Post-the Abacus International Conference in Seoul in which it told its agent customers of the trends changing the travel business, WIT decided to ask a senior agency owner how he feels about the changes and how he thinks traditional travel agents should respond.

He wishes to remain unidentified but we believe his views are representative of those held by brick-and-mortar agents across Asia which are struggling to remain relevant in an age of consumer technology.

(Abacus’ Brett Henry explaining a new solution to a customer in Seoul)

Q: Having listened to Abacus talk about all the changes happening in online and mobile, and social media, how does that make you feel?

I believe this is an important wake-up call to all traditional travel agencies owners and senior management who have not yet gotten their internet or mobile solutions ready, to urgently have a well-planned, strongly focused and effective response to the changing business landscape.

Otherwise, these ‘old fashioned’ travel agencies may become marginalised and lose their customers to the new players in the travel industry like OTAs, LCC, Airlines direct websites, and even Group Buying Deals websites.  Essentially, the game has been changed.

With the advancement of technology, new computers, enhanced internet functionalities, faster bandwidths, fiber optic, 4Gs, smart phones, etc, consumers are indeed rapidly changing in the way and manner that they reseach and buy their travel products and experiences.

Online websites and mobile websites serve to provide cheap, easy and convenient ways for consumers to book their travel. Social media websites serve to influence the consumers on where to go and who to buy from. So if the traditional travel agencies still do not embrace and participate effectively in the new changing landscape, then they may find themselves similar to the traditional provision shops, CD music stores and traditional bookstores whereby fewer and fewer customers will walk into their stores or buy from their business everyday. Gradually they will become irrelevant to the customers who want new options.

Q: What does it make you want to do?

It motivates me to want to quickly work with the Team Abacus to incorporate all their latest innovative products into my existing business environment and workflow so that I will be able to improve my company’s overall business productivity and efficiency. With these new enhanced productivity tools, I will then be able to compete more effectively with bigger OTAs because I will be deploying similar technology automation and booking tools as these big OTAs.

Q:  What should travel agents who don’t have an Internet presence do? Should they go straight to mobile?

I believe that as a business, we must always make the widest provision and accommodation for our customers to buy from us in all ways and manners. So we must have fax machines for old fashioned customers and we must have call centers, emails, internet booking engines, mobile-enabled websites, convenient store locations in shopping centers and whatever other formats that customers wish to use to transact with us. It will thus depend on the consumers’ buying pattern, preferred choice of booking methods, culture of the country and location of the travel business.

Thus the question of whether they should go straight to mobile will have to be answered in light of who is their target audience and what are the objectives they want to achieve. If these traditional agencies intend to aggressively target all the smart phone users and if there is a very large base out there, then the answer would be YES, they should give urgency to creating their mobile solution.

In this manner, these traditional travel agencies can develop the most strategic and easy-to-use mobile websites and perhaps they can buy SMS data mining with telcos to identify who are those smart phone customers who had purchased overseas data roaming services over the past several months as these are their most likely target audience to work on if these traditional travel agencies decide to focus on a mobile target audience.

Q: Do you think mobile is the one area traditional travel agents have a chance to compete against the pure online travel agents?

I feel that mobile, computers, internet, telephones, fax machines are all just alternative methods of making a travel booking.

I feel that the key differentiators to attract customers and to compete with the OTAs are the attractiveness of the prices, the deals, the value adds, and also the design of the mobile website itself. If all these components are present, then the traditional travel agencies would be essentially doing similar things to what the OTAs are doing and that by itself will enable the traditional travel agents to compete more meaningfully and effectively with the pure online travel agents.

Basically one of the key objective of OTAs are to capture a large market share and so besides, call centers and internet websites, mobile is just one of the avenues to grow their market share.

Of course, having large sum of marketing dollars to throw at the story would definitely be helpful too.

Q: Dan Lynn (CEO, AirAsia Expedia) in his talk said travel agents should not compete with OTAs on price and choice, but on details – why customers use you. What do you think? How can travel agents compete in this changing times? 

I believe that there is much wisdom in what Dan Lynn said about focusing on your strengths instead of competing in your areas of weakness.  This is like in the Olympics, the greatest Olympian would not do as well if he has to compete at high jump instead of swimming. So we must stay focused, identify our own areas of strength and to compete in our areas of strength.

However, I am a little concerned with his comments that travel agencies should not compete with OTAs on price and choice. Basically there are only a finite number of customers out there and generally more or less, we are all selling to the same group of customers. It is a zero sum game. If we are not going to compete in a meaningful manner with likewise products, comparable prices and choice offerings, then we will be out of the game. When I am buying any products myself, I would also choose to buy from the store who give me the best deals in term of the latest models, the best prices, the widest choices and the best service.

So if traditional travel agencies do not also compete aggressively with OTAs on prices and choices or any other areas that these OTAs do so well in, then why would any customers buy from them? I feel that to some extent, it may be necessary to go head on with the OTAs so that the traditional travel agencies do not become pushovers. Like they say, it is not the size of the dog in the fight but it is the size of the fight in the dog that matters.