Huh?

Let’s set the "portal" question aside for the moment, after observing that the e-commerce industry itself is divided about the long-term role of "portals," especially their ability to generate sustainable revenues.

It isn’t suddenly too late for most travel distributors to enter the online agency field—it was ALWAYS too late. Forrester is now catching-up to the reality that a few of us have been saying for years: "Most businesses will be big-time losers on The Internet," and this because of the incredible barriers to enter in the online agency game.

To succeed as an online agency, one has to embrace several simple business principles:

1. Ignore all forms of market research and offer the product YOU THINK the customer wants and that your developers want to build—not what customers SAY they want.
2. Persuade the venture finance crowd to fund your business based upon the present "greater fool" theory of Internet equity, and without a business plan that shows when you will make any money, or how you could every make money.
3. Ignore the designs and business postures that have made the (very few) successful e-businesses work, in favor of building an "agent in a box," the ultimate low fare finder, or some other such techno-gadget that nobody wants to buy.
4. Forget about how you could deliver the fundamentals that the customer really values in an electronic setting.

Very few new businesses are prepared to take these steps that would make them like the big online agencies. Does this mean that I won’t receive invitations to more seminars purporting to tell me how to be just "like them?" One can hope ...

The fact is that there are just as many opportunities to create profitable and sustainable electronic travel distribution companies as there ever were. There were few to begin with, but the model has yet to be properly implemented. The existing online agencies are indeed at risk, but because of flawed strategies and implementations more than anything else.