What will determine the future of distribution in the next 3-5 years in the Russian tourism market, will global trends influence us or will we, as always, go our own way? These and many other questions were discussed by market experts as part of the panel discussion “Global changing distribution channels of tourism services”, which attracted a lot of attention from visitors to the OTDYKH Travel Technology conference.
Photo — Dmitry Plisov
The following took part in the discussion:
- Grach Muradyan, Head of IT projects at Amadeus Russia;
- Tatyana Merkulova, Vice President and Commercial Director of the Transport Clearing Chamber;
- Ilya Kravtsov, director of B2B.Ostrovok.ru;
- Alexander Ladygin, founder of "Rent a Ride";
- Anatoly Kuryumov, General Director of Raketa.travel;
- Inna Beltyukova, Chairman of the Board of Directors of Inna Tour.
Victoria Kizimova, moderator of the section and CEO of the company "My Agent", summarizes the results of the discussion.
Everyone is concerned about how and what the client will buy, how to change in order not to close. Defining the main global trends and challenges, the participants of the discussion noted the following:
- Convenience is becoming the new religion. Professional market participants, travel agents are looking for easy-to-use and content-rich solutions. Therefore, now is the time for the growth of b2b booking platforms.
- Suppliers want to be as close to the customer as possible. Sometimes this means that providers want to sell their content directly to the end user, such as hotels increasing their spending on promoting direct bookings. In other cases, providers change their technology to be able to deliver the full range of their capabilities to the customer. A great example is the implementation of the NDC protocol in aviation, where the airline and agent communicate host-to-host, without losing data.
Entry of non-tourism competitors into the marketBanks, for example, have discovered the opportunity to attract clients to their own product through the sale of travel services at discounts.
All speakers agreed that B2B sales channels in Russia have a significant share, and for some travel service providers they are the main channel. Convenient B2B online tools will continue to develop. In particular, they will be filled with new products, for example, multimodal transportation. Just yesterday it was hard to imagine the possibility of booking a trip on 2-3 types of transport at once in one interface and in one ticket. Now such complex products are becoming a reality.
Discussing the need for each participant in the travel services market to use the latest technologies in creating and selling a product, experts agreed that owning technologies is already the lot of large players. Knowing, being able to use, renting such technologies is another recipe for success today. "Lean" on the leader in creating dynamic packages or getting one access to all airline NDCs at once, everyone will decide for themselves. Being closer to your client, focusing on your own value for the client is a recipe for success for all times.
Source: trn-news.ru