Transformational, Not Transactional
Moving beyond an industry plagued by manipulation and paltry service
For as long as companies started to internalize the idea that you could sell stuff online, there has been Data Science.
To leverage all information available to the business in order to see more, click more, buy more. To rank higher on Google, to peruse a unique offer, to ruminate it, to buy. Attention, Desire, Interest, Action. Because only one thing counts in this life: to get them to sign on the line which is dotted.
For as long as the interaction with the company was mediated by machines, data scientists have been playing three-dimensional chess against clueless users.
The end result has been clickbait, fake news, and dark patterns.
And although clickbait and fake news and their consequences have been acknowledged and debated, the deceptive nature of tricking users with reciprocation, social proof and scarcity has somehow escaped public scrutiny. Suitably, most online businesses engage in many of these practices one way or another.
No other industry reflects this trend more intensely than online travel agencies. How they manipulate you, their bad UX and the lack of credibility of the reviews, among other problems, have in time corroded the industry’s reputation. It didn’t use to be a problem when only a minority experienced glitches. Now, it’s so widespread that many resort to having multiple browser windows opened, or connecting via VPN, to evade the algorithmic mechanism placed upon them.
This has been, and continues to be, the transactional era of the OTA industry.
Converting Lazy Prospects with Humans
“Call me lazy or entitled”, says Alex Hern on The Guardian, “but I want travel apps to do my thinking for me”.
I agree it’s not a far-fetched request. I’ve described data science as the onerous technological branch of the Evil Internet, but it doesn’t need to be that way. OTAs are well-oiled machines that can handle everything related to holidays—combine flights, hotels and car hires, among other amenities. But they require from the customer a painstaking level of detail in order to start the search.
Shouldn’t the industry rush towards addressing that customer pain? Who is filling that gap?
Humans.
Most metasearch engines can find you the cheapest flights between two cities and allow you to narrow the options by flight time, direct flights, time of layover, etc. But it’s up to you to find out the cheapest option.
“If you’re free to travel any day of the week”, says Hern, “repeat every search seven times; and if you’re OK with your holiday being a flexible length, you might even have to run up to 49 separate searches”.
Most customers aren’t wired to be that systematic. Instead, when they enter an OTA’s website, they’re looking for something as vague as “I want to go somewhere hot in November and I don’t care where”.
Because of a series of deep flaws in the way Internet companies approach customers’ needs, human beings seem to have an edge. That is as paradoxical as it gets: when chatGPT is apparently about to send everyone home and gorging our jobs, conversational, flesh-and-bone creatures are beating the algos at checking databases for prices and places.
Transformational Era
It was somewhat of a consensus that newspapers were doomed, and that clickbait was just the final firecracker of a dying industry. But the rise of independent journalism could be proof that there’s a post-clickbait news industry; it’s just completely different to what everyone was expecting, more cerebral and analytical and less bombastic and attention seeking.
Something similar, I believe, is in the verge of happening in the travel industry. Implicit in the review I made of the industry in A Grid In The Sky is the idea that capturing customer’s data is fracturing the relationship between OTAs and airlines. The reason data is so important is because the industry agree as a whole that the most important factor to retain price-sensitive customers is by manipulating them.
This is the truism that underlies the transactional era of OTA industry. The resulting distrust and customers’ reliance on human agents for high-end options such as cruises and ski resorts leads me to believe that this truism is simply wrong.
Perhaps the industry is in denial. “Alvaro, you’re telling me that all that data the OTAs have is useless?”. No, it is not. What I mean to say is that customers are OK with their privacy being dead as long as they don’t have to give away their thinking too. OpenAI is filling humans’ need for computers to step up their game and start addressing lazy, ambiguous and ill-conceived requests, and OTAs should start doing that for holiday plans.
But pretending to even try at that demands something much more valuable than data from their customers. OTAs must be trusted, like an advisor. An army of customer support agents can looking at spreadsheets and calculating totals; that part has been eaten by software. A local telling you how to organize your holidays to visit the Sakura trees in Japan at their best; that part is still human.
