Travel Commentary

Over the course of the last couple of months, some members of the SilverRail team have attended some major travel conferences (ACTE in Rome, GBTA in Budapest and PhocusWright in Scottsdale), all of which highlighted an interesting divide in the corporate travel market as it relates to online self-booking tools.

Will the market stay with the traditional mandated self-booking tool for all travel? Or will the “book where-ever you want” model take hold, giving travelers more freedom in their booking choices?

An article that our CEO and co-founder Aaron Gowell has written commenting on some of the impending changes in the European travel industry has been featured by Tnooz, the leading site for travel technology.

Aaron comments on the top ten things that he thinks will change the way travel distribution will work in the future.

From the article, a couple of examples:

When we pulled together our TrainsVsPlanes video, we thought we might be the only ones playing this game.  But it turns out the Economist has run a similar effort, but in China rather than in Europe.

Recently my colleague James Harland posted an entry about "GDS Bypass". I wanted to offer an opinion and argument about why the whole subject - and discussion behind - is focused on the wrong issues.

This has nothing to do with rail whatsoever, but working in the travel industry it is difficult to avoid the announcement of Google Flights, which is the first really big announcement since their acquisition of ITA Software which finally went through earlier this year. I haven't really used it in earnest to book a flight or anything, but from first pass, frankly, it is pretty awesome.

An article in the Venture Capital Journal, mentioning Hipmunk in particular, has highlighted the growth in travel sites and investment in the industry in general.  Not only that, but one of our investors, Charley Lax of Grandbanks Capital, gets a quote, and we get a mention as well!

While at GBTA, one of the few panels I actually managed to attend was one called: "Direct Connect, The Hot Seat", which the moderator was quick to try to rename the "GDS bypass" discussion. It was actually a really interesting debate, and follows up well from the post I did on the development of the GDS model before.

Since the beginning of time in the travel industry, there has been a need for content aggregators of some description. It has never made any sense for your Mom and Pop travel agent on Main Street (or the High Street depending on where you are reading this) to have relationships with every airline, every hotel chain and every rental car agency in the world in order to fulfill the needs of their customers.

And hence, the original Global Distribution Systems (GDSs) were born.  (This is actually ignoring the fact that originally GDSs were just automated booking systems for individual airlines (such as Sabre and AA) but we'll gloss over that for now.)