Frictionless voyage
E-commerce company wants to make your on-the-ground experience smooth as silk
When you book a vacation online through one of the major travel websites, the interaction with that company usually ends after the payments are made, the itinerary is sent and the tickets and accommodation details land in your inbox.
Sure, there may be a followup email to offer you a car rental or airport transfer, but — unless a flight gets cancelled or something else goes wrong — the relationship with the company that sold you the vacation often ends there.
Executives at Booking.com, one of the largest e-commerce travel companies in the world, are hoping to change that.
They’re betting that the next frontier in serving the increasingly tech savvy traveller is in helping you get the most out of your trip once you’re on the ground in your new destination. In 79 cities around the world, the company has launched Booking Experiences, an app that makes it easy to find and pay for activities and attractions.
Based in Amsterdam where it has its roots as a small Dutch startup, the company is now part of Booking Holdings, formerly Priceline.
More than 1.5 million hotel room nights are booked on the platform each day, which now has 198 offices around the world — including one dedicated entirely to artificial intelligence — and operates in 43 languages.
Hoping to do for your experience once you’re settled in at your destination what they’ve done for getting you there, the app allows travellers to peruse through categories such as Museums or Food and Drinks, find their way using built-in maps and pay with a connected credit card simply by showing one QR code on their phone. No surprises about whether a small local vendor takes cash only or is closed on Mondays.
In Booking.com’s Montreal office, Marco Purificati oversees Booking Experiences for North America.
“We have done research specific to Canadian travellers and we found that — and it’s not a surprise considering the busy lives that we all run — at least one in five Canadians want to have the research done for them, someone to do the hard work in terms of discovering the next destination or what to do on vacation.”
Purificati says the company’s findings also show that Canadian consumers are looking for savings and perks — things like discounted admissions or “skip the line” privileges at the attractions they visit.
I had a chance to give the app a whirl on a recent trip to Amsterdam where journalists toured the Booking.com headquarters and met with senior leadership.
Utterly charmed by the city’s great bike culture and amazing cycling infrastructure, biking along those pathways and over canal bridges on a Mary Poppinsstyle ride was my top priority. It’s said that the city of approximately 820,000 has around 900,000 bikes. (About 6,000 of them are fished out of the canals and other waterways each year.)
Luckily, A-Bike Rentals and Tours was just a short walk from where we were staying at Sofitel Legend The Grand Amsterdam Hotel.
AMSTERDAM from T1
It has a fleet of more than 1,000 bikes in 15 different styles, including those super Euro cargo bikes that Dutch parents use to cart around their kids, groceries and tulip bulbs.
All I had to do to get myself a set of discounted wheels was show the QR code within the app, then listen to some quick instructions on the bike’s double-locking system to ensure my rented ride wouldn’t get pinched and later meet its fate in a canal.
The only challenge was trying to follow my navigation app’s instructions to “turn right on Binnengasthuisstraat” then “right on Oudezijds Achterburgwal” without causing a traffic jam among my fellow city cyclists. I made my way to Moco Museum, the Museum of Contemporary Art, delighting first in cycling under the big arches of the Rijksmuseum as I entered the city’s Museum Quarter.
Moco was offering a skip-theline service for Booking Experiences customers, so I was able to bypass the queue that stretched down the museum’s front steps and immediately start looking around.
My timing was particularly good as there were special exhibits by the legendary Banksy as well as Iranian artists ICY and SOT, in addition to the regular collection, which includes offerings by Jean-Michel Basquiat, Keith Haring and Roy Lichtenstein. From there I wove my way along more canalside pathways and through the floating flower market.
Then I met some other members of our group for a cheese tasting experience at one of the shops owned by the cheesemaking family behind Henri Willig. Again, that QR code was all we needed before finding ourselves sitting around a long table in the store’s top floor, sipping wine and tasting a variety of Dutch cheeses.
As the app gathers data on users’ preferences, the recommendations for activities will get more personalized. Knowing I’ve chosen a bike rental in the past, it may recommend one for me when I land in another city, for example. Same goes for other foodie outings.
Booking’s CEO Gillian Tans, one of the globe’s most powerful women in tech, says the company has 2,000 engineers “basically working on that everyday.”
A second generation of the app will account for local weather and recommend indoor or outdoor activities accordingly. “We’re taking the friction out of travel.”
Tans says the addition of the Experiences app is also fuelled by a major trend in the travel industry. “People more and more are looking for a real local experience,” she says.
Millennials especially are less interested in sticking to a beach resort and more keen to have unique experiences. All the better to differentiate one’s Instagram feed.
One challenge may be perception about whether the Booking Experiences strike discerning customers are far enough off the beaten path.
“The problem with offering experiences is that they can be perceived as commercial,” says Michael Erdman, senior vice president of market research group Longwoods International. “What we know from research is that people want authentic experiences that are not commercial.”
Making it clear that this goes beyond the convenience of buying a city museum pass, for instance, or perks that some may already enjoy through reward programs like American Express that already have line-skipping offerings will be important, he says.
The idea of using mobile tech to plan activities does seem to fit with some of Longwoods’ research finding about how people aren’t just booking their flights and accommodations and leaving the rest to chance, says Erdman.
“Restaurants are the number one thing being booked online in advance of trips,” he says. “You can do these things now ahead of time. You don’t have to rely on word of mouth when you get to a destination.”
Back in the Montreal office, Marco Purificati answers my questions about the business model for Booking Experiences during a phone interview.
“There is that revenue sharing model with our partners, but what’s most important for us is… the fact that we can make it more of a seamless experience between the accommodation, where we’re already winning in that space and allowing them to discover attractions and experiences.”
“Of course, we are thinking that will bring them back to Booking.com,” Purificati says.
Erdman says that customer satisfaction is indeed “very predictive of return purchases.”
“But your time window is just until the next guy has the same goods as you.”
Given that Booking.com has 29 million different places to stay, in 141,000 destinations spread over 230 countries and territories, though, it could be a challenge for other plays to match those same goods anytime soon.