What a Short Strange Trip it's Been

As the available memory on my aging laptop starts to evaporate, I took a few hours the other night to free up space. The stuff you find when you go on a cleaning rampage...

I found a saved news story from 1998 that I'm sure I thought might be important some day. It was a story that Priceline.com, "the Internet buying service that tries to book flights for travelers at prices they propose, is planning to do the same thing with hotels.

"According to Jay Walker, vice chairman of the company, rooms will be offered by late October at more than 1,000 hotels in 26 cities nationwide..."

Just nine years ago this was a breakthrough idea. And, it was launched three years after the generally accepted "consumer-centric" birth of the web. It took Priceline.com three years to figure out that they could offer airfare on the cheap...and six months later, they were back offering hotels.

As Web 2.0 is here (and, in some quarters, beginning to gray), what will the breakthrough products look like three years from now?

It's both exciting...and (for Destination Marketers) scary.

Comments

[TourPro]

Shatner is awesome. I think there are many people of my age (41) that really can relate.

Priceline.com surely was a cool idea. In all reality though, it is nothing more than another distribution channel. Hoteliers used it to get rid of distressed inventory. Oddly enough, sometimes the consumer would still bid above what we were willing to take - cool!

Here's is my prediction - The Reverse Auction. In other words, turn the GDS into a giant Request For Proposal system. Or, using Web 2.0 tools, consumers could "post" their itineraries and desires. Suppliers would monitor these "tags", then respond with their best offer. Early innovators could aggregate these RFP's on one site (the destination site?). With increased efficiency and other communication tools, this could easily be done in near real-time. Another example: I'm on the road, need a room, send out a text to hotels within a certain radius, get virtual offers with directions, GPS coordinates, etc.