Brad Ideas - A road-trip travel agent - Comments

All that tech?

brad — Sat, 06 Feb 2010 21:00:23 -0800

It’s just a standard web desktop, and perhaps a travel agent’s database of hotels and a bit of ground knowledge. No fancy tech. I have all that tech. I do all this stuff from my laptop next to an internet cafe, but a person with a fast connection and big screen can do it much faster. Add a few tools (to merge together the review sites and the price queries) and you could do it in a few minutes for me.

Now a network of agents, with each caller sent to the right agent (one who knows the area and speaks the language) would be some more advanced tech. The hard part though, would be figuring out how to express each customer’s “desire profile” in a way that is compact and can be understood by the agent in a minute of reading. I have a feeling that to make me happy, an agent would need to learn my tastes over time.

My tastes also vary. I tend to want good value in my purchases and may spend $200 for a $500 hotel rather than take a $80 hotel for $80. But that sort of taste is hard to judge. And you have to know what is truly a bargain and what is an ad.

All that technology and

Jay H — Sat, 06 Feb 2010 08:58:31 -0800

All that technology and talent on call for just $30 to $40 per hour? Maybe from India, but even then the economics sound sketchy.

A road-trip travel agent

brad — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 09:47:52 -0800

I’ll have many more observations about my recent trip to DLD, Davos and the Alps soon, but one thing I’ve decided I do want to find (or train) is a travel agent/helper who can assist well with unscheduled travel (ie. a road or railpass trip.)

With unscheduled travel, you don’t know in the morning where you will end up that night. You only figure it out later in the day. Sometimes you just drive until it starts getting late and then you pick where you will end the night. It’s hard (or expensive) to do this in high season but in low season you can always find a room, and I and many others like that sort of freedom.

So when you do pick where you want to end up you have a few options:

You can have a guidebook or database (such as AAA in the USA) and phone around places until you get something you like
You can hunt around for web access (better if you have a data plan on your phone) and use sites like TripAdvisor and the various booking search engines (like Kayak/Sidestep) to find a decent hotel at a good price.
You can just drive into town and look for Vacancy/Zimmer Frei signs and go in and ask the price.
You can find somebody to do this for you.

There are problems with all these approaches. Method 3 (especially using tripadivsor) helps you avoid turkey hotels and find the better values. However, the databases cover only a fraction of the hotels, and the online reservations systems also cover only a small fraction of hotels in an area. There will be better values out there. On the other hand, many hotels offer a better price through the internet than if you call them, or will charge even more if you just walk in.