Friday, June 03, 2005

Transparent


Price comparison has arrived in travel. At the click of a mouse the traveller has the ability to compare on price across 100 of online travel sites. The power has shifted and the average web user is aware. What does the future hold if it does become so easy to compare prices, if a user is at the click of a mouse able to find the cheapest hotel, car, flight, package holiday?

Despite some scepticism over meta search engines at the eye for travel conference, time well tell if this does change travel distribution. The internet has a funny knack of allowing customer (users) to operate in completely unexpected ways. Who would have predicted people would happily, indeed proudly auction all types and values of things on the Internet and trust someone miles way to pay for the Good! E-Bay must make us rethink some if not all assumptions we make.

One thing is clear price is becoming transparent and if you driven by price than there are tools out there. These tools will become more easily available and already they can be integrated very easily it sites as we have done in this blog. The form below allows you from this blog to check price and availability for Hotels anywhere in the world. Alternatively it is a simple a link in text. Hotels in London for the 6 June until the 12 June. This is also true of flights and car hire. Suddenly an opionated backpacker with a blog can become a power sells point for travel goods and services!

In the end it will come down to trust- Brand!

1 comment:

Travolution Blogger said...

Price and avilability aren't the only things becoming transparent on the web- images are too. The Google image search is scary- I've never met anhyone with the same name as me (Simon Ferguson) in my like, yet using Google images it took just 0.18 seconds to pull pictures of over 300 Simon Fergusons from around the world. And even worse,most of them are ugly buggers! I can asure you my parents did love me really.

Nothings sacred these days- not even your identity!