Somewhere between the Thanksgiving turkey and the last of the leftovers, the following analogy hit me:
- In 2005, travel metasearch is to consumers as GDS's were to travel agencies in the late 1970's.
The rationale? Both carved out a must have status for themselves among a majority of their constituents.
By the end of the 1970's, a majority of travel agencies either had GDS access on their agents' desks or were on their way to getting it. This necessity of GDS capabilities was based on two key value propositions for the agents -- the ability to instantaneously view and comparison shop thousands of suppliers' products all over the world and the ability to sell those suppliers' products in a highly productive manner (vs. phone, mail, fax, etc.).
Likewise, love 'em or hate 'em, use 'em or dis 'em, search engines deliver the same capabilities to consumers (I'm constantly reminded of a Forrester Research presentation over a decade ago at which an analyst stated that the greatest change brought about by the Internet would be "consumer empowerment"... what an understatement that has turned out to be!).
Even as online agencies criticize it in all its forms (see Priceline CEO Jeffrey Boyd's comments at PhoCusWright in Dennis Schaal's Travel Weekly article), they have no choice but to invest heavily in search themselves. Not doing so would, in effect, be waving the white flag of surrender to suppliers for an already large and growing segment of the consumer direct channel.
At this point, I could make the case that travel sellers may be in the process of exchanging the devil they think they know (GDSs) for the devil they don't (keyword costs) but will save that for another post... or not. That argument may already be moot or, as the popular idiom goes, that train has already left the station.
Time, and consumers themselves, will tell.
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