and the seemingly endless need for daily experts to support the staff being in contact with the customers.
This has created companies with a silo management structure where people defend their turf and avoid sharing wisdom or listening to others. The one with the biggest hammer wins and they only see nails not people.
What is beyond the gate?
Thousands of industries have evolved since they started; from inventing the wheel through the industrial revolution to today's robotic manufacturing and process-oriented world. Huge systems handle products from being ordered by customers or suppliers and delivered to where needed. This happens from human needs like groceries to producing food, smartphones and rockets.
In all these industries we have seen constant product improvement, costs being eliminated and prices going down through science like LEAN, robots and people inventions.
The travel industry takes for granted that producing the tubes, luggage and the baggage carousels simply just happens, are there and available. We rarely appreciate all the thinking, manufacturing and invention going into these products and in general we look at ourselves as the people knowing it all because we are in contact with the customers.
We call all the other service points names like accommodation, ground transportation, flight service, meet and great and concierge. Why do we act like this? Because the actual cost of transportation originally far exceeded all the other cost elements.
I find it disturbing that the value brought to the traveller now comes from companies like Google. Most other players build on the same technology available for decades and surrounded by fringes of good and bad secondary inventions.
Over the last years we have seen the rise of new tools in hundreds of articles that are seen as part of the holy grail. However, have they really made an impact?
- Do travellers experience more user-friendly tools? We constantly hear about the rogue traveller
- Do we provide immediate overview to the customers? Do we use the data intelligent enough? I believe most companies use their data a couple of times a year and still talk about D and Z classes.
- Do we really deliver duty of care to the traveller? What happens if the electricity and mobile network stops working at the destination?
- Leisure travellers are mostly on their own and they buy direct from many suppliers because it is cheaper, and they feel more secure doing that. Yes, there are successful travel agencies and tour operators catering mostly to the grey gold, MICE and adventure. They will have at least one or two decades until the millennium generation replaces the baby boomer
We know that marketing and selling services, from hotels to my own apartment on Airbnb, are really expensive even as we only talk about exchange of bytes. The OTA, metasearch engines and other intermediaries rely on this high income and need it. The companies transporting people spend huge amounts in marketing today but only pay a fraction to their intermediary, while paying huge amounts to distribute one seat to a traveller.
Over the years we have become safe in our own wisdom of knowing it all
We have made a large number of federations with the purpose of sharing information, but more often than not we just confirm that the existing wisdom is good enough and we know how to act in this environment. In the corporate world the buyer is king/queen and their federations really try to locate know-how and share it with the members, but often ends up being content with the small steps available from the retailers and suppliers.
Every year these federations (both buyers and suppliers) arrange hundreds of local, international and global conferences with the aim to present new products and ideas, share wisdom but most important network and show you are alive. Rarely has a CEO from the car industry been invited to talk about their "food chain". I wonder how many travel CEOs have visited a steel mill or locomotive factory perhaps even Boeing or Airbus.
I believe we will face so many challenges ahead including the level of pollution the industry generates to the education and management of all the dedicated people working here. This must force all the leaders to rethink and change their existing structures.
This can only happen if the courage is there to accept that there is a huge knowledge base outside the gates. By opening them and learning from the world of other industries, you (and not Google or Amazon) may find the holy grail.
Start by unlocking the gate
- Steal talent from other industries and not just from your competitors.
- Share more best practices, it does not risk competitiveness. Industries like car manufacturing have done it for decades.
- Leave your comfort zone and visit developing countries and see for yourself where they skip technology steps ie Kenya with their ingenious payment system.
- Dare experimenting. Identify your naysayers, create groups and give them free autonomy to experiment and create alternative projects and processes.
- Leave your travel federations and enter industrious with many different industries represented.
- Introduce the word: WHY. Start with Why are we doing what we do?