Cruise customers prefer agents to Google

Niche operators in the cruise and family sectors can exploit the failings of both mainstream agents and the search engine Google, according to industry bosses.

Searching for family holidays online is difficult, said Advantage Travel Centres new managing director Julia Lo Bue-Said, because vital elements such as adjoining rooms and suites aren’t reflected in the search categories.

Virgin Holidays e-commerce director Chris Roe said pricing was difficult for families to compare online because airline reservations systems had different age limits for children.

Bookableholidays.com MD Jason Dwyer, said: "Families need to be able to drill down into the detail to get the right product."

The shortcomings of natural search on Google, as well as mainstream tour operators’ websites, were highlighted at a roundtable discussion of travel industry bosses, hosted by World Travel Market.

It heard that the cruise sector is one of the least successful online. Andy Harmer, director of CLIA UK, said: "Around 80% of cruise in the UK is bought through agents. Travel agents are successful because they give customer what Google can’t."

However, industry veteran and former Thomson director Dermot Blastland, now an non-executive director at On The Beach,  took a different slant. "Is there really that much dissatisfaction out there?  As an industry we take millions of families on holiday every year and a lot of them book online, yet we’re talking as if it’s chaos."

He said Thomson wants to sell direct to the customer online so it can gather personal data which give it access to their personal history and other preferences. "Many travel agents just haven’t built up the database of their own customers," he said.

Event moderator Steve Endacott, CEO of On Holiday Group, said cruises hadn’t done enough to capture the family market. This was backed up by Amadeus marketing director Rob Sinclair Barnes who said Amadeus research which found that only 6% of people thought that cruising was good for families.

WTM head of marketing and communications Micaela Juarez there was a gap in the market for an Amazon-style aggregator.

"There is no aggregator of travel product that stores what you want and like," she said. "The searches of tomorrow should enable holidaymakers to see holiday types that they may like.

"However, the industry needs to be careful not to scare consumers with what might appear a ‘big brother’ approach."

But the biggest issue for cruise remains pricing, said Virgin’s Chris Roe. He said the low lead-in prices offered by cruise lines and specialist retailers "did the cruise industry no good." Kathryn Beadle, managing director of Norwegian cruise line Hurtigruten said: "Market leaders inevitably compete on price and that can lead to price wars."