The other airline hubs
Though family vacations, friend-filled excursions and personal getaways have packed long filled up the schedules of citizens in developed countries, the way we go about planning these trips has dramatically evolved with technology. What’s more, travel planning appears to be far from settling on a universal system, and instead continues adjusting mobile computing, smarter software and high competition. Recent publications point to a growing tension around online travel agencies (OTAs), pinning their tremendous convenience against the self-defeating complexity created with so many.
Two distinct articles present seemingly contradictory observations about contemporary travel booking habits. One piece reports on recent Google research indicating how complicated and unreliable these websites have become, noting that people in the UK make on average 32 visits to 10 different websites before booking their air travel. The not outlined in the article at hand, there are a number of reasons for the growing complexity, the primary of which concerns to accuracy of the information given. These online travel booking sites, such as Kayak and Expedia, do not indiscriminately provide every price for every possible flight (or hotel, etc.), but instead make deals with the airlines to show a select few or to give them pricing advantages on the site. Travelers respond to this market fixing by checking several hub sites, even though comprehensive and streamlined information was the fundamental purpose of these sites.
A separate article outlines the findings of a notable September survey that testified to American’s ever-growing trust in and reliance on these OTAs. Some of the principal finding include: some 70% of American travelers regard OTAs as convenient and safe, 55% prefer OTAs when searching for hotels, and 43% end up booking on the travel website itself versus the 40% who book directly through the hotel’s platform. That traveler’s make 32 visits to 10 websites does correspond with a broad use of these travel sites, we might expect also that consumers would view these sites with distrust and perhaps get fed up with price inconsistencies across sites. That does not appear to be the case as of yet.
This current tension and complexity surrounding OTAs sheds light on a new concept within Information Networks as well as hubs and authorities on the web. Online travel booking sites present a nice example of a hub and authority network. Airlines serve as the authorities and OTAs as the hubs. In an ideal (but not the existing) case, if a traveler were to type a generic search into Google such as “flights SFO to LAX,” the airline website with the most links from the hub OTAs should have the greatest authority score (and also page rank) and appear at the top of the query results. (Now OTAs show up first due to deals with search engines and their own popularity). If certain hub OTAs make deals due exclusively show only a few carriers, our current model can handle this by simply removing links. When OTAs artificially skew the listed prices of certain flights (perhaps due to a deal with airline A to show a higher price for airline B than a user could find on B’s direct site), the travelers must be weary of the information these sites provide, or the quality of the links in the graph. Our current model accounts for the breadth of a hubs information, but does not consider the accuracy or value of that information. I am curious to see if we will tackle this issue as we move forward.
Sources:
http://www.prweb.com/releases/2015/10/prweb12990988.htm
http://skift.com/2015/09/18/google-urges-airlines-to-reap-rewards-from-mobile-disruption/?utm_campaign=Business+Traveler+Newsletter&utm_source=hs_email&utm_medium=email&utm_content=22177715&_hsenc=p2ANqtz-_UYaiDVfdrxB0oPi-KaK_DzhAgMUFmc9mK-fzFhAaUWNe8OV03xW2A92z3K21UgyPeYvzyORVQ17Aki3UOI0ozi1xcKA&_hsmi=22177715
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