Link video group 78: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tXX7Ly2r0NY
Thomas Cook was was a baptist preacher who lived in the 19th century. In 1841 he made a deal with the Midland Railway to organize a trip for his society. After that, Thomas cook organized a lot of other transportation trips. He became the first recorded travel agent. Without making use of any technology, Thomas Cook organized travels for 165,000 people a year.
Nowadays, we can’t imagine the travel industry without technology. Firms just like Booking and TripAdvisor are online travel agents. Because of these firms, people don’t have to go to a physical store anymore.
TripAdvisor.com
TripAdvisor was founded in 2000. It started as a portal for professional reviews and by now it’s the biggest travel website. They search the cheapest trip for you. You can also write about your experience about a hotel, flight, restaurant, etc. and view comments from others. In this way you will be sure about your choice.
Besides their website, TripAdvisor also have different applications. They have TripAdvisor for both mobile and tablet and three application where you can see different information about flights, weather and restaurants.
The biggest strength of TripAdvisor is that they has a strong international presence with 300 million (unique) monthly visitors. Point that are less good are the controversies regarding the validity of the reviews and the chance of theft of email addresses.
Booking.com
Booking is an online accommodation booking website started as a small start-up in 1996 at Amsterdam. Now it has become the world’s number one online booking website. Booking has a similar but different value proposition to TripAdvisor: Booking is mainly focused on the hotels.
In contrast to TripAdvisor, Booking have their own online booking system, where people can directly pay on booking.com. As the biggest online booking website, they’re also able to connect the hotels around the world which is supported by rich resources and information.
Prediction
Because people prefer the cheapest price, the biggest success factor in the future is to build consumer habits and expectations that they will find the cheapest hotels at the right price when using the review sites.
Using the hype cycle, we believe companies like TripAdvisor and Booking.com are ‘at the peak’ and that the services are at the end of ‘at the peak’. The service will reach the stages where negative press begins. Media hype is currently building and with the brand expansion, supplier proliferation is increasing.
The review sites aim to handle users regardless whether they visit through its apps, or desktop. According to TripAdvisor’s CEO Steve Kaufer, people prefer Apps. The future for the online travel review industry is one with a greater emphasis on the helpful button as well as the ability to achieve higher overall expertise levels.
The future of creating an online community should encourage the forum posts, destination experts, seeing where your friends have been, giving the chance to directly ask other users about their reviews, and more overall social interaction.
