Five (No, Six) Things That Travel Distribution Companies Must Do to Survive and/or Maximize Profitability

Summary

In August 2013, Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, bought the The Washington Post newspaper. The move caused a lot of head scratching in that here was a person (Bezos) who was clearly a leader in using the Internet to develop business value, seeing a media "dinosaur" with its traditional business eroding, and acquiring it with his own money. In the wake of the Bezos/Post announcement, pundits made a number of pronouncements. These included an article titled, "Five things Jeff Bezos should do to reinvent the sinking ship that is The Washington Post."

We have taken this concept and applied it to the travel distribution business, which has been fundamentally disrupted by online travel agencies (OTAs), metasearch companies, Internet transparency and supplier direct initiatives. And even though the travel industry has shown significant signs of recovery and well-being, we believe a similar "reinventing" approach would be useful in travel distribution.