Some of my takeaways from Google I/Os announcements last week. It is totally clear that travel search and inspiration is going to completely change in coming years. I can’t imagine a world where this doesn’t totally shift. And OTAs are going to be challenged in the process.
The biggest change I think is that travel research starts becoming assembled. What I mean is: inspiration, comparison, itinerary planning, reminders, (possibly even booking), travel delays and small decisions all start getting pulled into one flow.
Agents can research a full itinerary for a 5 day trip with the family in London. And it can be iterated on. Or it can propose 5 totally different itineraries and the family votes on one. Currently it will be full of errors (I tried a few times) but soon it wont. And in any case, the main structure of the travel plan is now settled, i.e. discovery is done.
Next the family organizer or the tech savvy kid can generate a small apps or widgets around that trip. A family itinerary that keeps track of flights, delays, weather, bookings, activities and changes in one place. High-end travel organizers do this already, and as with most technological innovation, it democratizes luxury lifestyle.
The universal shopping cart has a huge potential. Could it finally solve complete itinerary booking? I’m optimistic, but I also know this is a much harder problem to solve than online retail. Putting a hotel, flight, activity and spa treatment into one cart would be amazing but I realize it is also one of those problems where the last ten percent is actually ninety percent of the work.
Still, the direction is important. If the browser, Google account and AI assistant become the place where the itinerary inspiration and planning lives, which seems inevitable, then it changes how discovery happens completely. When I wrote about OTAs becoming the plumbing that was what I meant.
Yes, Expedia has flights, hotels, cars and they have lots of experience in this space. Probably more than any other major OTA. If they can build their own agent, adding activities they would have a pretty solid system.
Booking has a lot of the data, but fragmented in multiple areas, Kayak, RentalCars, and a lot of it is just meta-search which is painful to manage all the way to booking. They can build and scale as they’ve proven when their decided to take on Airbnb and build their own appartment rentals.
Speaking of Airbnb, they might have the strongest play in actually building the system they’ve clearly seen the problem with AI bookings and they know how to create great user experiences. But they don’t have near as much data as Expedia and Booking, and they’ve never shown a huge ability to API and partner with other industries, though they seem to be working on that.
None of this is settled yet. But in my view there’s no way that search continues to be what it currently is. Some have argued that there’s nothing wrong with Flight search today, so why use AI search. I guess the same could have been said 30 years ago when we could just call a travel agent.
