The Rise of the Online Vacation Agency
blog.kangacruise.com
blog.kangacruise.com
Related to this would be a nearest neighbor point of interest discovery tool. Often its easy to find what is interesting to do in a particular location, but its much more difficult to explore options that are a day trip to an overnight trip away from that anchor point. My experience has been that the day trips or overnight trips with a return to the origin point at the most memorable.
Some examples:
-- Vacationing in Praia do Forte in Bahia, but taking a day trip to Mangue Seco.
-- Passing through São Luis do Maranhão and taking a three day trip to Barreirinhas, and from Barreirinhas, taking a day trip to Lençois Maranheses.
-- Day trip to Interloken from Zürich (I wish we had done an overnight trip, but we didn't plan on that and missed out)
-- Day trip from Amsterdam to a spa by the beach (unlike the other three, this one was not worth it and I wish I had known that before)
At the end of the day a great vacation often resembles a bunch of nodes in a graph, with edges being formed on the basis of financial cost, time cost and value of that destination/activity/hotel/restaurant to me. Find me the best route between node A and node B in the graph that maximizes happiness (According to my criteria) while minimizing cost and travel time.
Another reason it's valuable for this to be centralized is that it avoids the issue of being sent to some boring activity or place because you don't know that the local person may be recommending a venue on the basis that its his brother or cousins business. This happens surprisingly often.
Happy to get a little more into the specifics if anyone's interested. It took us a long time to get out of the "better ui, kill the travel agent" mindset that's prevalent among travel startups. The greater complexity of vacation sales really seems to throw most of the precedent set by online travel agencies (Expedia) and meta-searches (Kayak) out the window.
I guess if you are looking into pre-packaged resorts, where its a charter plane, resort, and even airport transfers included (Transat Vacations, Sunwing Vacations, etc) then maybe that's true that people still us agents for those... I still see agents advertising those in malls.
But I bet that segment of the market is declining year over year for the past 10 years. So yes, its a low percentage of a shrinking market.
As for cruises, the market is still overwhelmingly older and retired people[1]. Another market it will be hard to disrupt with technology.
Not to be all pessimistic, but there's a reason things are the way they are I guess.
1. I worked for a cruise booking company (a deplorable company and industry, just FYI, but that is a story for another day). I wrote their systems for integrating with Sabre and then the UI. The industry just plain sucks. The scams, the "discounts", the different prices. Not to mention that getting the data is a nightmare (it might have changed, I've been out of that for some time now). I honestly felt terrible about what I did nearly everyday. There was always "another tweak" to get more money out of the customer, some additional fee or service charge. It was unbelievable.
I don't know kangacruise and I wish them luck. I hope they can wade through the crap industry and make a nice experience that gets the user a fair price.
2. In the past 5 years I've taken at least 3 vacations a year plus at least 10-15 business trips. Conservatively, say 35 trips, many of them international. Not once did I consult a travel agent. I considered it once for a more involved trip, but when I saw that they weren't really bringing much to the table, I left and did it all myself. It wasn't hard. Perhaps having to loop in three different sites is annoying, but unless there was an overly compelling reason to use a travel agent, I wouldn't even consider it.
At this point in time, I feel travel agents are mostly for older folks or someone with more money than sense. I don't know if you can actually create a market (yes, I feel you would have to create it...it wouldn't form naturally) which is always an uphill battle.
I'm not even sure this is something that needs to be disrupted. My experience with actual people for booking these things has been fantastic. It's low stakes and relatively easy...I'm not sure online is better.
I agree with regard to whether or not this needs to be disrupted--I do some work for a local travel agency and the level of service they provide is remarkable (it would be very difficult for me to save money by booking the same trips myself online, without even accounting for the time it would take me).