Online booking of holidays - why is it a hell?

We are living in an era where especially the travel and leisure industry has underwent major changes the last couple of years. In the past people went to a travel agent or more and collected first several brochures with color pictures and descriptions. One of the disadvantages was that the brochures were so unclear that one had to return to the travel agent to get proper advice.

Now we are flooded with online possibilities to book our holiday online. The Online Travel Agents (OTA) make us even believe that sitting behind the computer is the moment the holiday already starts. That is why their websites try to breath a holiday like atmosphere, and we are flooded with pictures of happy families, beautiful women, gorgeous landscapes, etc.

But nothing is more true. Booking your holiday online has become a hell for a lot of holiday-goers. Where does the normal visitor start to plan his holiday? Most likely he enters a few keywords in Google, Bing, or another search engine. And then he is provided with thousands of search results of which it is very difficult to filter the relevant ones out of it. And of course, by now, we all know that the first five results are sponsored, and therefore, there must be something wrong with the offer.

So an evening holiday planning involved going through an awful lot of irrelevant search results. When I plan to go with my wife and two little children on a holiday to Spain I do not want to see interesting hotels with golf courses, or hotels with discotheques, because my children are so small that I do not even have the time to dream of these things.

Checking link after link on the search result pages sometimes you do encounter an interesting option, but that is only the start of the real nightmare. If you have found an interesting looking accommodation then the trick is to enter the name of the accommodation in a new Google Search page in order to find out which tour operator has the best offer. Or like I like to do to find out the website of the accommodation itself, because I do not like to pay for the profit margin of the tour operator.

So we have now discovered an accommodation, and found an tour operator's website or the direct website of the accommodation. Can we now finally be happy? No, of course not. It is now time for unclear, non-usable, or malfunctioning technology to rear its ugly head. Halfway the booking process suddenly a technical error occurs, or at the end of the process there seems to be no availability anymore, which was there at the beginning. An endless switching between tour operators has seemed to begun.

Unfortunately, modern technology and what is called Web 2.0 has made our lives even more complicated. We are after the choice of an accommodation now suddenly obliged to check sites like TripAdvisor, and the likes so that we can suddenly be confronted with what other travellers to our destination have written about it. With a little bit of bad luck this means that the whole process of looking for an accommodation can start from the beginning again, because the reviews show that our dream apartment suddenly seems to be full of smelly insects, or more trivial complaints like that a pubic hair was found on the floor, and therefore, the apartment is a complete disaster according to the reviewer.

And now all of a sudden we also need to be social. We need to share our holiday destination with our friends on Facebook, or tweet it to our followers. Is this really because we hope our friends or followers have some additional advice for us? Or do we want to make them a bit jealous with our planned holiday?

It is my personal experience, therefore, that planning a holiday nowadays online lasts almost as long as the whole planned holiday. And I wish that there was a relationship between the amount of frustration upfront and the enjoyment afterwards. In other words, the more frustration upfront the more enjoyable the holiday will be.

Is it really all that bad what I have described here? In some way YES, but most of all we should not forget that we should use the internet as a tool to help us find our new holiday destination, and that the online search for it is not a goal on itself.

Most of all, however, I would like to urge Online Travel Agents, Online Tour Operators, Hotel owners, etc. to really reconsider whether there approach is the most logical approach for the people they want to reach with it. Which tools can they use in a proper way, which software can they use, which social media strategy is best for their purpose, etc.

Of course, this is what I can help with being a consultant in the travel and leisure industry.

Jan van Eijck