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This issue contains my essay, "The Unknown Electronic Travel Customer." Perhaps no segment of the traveling public receives as much abuse as the electronic travel customer. Few electronic travel-sellers seem to have seriously asked what beleaguered customers really want to buy. The answers might be surprising. Many technology-based travel reference and ordering systems appear to meet only the needs of their designers -- the products being so ill-conceived that distributors would be ashamed to offer them in non-electronic form.

Industry experts alternate between predictions of either the demise of agents or an Internet-driven Valhalla where e-dollars await those business warriors able to operate a Web site. All such predictions are driven by assumptions, usually anecdotal, as to how customers will behave. This paper explores several key and proven characteristics of customer behavior and applies them to an electronic setting. It also describes the logical design and decision-making processes that must be employed in order to produce sustainable, usable products and services.

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David J. Wardell

The Unknown Electronic Travel Customer

Perhaps no segment of the traveling public receives as much abuse as the electronic travel customer. Few electronic travel-sellers seem to have seriously asked what beleaguered customers really want to buy.

The answers might be surprising. Many technology-based travel reference and ordering systems appear to meet only the needs of their designers -- the products being so ill-conceived that distributors would be ashamed to offer them in non-electronic form. Others occasionally give the impression that they would not recognize a customer if they saw one.

This paper explores several key and proven characteristics of customer behavior and applies them to an electronic setting. It also describes the logical design and decision-making processes that must be employed in order to produce sustainable, usable products and services.

ANECDOTES: THE ORDER OF THE DAY

Industry experts alternate between predictions of either the demise of agents or an Internet-driven Valhalla where e-dollars await those business warriors able to operate a Web site. All such predictions are driven by assumptions, usually anecdotal, as to how customers presently behave and how such behavior will evolve over time.

Various techniques and processes, including surveys, focus groups, and other methods of acquiring business intelligence have emerged over time as reliable predictors of customer behavior (when properly staged and interpreted), but even a cursory study of online travel business and product planning methods reveals a startling disregard for such tools and an inordinate reliance upon business strategies developed a priori—meaning reasoned based upon one’s own presuppositions or knowledge without evidence.

Partly this results from the fast pace of electronic commerce in general. In a marketplace where timing is perceived to be everything and a few months can see entire lines of business eclipsed by new products and techniques, simply pausing to assess the customer landscape is perceived as an impossible delay.

More cynically, however, realistic customer research sometimes produces results far different from what developers view as being in their interest. It is frequently easier to sustain initial enthusiasm (professional and financial) for a product if the behavior of annoying customers can be discounted.

Although not unique to the travel industry, the trade has previously seen more than its share of this behavior. One classic example was the hysteria over Electronic Ticket Distribution Network (ETDN) technology several years ago, which created new businesses, networks, industry committees, and countless well-attended seminars but produced only a handful of tickets before evaporating. The a priori strategies of the developers discounted the fact that the machines really held no intrinsic customer benefits and missed the fact that electronic ticketing would quickly render the basic ETDN premise meaningless.

JUSTIFYING BEHAVIOR

Logicians reason a priori when developing logic systems but it is a risky business tool—people do not always behave logically. Successful developers, retailers, and product-planners learned long ago that only through coming to terms with whatever customer behavior might be are they able to develop and deploy successful products. This understanding often by itself describes success or failure.

Moreover, people frequently do not fully understand why they behave as they do. Simply recognizing a reaction does not of itself convey sufficient information to develop sustainable products or services.

Travel is a more compelling and emotional subject than is apparent on a purely intellectual level. It would seem that simply acquiring travel services that consist of known and agreed elements delivered according to contractual commitments would be as straightforward as any other purchasing process. Yet, travel agents long ago learned that senior executives pay wholly disproportionate attention to both the acquisition and administration of travel services because they directly touch themselves and their immediate associates.

Media coordinators and promoters also learned that public figures frequently make themselves available for appearances and events if “free” travel is part of their compensation, even though their personal means are usually more than adequate to buy whatever trips they require.

A useful example of a priori reasoning in this manner is the general dissatisfaction with travel purchasing most people keenly feel. The lengthy, dreary telephone calls, contending with contrived airline rules and ticket restrictions, long airport lines, and capricious (frequently rude) airline employees creates a view, held by most frequent travelers, that travel distribution is chaotic and fundamentally “broken.” While clearly the distribution system is fraught with inefficiency and archaic practices, one cannot safely reason from this “cause” to the “effect” that consumers will automatically embrace any service that attempts to change the way travel distribution functions, regardless of how contrived or inefficient such a solution might be.

Travel self-booking systems, for example, occasionally spend considerable energy creating so-called “direct links” between their systems and the reservation hosts of their vendors (bypassing the CRS/GDS), sustained by the promise of “efficiencies” thereby created. In reality, tangible customer benefits enabled by such links are frequently difficult to describe.

COMMON ASSUMPTIONS

As with any controversial subject it is appropriate to call upon people making assertions to assume the burden of proof. Here are several common assumptions about the electronic travel customer. Most directly sustain specific products or ways of doing business that ought to be questioned or rejected outright until reasonable, clearly demonstrable evidence is forthcoming.

1. There Are A Large Number Of Electronic Customers

With each new consultancy or research report the size of the on-line travel sales market inflates. Predictions now range in the tens of billions (always a few years in the future).

This sounds true and perhaps will be over time, but for the present no one has been able to say anything definitive about the number of real or potential electronic travel customers, nor anything about their demographics whatever. Moreover, the huge numbers routinely cited simply cannot withstand the most basic scrutiny.

In 1999 several consultancies started predicting a $20 billion travel e-commerce market by 2001 (a figure that grew larger with each new report). Despite the fact that, with more than half of 2001 now over we are nowhere close to achieving such an estimate, this and similar predictions by other researchers (grown much more fanciful in following years) fail to adequately consider serious limitations in consumer time spent on-line, the real number of on-line travel consumers as a percentage of the total populace, and the on-line penetration necessary overall to sustain that kind of number—not to mention other demonstrable consumer behavior limitations and infrastructure.

Among the most useful services waiting to be performed is a thorough, objective, disinterested estimate and description of the real on-line travel marketplace.

2. Electronic Travel Is Important To The Traveling Public

Electronic travel is important to consultants, to product developers, and to vendors who believe it can empower a distribution system that obeys a different set of rules than the one currently in place obeys, but this assertion has never been proven in a general sense. Most unbiased (albeit limited) studies available suggest the opposite may be true. In such a case, where evidence apart from anecdotes is not forthcoming, the assertion violates the logical principle of “Hasty Generalization.”

3. Travel Purchasers Want As Much Control As They Can Get Over The Planning, Reservations, And Fulfillment Processes

People assume this is so because it makes a priori sense to electronic travel commerce advocates. Reasoning from “causes” (some people are dissatisfied with the travel process) to “effects” (therefore they will embrace electronic travel) has yet to be demonstrated satisfactorily. The most critical error in any selling environment is measuring what everyone wants by what I want.

4. Over Time, Travelers Will Assume More Work In Exchange For More Control

This is the critical part of the electronic travel business proposition. There is no escaping that fact that "do it yourself" research and bookings take time, energy, and commitment. Beyond highly motivated early adopters, no one has shown that this is a sustainable business proposition over time.

5. Electronically Self-Booked Travel Saves Consumers Money

The financial analysis sustaining arguments favoring self-booked travel are frequently ill conceived and not thoroughly reasoned. Examples are frequently brought forth describing much lower transaction processing fees available to self-bookers as opposed to traditional travel agency services. Pointing to real operational cost reductions achieved through closing corporate travel departments or agency-based on-site centers enhances this argument.

Analytical flaws arise because user time, frustration, errors, and re-works are rarely considered. Simply illustrated, most self-booked travel transactions require 20-30 minutes minimum to complete—often much longer. Where travelers book themselves the time of highly paid executives is often exchanged for that of relatively low-paid clerks or agents—a difficult economic proposition to defend under the best conditions.

6. Customers Crave Self-Booking So Much That Marginal Products Will Be Tolerated

Although unspoken, this is the working hypothesis of many electronic travel commerce developers. Were it not so customers would not be subjected to the slow, cumbersome, and annoying software they now endure. Further, product developers often assume that customers will value their products and services so highly that they will abandon all of their existing service delivery, reporting, customer service, and problem-resolution infrastructure and not insist upon cost-effective and efficient integration with processes that serve them well.

This is the single most important cause of customer service failures afflicting the electronic travel industry. It is easily cured where products and services and envisioned with integration in mind, but it is exceedingly difficult and expensive to cure once a dysfunctional infrastructure has been created.

7. Customers Will Trade Travel Agents For Control, Convenience, Price, Or Some Combination

Unbiased studies usually indicate the opposite and, where customer views are encouraged and acknowledged, they typically express a strong preference for involving agents in key parts of service delivery. Again, integration is key and must not be dismissed because of views held personally by product developers.

The reason for this customer preference should be clear; parts of the existing travel distribution system serve them well. Among the most important of these is access to customer support and recourse. When travel arrangements go astray, as experienced travelers know is inevitable, the customer requires clear, concise “recourse” in order to satisfactorily correct the situation.

This is something most electronic travel sellers, who typically view themselves as being in the software business, are ill-equipped to deliver.

8. Electronic Bookings Are Cheaper For Vendors Than Agents

An unsubstantiated claim. There is, in fact, good evidence to indicate that, where all customer service activities are included (they cannot successfully be dismissed as unimportant), some cost increase is inevitable.

SUMMARY

I personally believe strongly in electronic commerce and its potential in the travel industry, but I am far from convinced that more than a few people active in the field know where they or their products must go. Fewer still listen to what their customers are saying and almost none are qualified to make predictions about the industry or teach others how to prosper in an emerging market where so little is truly known about key behaviors and desires.

With this challenge comes a substantial opportunity. Delivering what customers truly want to buy can inject a vitality and sustainability into electronic travel products that today see only token acceptance because they are so much at variance with real customer expectations. In the “new” economy as well as the old, businesses succeed to the degree they identify, understand, and fill those needs.