I wrote recently questioning the value of FAM trips given the amount of information readily available on the internet. Your prospective customers can access a whole wealth of holiday information from time zones, to the best place to exchange currency right down to which room number to request in a hotel.
All this fine detail is available to all and yet I still maintained that the FAM trip has value to a travel agent because your personal experiences have value to customers.
Having said that, while I believe that it is better if a travel agent has visited a destination, a good travel agent can still add value to a client’s experience without that first-hand knowledge.
It is simple enough today for a customer to book a flight from A to B and to book a hotel at point B armed with all the information that can be gleaned from the internet from a Skytrax airline rating to a hotel booking site complete with reviews.
Yet even this seemingly straightforward booking can be fraught with problems for the uninitiated.
The good travel agent knows to ask the right questions: Is that airport at point B the primary airport or a secondary one some distance from downtown? And what protection is there should that hotel over-book?
You of course know all of these benefits, and more, that travel agents can offer customers but thanks to some high-profile problems in recent years your customers are realising that the online world is not as straightforward as it appears.
One of the biggest problems caused to the travelling public in recent years was the 2010 eruptions of Eyjafjallajökull, the Icelandic volcanic events that caused major disruption to air travel across western and northern Europe over an initial period of six days. Anyone not under the protection of a travel agent or tour operator was left to their own devices.
And then there are the news stories like the one back in April this year that quoted the National Fraud Intelligence Bureau as saying that fraudsters are costing travellers £2.2m a year from fake websites, email scams and fake ads.
So does this mean that customers are returning to the High Street in droves? Well back in 2008 Jeremy Skidmore wrote in the Telegraph that “Holidaymakers are returning to traditional booking methods and visiting travel agencies again because they believe they offer more security during the economic crisis.” But then within a few years we were reading about travel agency closures.
What is really going on? Perhaps we are going through some form of natural selection where only the fittest survive or perhaps the travelling public are adjusting to a new way of buying; or perhaps most likely it is a combination of both.
There is no doubt in my mind that these are both challenging and exciting times for any kind of retail business. The distribution chain has become shorter such that a travel agent can easily be a tour operator and make their own package arrangements if they want to; or if economic reality makes it so that they have to.
Businesses are having to change and those that don’t will sadly not survive but I do not believe that it is inevitable that a bricks and mortar business will tumble while travellers scurry online. Even if it were possible to eradicate the scammers I believe that there will always be room for the one-to-one personal interactions between buyer and seller.
Now I know that the so-called Millennials are purportedly more inclined to the online world having been raised on pixels and megabytes; but I maintain that no algorithm will replace human interaction and the conversation with someone who has been there and done that.
What is your experience: are customers abandoning the internet and returning to you? Also, is it naïve to believe that a website will never replace the real-life travel agent, be it face-to-face or on the other end of a phone line or Skype call?
Photo copyright: http://www.123rf.com/profile_wavebreakmediamicro’>wavebreakmediamicro / 123RF Stock Photo
Sources:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/travelnews/3171511/Holidaymakers-return-to-travel-agencies.html
