Great article on the travel myths. Well actually, it’s an article about what’s wrong with the travel industry and why, in the last 15 years, it still hasn’t innovated nor solved significant problems which all are related to one thing: user trust. How do you acquire a user’s trust so he can constantly come back and use your travel service and be presented with quality results each time he visits? Afterall, travel customers are fickle and will use several sites to find their best prices (I know I do) since all sites, regardless if you are hipmunk or google, will give you inconsistent prices or irrelevant prices.

Although the ways of solving it, as the article looks at it has been tried to solve via UI, such as hipmunk and powerful search, such as Google, that’s all it offers. Are these the only two variables in solving the user trust issues?

So here’s where Flocations comes in; although we try to innovate on both the UI and Search, as these are of utmost importance, we innovate on something that is not mentioned in the article; target market.

Unlike the big fish and little fish that are trying to swim in the ocean, Flocations wants to stick to our comfortable little pond. That is, we make it quite clear that we are NOT the place to go to for international travel. We strictly concentrate on regional travel. Making this apparent, we already start segmenting ourselves away from people that:
1. Know where they are going
2. want international travel
Which leaves us the small niche market of “people that want to travel nearby for vacation”. This means, that we build a product specific to the people that want to do this and there are certain consistent attributes that people wanting to do nearby travel have (such as the affinity towards lowcost carriers, hence, FLocations will never include legacy carriers). In other words, we know exactly what our users want because of the tiny niche we are trying to cater to and therefore, we can gain user trust faster than any other player simply because we pinpoint our clinetelle.

So coming back to solivng the user trust issue, Flocations solves this by adding one more elemnt aside from just UI and Search, but we segragate ourselves to one niche market and do it well.

When Airbnb created a community marketplace for people to post, browse, and book unique accommodations around the world, it revolutionized the travel industry. To acquire customers for its unique marketplace, Airbnb needed to reach and educate users about how the service worked, and scale it globally.

Pretty nice case study that google put out about how AirBnb grew their transactions from 800,000 to 2Million through a campaign of education and re-education since AirBNB model was so revolutionary.

Since Flocaitons does a few things out of the ordinary when it comes to travel, there is a small learning curve for the user. Or I should say there is a hurdle; the user usually gets shocked by how our site is presented as they are used to the old text-based origin/destination input methodology. I suppose our challenge is to get them comfortable with the new interface straight away. Ah, the challenges of trying something new.

Tudor