IT in tourism is a myth
This post does not pretend to the truth in the first instance, just sharing my thoughts. By education, spirit and former profession I am a programmer and have always believed that any work, any process should be utterly automated. I also thought when I was opening my own travel agency. I thought that in my company there would be the best and most convenient site, I would have a complete database of hotels, actual tours in search, and sales managers would only do anything to mark paid applications with birdies.
Everything turned out to be much sadder.
It would seem that the rapidly developing tourism industry and IT, is also a very developing industry should be somehow interconnected and all solutions for tourism should be at the height, and be inexpensive. After all, an online store can be opened for 300 bucks, how does tourism differ from ordinary e-commerce?
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The problems began immediately when I wanted to bring together two tour operators with their proposals. In open access XML was only for TEZ and for Capital (which later went bankrupt). When we opened, it was January, almost “not a season”, but the amount of data was simply amazing. The size of XML reached 2-5 gigabytes. My poor VPS was just dying. Then I realized that it was a stupid idea to upload all the data and store it. Especially in the season when the tour operator offers change literally every hour.
That is why almost no tour search system such as tourindex or ruspo has 100% current tours. I realized that writing this service alone would be somewhat problematic (although maybe I’m wrong, correct me). I set a goal and began to compare tour search systems, so that the client could enter, find what he needed, order, and the manager from the “this” side would quickly process. There are few such systems:
All these systems are practically no different from each other, perhaps, the cost of connecting and a set of tour operators.
We started working with everyone in turn. And what's interesting turned out. No system can be properly embedded on the travel agency website. No system performs the tasks for which it was created.
In one, for example, all links to hotels lead to a third-party site, which displays prices for tours already from other travel agencies. Ie if the client clicks on the name of the hotel, he can safely go to the competitors.
The other system does not allow you to customize the display of results on a separate page, but displays them in some strange pop-up, and you cannot simply change the search currency from Russian rubles (in Belarus is somehow not very relevant) to dollars.
The third is written in .NET and the tour search form opens on a separate server (for example, 212.192.19.1, etc.) and is not integrated into the existing site.
By the way, “setting up a search form” is a separate paid service for such systems without which there is no way.
And so on, it turned out that no system is adapted to the needs of agencies, then it asks who and for whom it is being written?
It turns out that in this form there is no complete on-line in tourism, but there is some kind of pseudo-online. You can not buy a tour to Egypt on your card, without human intervention.
Yes, now there are a lot of tourist startups, as in Russia and indeed in the CIS, but all of them either specialize in the search for airline tickets (by the way, meta search engines have divorced a lot, but more on that next time) or tourist social networks appear , for independent travelers. But there are no normal start-ups that really help travel agencies, of which there are still very many.
As a matter of fact, I still work towards creating online tourism, but it turns out to be tight =)
Of course, there may already be solutions for a long time that I simply don’t know about, then this post does not make any sense.
We at our agency, by the way, spend a lot of time researching the user’s behavior on the site and try to follow his path from visiting the site to buying a tour, it turns out to be a very interesting picture. We tried, probably, a dozen order forms, but still do not fully understand what the typical “tourist” wants from the travel agency site. I hope to share some information in my next post.
Everything turned out to be much sadder.
It would seem that the rapidly developing tourism industry and IT, is also a very developing industry should be somehow interconnected and all solutions for tourism should be at the height, and be inexpensive. After all, an online store can be opened for 300 bucks, how does tourism differ from ordinary e-commerce?
')
The problems began immediately when I wanted to bring together two tour operators with their proposals. In open access XML was only for TEZ and for Capital (which later went bankrupt). When we opened, it was January, almost “not a season”, but the amount of data was simply amazing. The size of XML reached 2-5 gigabytes. My poor VPS was just dying. Then I realized that it was a stupid idea to upload all the data and store it. Especially in the season when the tour operator offers change literally every hour.
That is why almost no tour search system such as tourindex or ruspo has 100% current tours. I realized that writing this service alone would be somewhat problematic (although maybe I’m wrong, correct me). I set a goal and began to compare tour search systems, so that the client could enter, find what he needed, order, and the manager from the “this” side would quickly process. There are few such systems:
- RUSPO
- Tourindex
- Exat
- Broni.ru
- Master Agent
All these systems are practically no different from each other, perhaps, the cost of connecting and a set of tour operators.
We started working with everyone in turn. And what's interesting turned out. No system can be properly embedded on the travel agency website. No system performs the tasks for which it was created.
In one, for example, all links to hotels lead to a third-party site, which displays prices for tours already from other travel agencies. Ie if the client clicks on the name of the hotel, he can safely go to the competitors.
The other system does not allow you to customize the display of results on a separate page, but displays them in some strange pop-up, and you cannot simply change the search currency from Russian rubles (in Belarus is somehow not very relevant) to dollars.
The third is written in .NET and the tour search form opens on a separate server (for example, 212.192.19.1, etc.) and is not integrated into the existing site.
By the way, “setting up a search form” is a separate paid service for such systems without which there is no way.
And so on, it turned out that no system is adapted to the needs of agencies, then it asks who and for whom it is being written?
It turns out that in this form there is no complete on-line in tourism, but there is some kind of pseudo-online. You can not buy a tour to Egypt on your card, without human intervention.
Yes, now there are a lot of tourist startups, as in Russia and indeed in the CIS, but all of them either specialize in the search for airline tickets (by the way, meta search engines have divorced a lot, but more on that next time) or tourist social networks appear , for independent travelers. But there are no normal start-ups that really help travel agencies, of which there are still very many.
As a matter of fact, I still work towards creating online tourism, but it turns out to be tight =)
Of course, there may already be solutions for a long time that I simply don’t know about, then this post does not make any sense.
We at our agency, by the way, spend a lot of time researching the user’s behavior on the site and try to follow his path from visiting the site to buying a tour, it turns out to be a very interesting picture. We tried, probably, a dozen order forms, but still do not fully understand what the typical “tourist” wants from the travel agency site. I hope to share some information in my next post.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/137585/
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