Uncovering fractured Travel experience
International travel is supposed to be fun, leisure but the overall effort right from discovering locations to getting back home is damn tedious. A user interacts with lots of different platforms/websites in the course of the journey. A typical journey follows -(I am considering — a couple or a bachelor based in India)
Motivation
External
1. Friends/relatives sharing travel pics on Social Media, Youtube travel vlogs
2. Friends/Relatives directly sharing about their last travel experience
Internal
1. Need a break from work
User story — I always wanted to visit XX
User story — We haven’t tried travelled in the past 2 years
Discovery
1. Affordable Places
2. Best beach/hill station, etc places
3. No visa/Visa on arrival
4. Instagram/Youtube external motivation
Confirmation
Factors to consider
1. Can I get leave?
2. Budget
3. Visa complexity
Bookings
1. Book flights ( domestic as well if no international airport at your place)
2. Book hotel pickup
3. Book accommodation
4. Book destination experiences, local tour packages
5. Apply and Get Visa & Passport(if not available)
6. Travel insurance
Pre-Travel Preparation
1. Knowing about the location through a travel blog, vlog, etc
2. Shopping for clothes, bags, camera, etc according to the weather, location
4. Currency exchange/ forex card
Pre-Travel Preparation(week before the due date)
1. Pack bags according to the checklist
2. Checklist — Entertainment, Clothes, Travel necessity, Documents
3. Details on airport/ web check-in
4. Book a cab to go to the local airport
Travel Experience
1. Visa on Arrival
2. Exchange currency
3. Book cab to the hotel
4. Download important local apps
6. Destination travel guide
7. Check good restaurants
8. Get a local sim card
9. Book local tourist packages/ events(if not done earlier)
10. Share images/videos on social media
11. Buy souvenirs/ gifts for relatives
Post Travel
1. Book cab to home
2. Share experience with others
3. Buy picture albums/picture frames
The overall customer journey of travel experience involves multiple products and services. No wonder local travel agents and OTAs are required to do all these critical activities on the traveler’s behalf. And there’s hardly any OTA which handles end-to-end travel experience or any local agent which will provide this service without a tour package. And because of shifting to multiple parties for different tasks, the overall experience creates a lot of friction only to be satisfied by reaching the travel destination, no instant gratification.
We require the holistic experience of a local travel agency and the flexibility of OTAs.
How to do it?
Travel super app
A superapp like Grab or Chinese companies that cover all travel-related services.
But in a superapp, it is quite important to have a single core product/offering which acts as the nucleus for other offerings. (More on this here — Superapp saga of Grab) However, we are looking to over vertical offerings and not cover unrelated use cases ( ex Grab). So, the most critical part of travel( refer to above customer journey) –
1. Discovery
2. Booking
The reason being both of these section requires high effort, and trust and offers the highest revenue.
And this is exactly where Airbnb gain the upper hand, especially with its new “flexible” option. With “flexible”, Airbnb got into discovery, it already covers part of the booking and expects “Airbnb Experiences” to gain momentum in coming years. But so far it has been careful to only focus on part of the customer journey which directly affects its core — rental/booking business.
There’s also AirAsia which itself proclaims as SuperApp and is in the process to cover booking and pre-travel. A similar approach can be spotted in India’s MakeMyTrip.
Also notice that it is difficult to provide the same level of user experience across the customer journey and that’s why in general “one for all” is always a bad omen in the business world.
A possible alternative is to target local travel agents rather than consumers directly. The Indian travel market is dominated by local travel agents with more than 50% market share (ref). So, a platform can be built with the flexibility to integrate different sections like hotel booking, flights, and experiences from diverse OTAs. It’s like taking these local agents online and providing them options to create travel packages/journeys by bundling different service providers and OTAs.
But given the future of travel, where most of the decisions and actions will be consumer-led, it makes little sense to go with the above option.
So, considering all the factors we have discussed so far, I have come up with a concept of product that integrates everything –
From this diagram, we can also spot how different companies are moving ahead with their strategy. For example, Uber brings in flight, and train booking services. Finally creating a product that provides seamless integration of all these modularised services is difficult from technical, user experience and business perspectives.
Over the top, it looks similar to AirAsia superapp or Makemytrip, but the difference lies in not relying on a single GDS for all the services. Instead, integrate the different service providers and allow seamless data flow between them to offer a personalized and flexible user experience. Thus, the nucleus will be around user data and it will act as a launchpad to effectively target users, upsell more services and provide a better experience.