India as a tourism giant has close to 38 UNESCO sites and 3684 Archaeological Survey of India monuments. While domestic tourists hold the major share of tourism income with 1854 million travelers, international tourists count is close to 10 million(Reference: Tourism.Gov.in). Although numbers range in billions, the tourism industry is still struggling with certain derailing efforts from the insiders or stakeholders associated. There is a sense of rift between traditional travel personnel and modern travel firms from past decade.
Some of the major changes in Indian travel industry we witnessed from last two decades include advent of online travel agents, Radio taxis, Home stays etc. This post holds my personal view on advent of online travel booking and impact on traditional brick and mortar travel agent of India.
Why did traditional travel agents failed?
Travelling has changed altogether. Millions of sites are knocking handful of Global Distribution System (GDS) and earning commission differing from past where every small town had few agents who used to book. Booking used to range from hotels to overseas packages, bus to flight tickets. Many of those travel agent shops have been changed as mobile sales and service shops today.
What made these traditional agents fail? What these 3 stakeholder has to say on this failure?
- End-User
- Old Service Provider
- New Service Provider
Story of travel booking In past decade
Entry of websites like RedBus and MakeMyTrip brought major impact on many traditional shop owners who were relying on booking bus, train, and flight tickets.
Tatkal ticket is one major subject where these travel agents were excelled in. Typically for one tatkal ticket, agents used to earn somewhere around 200 to 300 Indian rupees. Agents used to send their helpers to nearby railway stations to stand in queue to get these Tatkal tickets booking done. They were literal Wikipedia with knowledge of quotas each train had per station while booking tickets. Agents calculation on seat confirmation probability for waiting list tickets rarely used to fail.
Travelers’ first “Celebration Moment” in his vacation was, getting this Tatkal ticket. Agent used to be a “Hero” if he would have made us get Tatkal.
While India has many festive seasons, Deepawali and Dasara stands high. Months of Summer and Dasara holidays are said to be seasons for tourists. There used to be a huge spike in ticket bookings then. Agents had this as right time to showcase their customer relationship skills either by priority booking or getting them preferred seats. Over the mouth publicity used to start from these customer experiences (CX).
Travel class people were the only ones eligible for offers from agents. Otherwise, it was “Fixed Price” or “No Bargain Please” business. The category called “Travel Class”, are the ones who usually work in different city and have this up and down business (traveling back to place where the family resides on every weekend) and students reaching their hometowns. These were the customer-driven initiatives, meaning customers used to strike out deals with travel agents on one to one basis.
And the scene changed in 2006,
The major shift was in the year 2006 where bus booking got an option of the Internet. RedBus and KSRTC online booking came into the picture. Both started in Bengaluru. Internet option alone would not have given the massive competition, but the difference in offers certainly did.
RedBus brought difference of at least 100–200 bucks per ticket in most routes compared to traditional travel agents, and KSRTC showed government buses can be booked online too. The first place where things got derailed in the travel industry is when these startups gave discounts above their margin to onboard customers. The discount trend stayed quite long maybe because of competitors like AbhiBus, MakeMytrip etc.
Things were still in place and agents were making some cash-out, which may be due to the internet literacy percentage then. The profit share was equally enjoyed by new service providers like RedBus due to tier 1 and tier 2 cities like Bengaluru, Chennai and Hyderabad.
The next few festive seasons in India had a tug of wars between the old and new service providers. There were a bunch of instances where the tickets were pre-booked by agents and internet vendors like redBus started showing “No Seat Left” boards. People were still able to get tickets on the same buses, using the traditional travel agents for a higher price. This is the second place where we feel things got derailed in the industry with a wrong move from traditional agents. Although customers booked tickets through traditional agents, they did not had a better experience this time. While customers had a feeling of being cheated, the travel vendor had just concentrated on business leaving the customer experience part. The “Hero” charm of the pre-internet era was lost.
Either of the issues we are pointing here is not done by every seller in the market. But it affected the travel industry as the number was quite sizable. Situation lead to closure of many travel agent shops in India.
The customer too has lost many things here,
Customer lost the opportunity to request the minute needs of him or what we term as micro problem, may it be a lower birth in train or a request stop in bus. It was common scenario earlier for agent to arrange seat in next bus if ticket holder dint arrive on time.
Travel agent was always a reliable guy, who could arrange seat in any emergency situation.
What could have been better?
Customer experience stands first. Travel agents have the advantage of directly interacting with the customer, while OTAs lack the same. Travel agents get to deal with micro problems of travelers which they can easily resolve almost at no cost increasing the CX.
Although OTAs have increased many checkboxes while booking tickets in website to understand travelers’ requirements, AI still no where close to human counterpart.
In the past decade, a small set of traditional agents were quite misled by the idea of creating their websites to give competition to bigger OTA players, stating “presence on the internet” is the only state of survival.
The statement could be partially true, but not at the cost of a standalone website for their store. The site used to have limited details. Nothing more than Name, address and services offered.
Paying price for a static site, URL (Domain name), server, and maintenance, made them lose interest in the competition. Agent used to surrender by end of year seeing no results from websites. Thousands of URLs got freed up after a year, as by then they had a feeling of being deceived by the internet.
Internet presence is needed, but awareness in the market where they are put up makes more sense. Listing on Google Business, Just Dial and Bing Map can help. They come at no cost unless you would like to advertise with them. However, haven’t seen much help from free sites and social media posting for local travel agents. They should have worked on getting better reviews in Google if they had felt that “internet is key”.
People love discount. Many travel agents didn’t agree to reduce the pricing when OTAs entered the market. The agents may not be able to sell the ticket at the same price, still the word discount is very nearer to customers ears. Traditional guy failed to make use of discount tactics.
Somewhere the fixed-rate board had fixed his fate.
Accepting the shift is another thing that would have worked better. It is easy to judge the winner in competition between individual to the organization. With the low inflow of customers, managing a store which sells only ticket would be expensive. After all rent, resource salary, and utility payments needs money. Interestingly many had moved from travel as the only product to travel as one of the products and survived. They have included many services like recharge, Aadhar, photocopying, etc.
Customer Experience stays forever. One of the best examples is travel advisers worldwide are getting paid high because they are carefully curating travel experiences. They are letting the travelers live every moment of travel. Even the mission of Travebrate is to Let you live every moment of travel.
Travebrate is a travel portal answering commonly asked travelers’ queries with the last validated date and being answered by authorities of attractions. We answer question on availability, accessibilities and facilities in tourist attractions.
