Travellers are frustrated with current solutions for figuring out their options online. Photo by Sybren A Stuvel under the Creative Commons license

Shifts in the number of travellers shying away from online travel websites towards traditional travel agents should serve as a wake-up call to online travel providers. The trend, identified in a recent Forrester report, suggests that there are 15 percent fewer travellers who enjoy using the web to book travel in 2009 than there were in 2007.

This is representative of the increasing complexity of booking a flight, train or a package deal. Travellers must browse through multiple travel websites to search for travel options and are forced to wade through the fine print to understand specific terms and conditions before booking. Most traditional travel websites are only able to offer a list of transport options from airport or train station A to B and not more specific door-to-door travel options. Even with the advent of social networking and the ability to learn about the customers’ needs, the majority of travel websites still plainly offer a generic listing of hotels or flights instead of profiling the customer to list options that fit best with the traveller’s style, need and budget.

There is an opportunity here for online travel websites to engage with the customer and to make the planning and the booking process more personalised and convenient. Zoombu allows people to compare entire end-to-end routes across multiple different transportation modes within a single search. Our service will also learn about your specific preferences, just like a real travel agent would, and build on these time and again to find the best trip for you.

Online travel websites could provide additional services, such as suggesting the best possible insurance plan based on the duration of travel, details on foreign exchange, permissible baggage limits for a particular flight, video tours of the destination, and detailed visa information.

There is a great opportunity for new travel websites to differentiate themselves by serving as travel agents and offering more complete and personalised travel packages without making the user experience overly complex. Existing online travel services that do not wake up to these changing trends might well struggle to keep users around.

-Posted by Sharad Piplani, Zoombu Team