A guest blog by Prasanna Veeraswamy, Head of Products – Hotels, Cleartrip.com
A decade and a half ago, when the first set of OTAs (Online Travel Aggregators/Agents) were born, travel planners were suddenly empowered with tools that enabled them to do all kinds of hotel and flight bookings without going to a traditional travel agent, while still being able to secure the best deal via comparison shopping. After a few years however, this gave birth to a unique problem of having to search in multiple OTAs to find the best offer since a deal may be found in one aggregator but not necessarily all others. It became difficult, especially for deal hunters – to find the best deal available.
Thus, metasearch was born. Metasearch platforms like Kayak, Skyscanner, Trivago and others started providing a consolidated view of search results that compared travel products across OTAs and hotel brand owners, giving a fast and comprehensive view of product choice and almost instantaneous purchasing option.
All problems solved? Unfortunately not. The advent of metasearch did help users by providing one-stop shopping, but soon, they also started breeding like rabbits! Many clones were available executing a similar functionality, but starting to show strong disparities in the prices they fetched. So, a user now had to look up multiple metasearch engines to pick the best offer! So, eventually they didn’t completely resolve the laboriousness of online travel booking – especially around the hotel/accommodation space.
Both OTAs and metasearch platforms that target hotel bookings bewilder the users with an overwhelming list of choices. It is also not easy for users to careully select and book based on the overall experience the property offers as comparisons are usually restricted to price or special offers and promotions.
In my opinion, it is time for the metasearch industry to grow up. Below are some of the areas of innovation I can think can lead to the next stage in the evolution:
Go beyond price
Not everyone wants to book a hotel based on the best deal or the lowest rates. Metsearch engines should therefore focus instead on comparisons of the overall product rather than on price alone. Differences in the actual product should be highlighted in a better way – not just through filters. Various aspects of the hotel, such as what the hotel offers for business travellers, romantic travellers etc., can be compared as well.
Go beyond plain user reviews and ratings
Evolve the meta-reviews further. Instead of just showing raw reviews, start comparing and ranking accommodations based on their meta-review aspects like Location, Amenities etc. (Trust You already provides such ratings).
Get more personal
Understand consumer behaviours to boost hotel bookings. Present to the user only a targeted shortlist through which they can then systematically filter through to find a hotel that suits their specific taste. Replacing the completely impersonalised and largely unorganised list with a highly relevant & recommended set would give users relief from decision-making fatigue.
Tap into the power of machine learning
Understand natural language queries. When someone types in a request for a “boutique hotel in Barcelona that’s great for families, close to the best tourist attractions and has in-room Wi-Fi”, the system should offer a perfect match that meets these preferences.
Integrate personalisation and machine learning
Replace limited search filters with refined query-based system upon accuracy and relevance; focus more on quality instead of quantity. In other words, don’t overwhelm the customer with too many choices. This point is actually well articulated by Derek Halpern in his article Social Triggers, in which he demonstrates how offering too many choices can actually overwhelm customers and prevent them from buying.
Rate the provider/supplier
Instead of just showing all the deals offered by various suppliers, start informing the user on the rating of each supplier based on the overall experience they provided to the user for a booking
Some metasearches actually rank the offers based on the supplier’s performance, but this is quite opaque at this point and more tied to the benefit of the metasearch (like commission rate, liquidation prospect etc.,) than focusing on the user experience. There should be an indicator for how good a supplier is (like how Amazon.com does for their marketplace vendors, so that the users can order only from a trusted vendor though there might be cheaper deals offered by an unreliable vendor).
• Featured image credit: RiSem/iStock
