A few weeks ago, I posed a few quick questions to a group of friends. The responses were telling. (feel free to play along at home):

Q: Where do you go when you want to book a flight?
A: Responses were plentiful and immediate - travelocity.com, kayak.com, orbitz.com, etc.

Q: Where do you go when you want to rent a car?
A: Responses were plentiful and immediate - budget.com, avis.com, travelocity.com, etc.

Q: Where do you go when you want to rent a vacation home?
A: A few seconds of silence… “Can you do that on expedia?”, “umm, craigslist I guess?”, “google?”

A Tale of Two Studies

Case Study #1: Finding a Flight

I need to go from Boston to DC for a business trip on Wednesday July 18^th. I want to fly out the evening of the 17^th, and return first thing in the morning on the 19^th.

I search on Orbitz and find this perfect flight:

I then search on Travelocity and find the exact same flight (for a $1 difference in price):

 

I could show you all the other travel sites, but I think you get the point. I’m going to find the same thing everywhere, so there isn’t much value in hopping around from site to site. Once I’ve picked my flight, I just click a few buttons, enter a bit of info, and my flight is confirmed. That was easy.

Travel sites aren’t fighting over inventory. They are fighting over features and usability. When that happens, the consumer wins.

Case Study #2: Finding a Vacation Home

Last year I set about to book a lakeside vacation home in Maine for a week in August.

I started at Google with a search for “Maine vacation home”, yielding results that were all over the place.

Now, I’m a picky shopper - I like to see and compare my options, read reviews on the product I’m about to purchase (rent), and generally feel like I got a good deal on something.

Take 1

I finally picked the “perfect” house and e-mailed the owner. The owner responded a few hours later saying “I’m sorry we are booked for that week.” Booked? But the calendar showed the property as open, both before I sent the e-mail and after I received the owner’s response.

Take 2

I found another nice property, and sent my second inquiry. Two days go by and no response. Who knows if my inquiry even made it to the recipient via the form I filled out. I resubmitted. Still nothing. I guess that’s a no.

Take 3

I find a third place that I didn’t like nearly as much as the first two, but I was tiring of the process. It’s available, the owner responds, great. I fill out the agreement and send them a check. Fast forward to my stay there - I’ll share the details another time, but suffice to say, I would not stay there again.

To recap, all I wanted to do was book a vacation home for some much needed R&R. Instead, I spent the better part of a week dealing with three different people amidst calendar and responsiveness issues, only to end up at a falsely advertised property.

Vacation Homes Need a GDS

Compare the two experiences. The airline industry is a well-oiled machine. The vacation home industry isn’t.

Most sectors of the travel booking industry have been commoditized. The reason for this is the airline industry, as well as most of the travel industry, is all interwoven via Global Distribution Systems (GDS). GDS’s (such as Sabre, Amadeus, et al) maintain large data stores of information about airline flight information, schedules, prices, reservations, etc. So when you search for a flight on Orbitz or Travelocity, what is happening is the site is tapping into one of the Big GDS systems, and you basically end up with the same search results at every site. I know in real-time what my best options are, how much they will cost, and whether the option is truly available or not.

The existing GDS system will not work for vacation homes due to the fragmentation of the marketplace, but the industry needs to begin pursuing a workable global integration system/solution. Currently, listing sites and industry software solutions all work in a bubble creating firewalls of inefficiency. The internet has liberated several verticals from self imposed growth limitation and it’s time we begin discussing the next generation of the vacation rental experience.

We have said this before and we will keep saying it “the vacation market is not a zero sum game”. There are tremendous opportunities for growth but we need to begin opening up solutions and working together to realize the marketplace’s potential.

 

 

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 20th, 2007 at 9:47 am and is filed under Food for Thought. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.