7 ms·

No, travel agents were an obsolete industry. Hotels are not obsolete, AirBnB is 'disrupting' the industry by ignoring local laws and regulations. It may be th

by JackFr 13y ago

No, travel agents were an obsolete industry. Hotels are not obsolete, AirBnB is 'disrupting' the industry by ignoring local laws and regulations. It may be that these regulations exist to protect an obsolete business model but it also might not. When your path is blocked by a fence before you tear it down, its a good idea to understand why it was put up in the first place.

umsm 13y ago
In my personal experience, I love travel agents. They were able to: (1) Make valuable recommendations (2) Offer me a better price than any website (3) Save me hours upon hours of wasted time
- zanny 13y ago
  (2) only because they are members of larger organizations that can strong arm prices down. (1) I'd rather the aggregate recommendations of a million people than the personal opinion of just one in most of these situations - you want the statistical mean experience, because a travel agent can be given special treatment or just have had a lucky streak placing clients in an otherwise seedy place. (3) Hopefully another thing tech can fix. I mean, yeah, you have the rare extremely special case circumstance you can't easily break down into a power search, so they have a niche, but as a general tool for people looking for places to stay, you really don't need another fleshy body directly involved with the seeker.
  - umsm 13y ago
    (2) Yay! The client wins! :) On a more serious note: That is how internet companies continue to stay in business: automate, lower prices, increase competition, etc. Agents just beat them at their game. (1) How many online reviews are fake? How many are written out of spite? There is a level of trust you have to give someone: either an online reviewer or a person. (3) Having a human to work with is usually better service than not. But it really depends on the situation. Edit: I'd like to mention that I am not an agent of any sort. I do more business online than anyone I know, but I also realize the pros/cons of both sides of the spectrum.
    - zanny 13y ago
      > (1) How many online reviews are fake? How many are written out of spite? There is a level of trust you have to give someone: either an online reviewer or a person. That is why I quantify pretty explicitly a million - I'd never consider any sampling below, say, a hundred reviews, and even then you have to accept the inherent inertial bias that anyone content with their experience won't review it, and disproportionately people will complain about a negative one than praise a great stay. You need enough aggregate results to smother false reviews or non-systemic bias. > (3) Having a human to work with is usually better service than not. But it really depends on the situation. It is really situational, but one critical aspect of the information age is a litmus test on every human service position on whether or not actually having gassy meat on one end of the transaction is really worth the comparatively huge costs of keeping said meat bag alive and happy. And it is a personal test - which is why most industries that have been displaced by the Internet still exist to serve the population that values that interaction.
- mattzito 13y ago
  I actually still use a travel agent for nicer vacation bookings. I almost always pay the same price as on the website, but get upgrades, free breakfast, spa credits, etc. etc. When it's more than the website, I do a cost-benefit analysis and decide whether the value I'll derive from paying a slightly higher price for amenities is worth it or not. And, I get the benefit of the travel agent's expertise, as you say, who knows a little bit about me and what I care about. Sure I can do the research myself (and I will often do so), but it's nice to get all this stuff for basically nothing.
maxwell 13y ago
I worked in hospitality for 5 years, and right now I'm staying at a hotel in downtown Vegas, a few miles from the author's Airbnb place. Hotels are obsolete. It's not the business model, short-term housing and hospitality certainly have no risk of obsolescence ever, it's the industry. Service sucks, rooms suck, tech really sucks. You have awkward kids in bad suits and clip-on ties at the front desk who're trained to use Romantic terminology over Germanic. That's at the better places. I'm staying at the original, and seemingly one of the better, Fremont Street places, in town for a quarterly meetup for the startup I'm at. The wifi costs $12.99 a day, they throttled my connection the one time I used it trying to make a viddy call, and last night I was connected to the router but nothing was coming through. I've had similar experiences around the country, for the past 10 years, and seen little improvement. I convinced the hospitality company I was at, and some that I consulted with, that the wifi is as important as the running water, but you can tell most don't feel that way. I got in the other night around 10pm, went to a touchscreen terminal they overpaid for, and I haven't seen a single person use over this week here, but didn't have a confirmation because someone at the company booked it, so used a phone sitting next to the kiosk to call a representative, who directed me around to find a desk that I'd passed and disregarded because it was labeled as "Tickets", then spent a good half-hour getting checked-in because of various confusion and technical glitches and dozens and dozens of key-presses in their property management system. Then, there are the guests. As soon as someone stays at a hotel, they think they're entitled to act like an asshole. It seems to usually boil down to them feeling like they overpaid, regretting the decision, and taking it out on some staff member. They know that the people around them are either other customers or employees, and treat them with ambivalence because there are no consequences or accountability. Guests can review a hotel, hotels can't review guests. A couple weeks ago, I stayed at an Airbnb place for the first time, outside of Boston. We texted the host when we were coming, took the T, ending up on an awesome light-rail car at the end that I didn't know about, walked through a beautiful neighborhood, knocked on the door, chatted with the host for a minute, and were shown to our room. Totally painless, which made it easy to feel gracious and respectful of the host and his property and neighbors. Had a great breakfast at a local place, because good places are in residential areas. All you can find around hotels are crappy chains. You know, because of the zoning. And that good places don't want to deal with pissed off hotel guests. The fence is coming down. Hotels are doomed.

by JackFr 13y ago

umsm 13y ago

In my personal experience, I love travel agents. They were able to: (1) Make valuable recommendations (2) Offer me a better price than any website (3) Save me hours upon hours of wasted time

zanny 13y ago
(2) only because they are members of larger organizations that can strong arm prices down. (1) I'd rather the aggregate recommendations of a million people than the personal opinion of just one in most of these situations - you want the statistical mean experience, because a travel agent can be given special treatment or just have had a lucky streak placing clients in an otherwise seedy place. (3) Hopefully another thing tech can fix. I mean, yeah, you have the rare extremely special case circumstance you can't easily break down into a power search, so they have a niche, but as a general tool for people looking for places to stay, you really don't need another fleshy body directly involved with the seeker.
- umsm 13y ago
  (2) Yay! The client wins! :) On a more serious note: That is how internet companies continue to stay in business: automate, lower prices, increase competition, etc. Agents just beat them at their game. (1) How many online reviews are fake? How many are written out of spite? There is a level of trust you have to give someone: either an online reviewer or a person. (3) Having a human to work with is usually better service than not. But it really depends on the situation. Edit: I'd like to mention that I am not an agent of any sort. I do more business online than anyone I know, but I also realize the pros/cons of both sides of the spectrum.
  - zanny 13y ago
    > (1) How many online reviews are fake? How many are written out of spite? There is a level of trust you have to give someone: either an online reviewer or a person. That is why I quantify pretty explicitly a million - I'd never consider any sampling below, say, a hundred reviews, and even then you have to accept the inherent inertial bias that anyone content with their experience won't review it, and disproportionately people will complain about a negative one than praise a great stay. You need enough aggregate results to smother false reviews or non-systemic bias. > (3) Having a human to work with is usually better service than not. But it really depends on the situation. It is really situational, but one critical aspect of the information age is a litmus test on every human service position on whether or not actually having gassy meat on one end of the transaction is really worth the comparatively huge costs of keeping said meat bag alive and happy. And it is a personal test - which is why most industries that have been displaced by the Internet still exist to serve the population that values that interaction.
mattzito 13y ago
I actually still use a travel agent for nicer vacation bookings. I almost always pay the same price as on the website, but get upgrades, free breakfast, spa credits, etc. etc. When it's more than the website, I do a cost-benefit analysis and decide whether the value I'll derive from paying a slightly higher price for amenities is worth it or not. And, I get the benefit of the travel agent's expertise, as you say, who knows a little bit about me and what I care about. Sure I can do the research myself (and I will often do so), but it's nice to get all this stuff for basically nothing.

maxwell 13y ago

I worked in hospitality for 5 years, and right now I'm staying at a hotel in downtown Vegas, a few miles from the author's Airbnb place. Hotels are obsolete. It's not the business model, short-term housing and hospitality certainly have no risk of obsolescence ever, it's the industry. Service sucks, rooms suck, tech really sucks. You have awkward kids in bad suits and clip-on ties at the front desk who're trained to use Romantic terminology over Germanic. That's at the better places. I'm staying at the original, and seemingly one of the better, Fremont Street places, in town for a quarterly meetup for the startup I'm at. The wifi costs $12.99 a day, they throttled my connection the one time I used it trying to make a viddy call, and last night I was connected to the router but nothing was coming through. I've had similar experiences around the country, for the past 10 years, and seen little improvement. I convinced the hospitality company I was at, and some that I consulted with, that the wifi is as important as the running water, but you can tell most don't feel that way. I got in the other night around 10pm, went to a touchscreen terminal they overpaid for, and I haven't seen a single person use over this week here, but didn't have a confirmation because someone at the company booked it, so used a phone sitting next to the kiosk to call a representative, who directed me around to find a desk that I'd passed and disregarded because it was labeled as "Tickets", then spent a good half-hour getting checked-in because of various confusion and technical glitches and dozens and dozens of key-presses in their property management system. Then, there are the guests. As soon as someone stays at a hotel, they think they're entitled to act like an asshole. It seems to usually boil down to them feeling like they overpaid, regretting the decision, and taking it out on some staff member. They know that the people around them are either other customers or employees, and treat them with ambivalence because there are no consequences or accountability. Guests can review a hotel, hotels can't review guests. A couple weeks ago, I stayed at an Airbnb place for the first time, outside of Boston. We texted the host when we were coming, took the T, ending up on an awesome light-rail car at the end that I didn't know about, walked through a beautiful neighborhood, knocked on the door, chatted with the host for a minute, and were shown to our room. Totally painless, which made it easy to feel gracious and respectful of the host and his property and neighbors. Had a great breakfast at a local place, because good places are in residential areas. All you can find around hotels are crappy chains. You know, because of the zoning. And that good places don't want to deal with pissed off hotel guests. The fence is coming down. Hotels are doomed.