

The Rise of the Online Vacation Agency - kmax12
http://blog.kangacruise.com/2012/10/the-rise-of-the-online-vacation-agency/

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malandrew
I'd love to see something for longer trips that can be modified on the fly.
I've done three 1-month long trips in my life where I went from city to city.
They required a lot of planning and research, but often while traveling you'd
learn of new options and have to quickly plan to incorporate those experiences
into your current itinerary. Being able to quickly adjust your itinerary of a
multi-hop vacation while en route would be nice.

Related to this would be a nearest neighbor point of interest discovery tool.
Often its easy to find what is interesting to do in a particular location, but
its much more difficult to explore options that are a day trip to an overnight
trip away from that anchor point. My experience has been that the day trips or
overnight trips with a return to the origin point at the most memorable.

Some examples:

\-- Vacationing in Praia do Forte in Bahia, but taking a day trip to Mangue
Seco.

\-- Passing through São Luis do Maranhão and taking a three day trip to
Barreirinhas, and from Barreirinhas, taking a day trip to Lençois Maranheses.

\-- Day trip to Interloken from Zürich (I wish we had done an overnight trip,
but we didn't plan on that and missed out)

\-- Day trip from Amsterdam to a spa by the beach (unlike the other three,
this one was not worth it and I wish I had known that before)

At the end of the day a great vacation often resembles a bunch of nodes in a
graph, with edges being formed on the basis of financial cost, time cost and
value of that destination/activity/hotel/restaurant to me. Find me the best
route between node A and node B in the graph that maximizes happiness
(According to my criteria) while minimizing cost and travel time.

Another reason it's valuable for this to be centralized is that it avoids the
issue of being sent to some boring activity or place because you don't know
that the local person may be recommending a venue on the basis that its his
brother or cousins business. This happens surprisingly often.

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colinsidoti
Author here. This is a somewhat of a follow on to another article, "Innovation
in the Cruise industry... Where is it?" that you might also find interesting:
[http://blog.kangacruise.com/2012/09/innovation-in-the-
cruise...](http://blog.kangacruise.com/2012/09/innovation-in-the-cruise-
industry-where-is-it/)

Happy to get a little more into the specifics if anyone's interested. It took
us a long time to get out of the "better ui, kill the travel agent" mindset
that's prevalent among travel startups. The greater complexity of vacation
sales really seems to throw most of the precedent set by online travel
agencies (Expedia) and meta-searches (Kayak) out the window.

~~~
aed
Colin - this is awesome and I just recently began working on an idea based on
many of the same observations you've made. Just shot you an email to the
contact@ address!

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unreal37
I haven't used a travel agent in about 10 years, and I vacation 2-3 times a
year. Not sure how they can justify that vacations are not booked online. In
fact, no one asks me when I am booking a flight or hotel online whether it is
for business or vacation...

I guess if you are looking into pre-packaged resorts, where its a charter
plane, resort, and even airport transfers included (Transat Vacations, Sunwing
Vacations, etc) then maybe that's true that people still us agents for
those... I still see agents advertising those in malls.

But I bet that segment of the market is declining year over year for the past
10 years. So yes, its a low percentage of a shrinking market.

As for cruises, the market is still overwhelmingly older and retired
people[1]. Another market it will be hard to disrupt with technology.

Not to be all pessimistic, but there's a reason things are the way they are I
guess.

[1] <http://www.cruisemarketwatch.com/market/>

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dagw
The market that I still see isn't pre-packaged, but custom packaged. When you
have 7 people flying from 3 different air ports, need reservations various
restaurant for three evenings and tickets to particular sporting event.
Companies that can fix all that and more with one super efficient point of
contact still offer value that many people are willing to pay extra for.

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Agent99
I’ve booked family cruise vacations each of the last 5 years. Each year I’ve
done all the research online including deciding on point of departure, cruise
line and the specific ship on sites such as expedia, vacations to go, and the
individual cruise line websites. Despite this online research, I still book
with a travel agent because they seem able to match or beat online prices,
book multiple rooms near each other, and sometimes obtain larger room credits.
If it were possible to accomplish all of the above without an agent at a lower
cost I would do so.

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jph
I love this idea and fully agree with it. My friends are currently planning a
vacation for a large group of us, which involves flights, hotels, and events,
as well as coming up with options for a range of budgets, interests, and
family needs like child care. Online vacation agencies would be a huge help
and well worth paying IMHO.

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fingerprinter
Two thoughts

1\. I worked for a cruise booking company (a deplorable company and industry,
just FYI, but that is a story for another day). I wrote their systems for
integrating with Sabre and then the UI. The industry just plain sucks. The
scams, the "discounts", the different prices. Not to mention that getting the
data is a nightmare (it might have changed, I've been out of that for some
time now). I honestly felt terrible about what I did nearly everyday. There
was always "another tweak" to get more money out of the customer, some
additional fee or service charge. It was unbelievable.

I don't know kangacruise and I wish them luck. I hope they can wade through
the crap industry and make a nice experience that gets the user a fair price.

2\. In the past 5 years I've taken at least 3 vacations a year plus at least
10-15 business trips. Conservatively, say 35 trips, many of them
international. Not once did I consult a travel agent. I considered it once for
a more involved trip, but when I saw that they weren't really bringing much to
the table, I left and did it all myself. It wasn't hard. Perhaps having to
loop in three different sites is annoying, but unless there was an overly
compelling reason to use a travel agent, I wouldn't even consider it.

At this point in time, I feel travel agents are mostly for older folks or
someone with more money than sense. I don't know if you can actually create a
market (yes, I feel you would have to create it...it wouldn't form naturally)
which is always an uphill battle.

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tstegart
Are you sure people don't book a vacation online? It seems the weakest part of
the argument. I booked my last vacation almost completely online, albeit from
different vendors. The flight was booked online, then the hotel (also online),
and finally my car, online. The only time I've used a travel agent is when I
travel to places that aren't online, such as Kenya, where I needed a local
agent to find a driver and map out a route.

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enjo
They cited numbers, and I tend to believe them. Particularly for certain
segments (like cruises). We booked a cruise in 2011 and it most definitely
required an agent. There are just to many options and to much to weed through,
the agents (who are free for me to use even) are just too easy for such a
vacation.

I'm not even sure this is something that _needs_ to be disrupted. My
experience with actual people for booking these things has been fantastic.
It's low stakes and relatively easy...I'm not sure online is better.

~~~
fooandbarify
If you look at the linked report it says that online segments are growing in
all of air, rail, car rentals and hotels--"vacations" are just not growing as
a segment online. I think what tstegart might be saying is that it's not
obvious which aspects of "vacation" are left, when all of those pieces can be
booked individually.

I agree with regard to whether or not this needs to be disrupted--I do some
work for a local travel agency and the level of service they provide is
remarkable (it would be very difficult for me to save money by booking the
same trips myself online, without even accounting for the time it would take
me).

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Tichy
To me planning holidays is hell. How do you come up with places to travel to?
So I think this makes sense, naturally I think about it every time I have to
plan a new vacation.

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abhimir
You guys might want to check out cruisewise.com, they have been doing
something very similar

