Priceline, Expedia and OTA emerging in the Online Travel Market

Travel industries has become one of the most competitive. And now a days everyone enjoys accessing large number of options to book trips and accommodations. Mobile apps for flight and hotel booking have become major concern for the traditional travel agents for a while now.

Alike Airbnb, online bookings are increasing through websites and mobile apps. Even, airlines, hotel chains and car rental brands have been developing their own websites and apps. For boosting their brand, loyalty programs are conducted where they try to convince customers that have no reason to use OTA search engine to find the best deal.

This becomes obvious for the travel agencies difficult to survive! Having website is not the solution. Expedia, Booking.com, Priceline and many others are the rising competitors and launching a new travel app means to go against them. To stay in this fierce competition, travel agencies must be something different.

Let’s have a look how popular travel brands operate and provide recommendations for the agents who wants to navigate into online world.

Source inventory of Expedia and Priceline

Companies like Expedia and Priceline source their inventory by negotiating directly with the hotels and using GDS (global distribution systems) to book hotel reservations, cruises, air tickets, car rentals, different attractions and services. GDS systems is expensive to access, and so travel agencies generally do not prefer inventory if they can avoid. 

How do online travel agencies make money?

Online travel agencies uses these business models, to monetize their products.

Agency business model: OTA acts as a middleman between industry operators and customers, making commission on each transaction. Expedia's rates for commission ranges from 20 to 25%. 

Merchant business model: In this model, OTA is the merchant. Bookings are done on the company's own website or mobile app. To use this model, online agency buys large number of hotels at wholesale rates and then markets rooms to travellers according to the agency's rate. Priceline sells hotel reservations according to this model, whereas Expedia totally relies on the merchant model, that offers higher margins.

Advertising business model: Priceline earns 0.3% of its revenue from advertising fees. Moreover, TripAdvisor is driven by advertising. For small travel agents seeking for travel apps or websites, advertising model is the most affordable. Alternatively, you can even use the existing infrastructure to build new services and earn money along with them. Many travel agencies make money on flights and hotels charging cost-per-click to OTA and supplier websites.

Differentiate your Product offerings

1. Go Mobile

Recent survey by Euromonitor International stated that, the travel industry will have highest percentage of mobile bookings of any retail industry by 2020. Since then, the market for travel apps will as competitive as for the web, it can be recommended to initiate your application with by targeting your existing customers. Your travel app can greatly increase your customer loyalty.

2.  Get into new and niche Markets

Rather than targeting undeserved geographical area, travel agencies that do not wish to be endangered species can differentiate by catering the niche market. Some of the areas where agents are still succeeding included luxury and business niche where travellers value personal relationships and expertise over cost savings.

Moreover, you can also choose a niche to target based on interests like adventure, spirituality, history, extreme sports etc. You can also select based on demographics, special events as in olympics, rock concerts, festivals or even you can choose themes like camping, city breaks, wellness, family or luxury. 

3. Technology to improvise Customer service

Expedia and Priceline care to the mass market, that consists of young people and are used to get instant information on the web and booking trips on their own. 

If you are start up, that audience you attract is not same as the one like Expedia target. While online travel agencies have wide range of options, they do not offer customer services that is actually expected. Customer service is what traditional agencies are so good at!

Traditional agents search for flights and accommodations for their customers. Moreover, a traditional agency plans the entire trip without any awareness of their client. And if there are any concerns during or after the trip, travel agents are always ready to help. These advantages can be improved with the help of technology. And the agents who embrace technology to improve the client experience, it is obvious for their survival.  

If you want to know more about your travel app, feel free to contact us!

Glimpse on Latest Laravel Update – 5.4

Laravel was considered as the top rated PHP framework in 2016 and the trend of Laravel is yet to stay this year because of its latest release of Laravel 5.4. Alike previous versions i.e Laravel 5.3, this version also comes with new and improved features that include support of Laravel Dusk, markdown and the improvements in Redis clustering.

With the introduction of the Laravel 5.4, many new features were introduced. Let’s have a brief idea about it.

Laravel Dusk

Laravel Dusk is an overall a browser testing tool for JavaScript enabled applications i.e button and link clicks within an application. It utilizes ChromeDriver and Facebook Php-web driver. It works with the Selenium browser, but it arrives with ChromeDriver by default that saves you from installing JDK or Selenium. The main advantage is that Dusk provides handy helper methods like loginAs that allow giving a user instance.

Real Time Facades

In Laravel 5.4, easily converts your application class into a facade. Unlike the previous version, there is no need to create your own facades, the new update can do it on-demand for you to get rid of countless onlookers.

Markdown Mail & Notification

Laravel 5.4 arrives with pre-built markdown templates and components for mail and notifications. This helps developers to generate responsive HTML emails. When you send email, you can integrate Markdown with Blade components to provide maximum flexibility.

Laravel Mix

Elixir API is now followed by Laravel Mix. It is introduced first time in the updates of Laravel. Though both versions are continued to exist, Mix is recommended to be build tool wrapper of choice. It is developed in Webpack and offers nearly exact same friendly API that you’re already used to.

Redis Cluster Support

Now you can get rid of clustering the single host in the same application. In the latest update, you can now define Redis connections to a number of single hosts and multiple clusters within the same application.

Collections Support Higher Order Messages

Collections in the latest update provide short-cuts or you can say “higher order messages” to perform common actions on them. Moreover, Laravel 5.4 has introduced a host of features that provides the ease of application development using the framework.

Blade Components and Slots

Blade components and slots are quite similar to sections and layouts but they are more easy and flexible way to create templates. If you are known to Vue.js then this provides pretty much same.

Changelog

Among the different features and improvements in the release of Laravel 5.4, special attention is given for:

– NEW TRIMSTRINGS AND CONVERTEMPTYSTRINGSTONULL MIDDLEWARE

– “REAL-TIME” FACADES

– CUSTOM PIVOT TABLE MODELS

– JSON BASED LANGUAGE FILES

– OBJECT BASED ELOQUENT EVENTS

– JOB LEVEL RETRY & TIMEOUT

You can find the complete changelog here

https://github.com/laravel/framework/blob/5.4/CHANGELOG-5.4.md

Conclusion

Laravel 5.4 has come up with many exciting features, along with the improvements in existing features. I had briefly marked some of the necessary features. If you have any queries or questions, reach us.