The recent Tourism Directions & Distribution Conference in Sydney brought to light some important changes taking place in the tourism industry, which put you as a small tourism operator in much bigger shoes.
Giving the keynote address was Anna Pollock of Desticorp, whose views caught my attention and led me to read the white papers published on her site.
In describing the rapidly disintegrating travel distribution model of the 20th century, she lists three groups of providers:
- Large global and national distributors, including wholesalers, ITOs, airlines and hotel chains
- Systems providers and intermediaries, such as Galileo and Sabre, which include only the larger corporate suppliers in their databases, and
- “The rest! Hundreds of thousands of small to medium-sized enterprises [SMEs] located throughout the globe that offer both direct travel-related services (accommodation, dining, transport, recreation and entertainment) and ancillary services (insurance, software, content, finance, weather, news, maps etc).”
I put the last point in quotes because these are Anna’s words, and it’s this large group of providers who are putting together the new model of distribution, which functions primarily online.
Anna goes on to say that this group is “waiting and ready for affordable, flexible, practical solutions that can connect them to a global market of demanding, capricious and valuable consumers hungry for the new, the unusual, the unique and boutique” (my emphasis).
If you sat up and said to yourself – that’s me – you’d be right. Small tourism enterprises have a huge amount to gain from the new distribution model that’s emerging across the world.
Says Anna: “There’s a revolution brewing that threatens to crumble the edifices of the corporate world.” (Don’t we all love to hear that?)
She’s talking about the same revolution described by Chris Anderson in “The Long Tail”. Chris explains that the ability you now have as a niche business to sell directly to prospects across the globe via the Internet means you can siphon off your corner of the market from larger businesses without depending on centralised distribution channels.
The problem for wholesalers translating a top-down model onto the Internet is that large, faceless sites, which are little more than a directory-cum-booking-engine, can’t interact, respond quickly to change or engage users with their personality and depth.
The threat to wholesalers comes from you – and others like you – the more focused sites and distribution systems (the brokers described by Anna Pollock), which are able to:
- beat the generic sites in the search rankings through authoritative content in a niche area,
- build trust and engage users through strategic blogging,
- maintain a personal conversation through targeted email marketing, and
- provide a fuller service through partnership with industry affiliates.
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