Competition is all around you
March 6, 2008
I’ve written before on the landscape of OTA and media companies which is getting more competitive everyday. But also the field of touroperators, airlines and hotelchains is getting more competive. At the PhocusWright conference at ITB John Kohlsaat, 
General Manager for Germany, Central Europe, Baltic and Denmark, of easyJet Airline Company made some comments on that matter. Easyjet, which is the 4th largest airline, is moving ahead fast. From flight only, they have added hotels, transfers and travel services to their offering. This will cause great problems for touroperators. They don’t own the capacity and will have to add value to it, to be profitable. The website that Easyjet uses for this is Easyjetholidays.com. It sees it as a revolution to the package holiday market. As customers are booking more and more direct at airlines and hotelchain websites and are being able to add other travel offerings to it, touroperators should be aware. Future will tell how fierce and bloody this battle will be.
In a few hours I will be heading back to the Netherland. The conference has been very interesting. The bloggers summit as well, great meeting all the bloggers 
from around the world. ITB was big, colourfull
and with great hotdogs!
Digital Divide and Travel Buying
February 29, 2008
When one attends ITB one also realises that the outbound and inbound travel business structure is still pretty much the same. Except the large travel companies, who can invest in IT, E-commerce and content management platforms, the smaller, regional companies have yet to leverage the full digital arsenal. The investments might be too much. I dont think the Travel 2.0 and web 2.0 paradigm has also been leveraged by the small and medium size travel enterprises that dot the landscape in Europe and Asia. Beyond e-mail and maybe a reservation platform for hotels, one has yet to see a platform for the SME’s. Exciting time to be a part of this travel mega mart. The scale is quite mind boggling.
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