The pendulum has swung so far in the DTC camp, one could argue it really stands for “Difficult to Compare.” Consumers want choice; they need it to feel confident in their decisions. But — and this is important — they don’t want to waste their time and attention trying to understand the value of hundreds of options. That’s why they use retailers like Amazon and Alibaba that offer comparison charts, recommendation engines, and granular filtering. Imagine you went to the grocery store, and there were 500 types of mac-and-cheese products on the shelves — all different sizes, prices, and flavors. Talk about analysis paralysis.
The travel industry is the latest to adopt this DTC drive. And with good intentions: airlines want to own the end-to-end customer journey so they can use that data to refine their product offering and drive revenue. As the leaders in modern retailing, we are all leaned in on the industry’s digital transformation, and we are also aggressively innovating NDC solutions in a way that best supports all of our customers on the supply and demand sides (more on that later). However, for the industry’s digital transformation to be successful, we believe this drive cannot be at the cost of putting consumers first, or in our case, the traveler. Our role as a marketplace technology is to present our customers and their customers with confidence in the choices presented.
It is unrealistic to assume travelers will abide by a tax on their time and attention by trying to compare multiple versions of “premium economy,” infinite pairings of timings and price, and over 10,000 branded products from the world’s top 250 airlines. That’s not an exaggeration. In fact, our industry has gone from offering 500 products in 2010 to 10,000 in 2024, according to Travelport estimates. And as a result, today, travelers are visiting up to 277 webpages before booking a trip, compared to just 38 websites in 2013. We believe there is a better, easier, and more profitable way to manage and present multi-source content. After all, Jeff Bezos is somewhere on a yacht right now because he made it easy for consumers to compare apples to oranges in an apples-to-apples way.
