Internet Entrepreneurs: Travel Example

People in rich countries spend a tremendous amount of money on travel. Vendors and consumers are separated by vast distances and numerous intermediaries. Each intermediary extracts a commission. It is the sum total of those commissions that is potentially available to Web travel sites.

Traditional publishers do their best to capture these commissions with guidebooks, magazines, advertising supplements, and plain old brochures. Despite the vast forests that are chopped down in this valiant attempt, dead trees publishers aren't satisfying travelers. A subscriber opens a travel magazine and finds the articles either much too long, because he or she isn't planning to visit the city described, or much too short, because he or she has a definite trip planned and is hungry for detail. Travel books are better, though they generally suffer from the "one voice" problem and the best-written books usually don't have any pictures because of the expense of color printing can't be justified when there aren't any ads.

Traditional travel publishers don't even try to give consumers the most critical information, e.g., "How did the last 100 people who went there like it?"

An Internet travel site starts off with a huge relevance advantage. Search engines consistently deliver travel URLs to people who are about to book a trip or leave for a destination. No other advertising-carrying medium comes close, except perhaps the airplane and hotel magazines that consumers get after they've started their trip.

The most important Category 1 service for a travel site is magnet content that will attract people to Category 2, 3, and 4 services. You can organize all kinds of Category 2 services around magnet content. For example, suppose that your magnet content in an Italian site says "I went into the cathedral at Assisi to reload my camera; there were some pictures on the walls. I think somebody next to me said they were painted by a guy named ‘Joe'." Somewhere out there on the Net there is a guy who did his art history Ph.D. on those frescoes by Giotto. Your magnet content's function is to draw that expert into surfing your site and contributing a few paragraphs via your comment server.

You will also want to have classified ads for vacation homes and tour packages, Q&A forums, and a quality rating system for tour operators and hotels. What makes all this more useful than rec.travel.europe is that the magnet content gives structure to the user-contributed thoughts.

The obvious Category 3 service for a travel site is a trip planning system. Your database will know where the consumer intends to be at every hour of every day of his trip. With that kind of information about your readers, if you can't sell high-priced ads for delivery to specific people, it won't be my fault!

The obvious Category 4 application is a hotel room booking system. Your server queries all the hotel reservation computers and the consumer can query you: "Show me the available hotel rooms in Paris for September 15th to 20th, sorted by distance from the Louvre and then by price. Oh, and convert the prices to US dollars, please."

It may take the full 50-year horizon of this chapter to come to pass but eventually there will be a usable wireless Internet. When that day comes imagine Joe Traveler, getting tired after a long day of sightseeing, pulling out his cell phone and saying "show me the nearby available hotel rooms for tonight". The phone company knows approximately where you are, based on which tower your handset has connected, and they ought to have enough marketing clout to establish links with hotel chains' room reservations systems.