This is a YouTube video titled "5 secrets to Starting a Successful Online Travel Agency" recorded in March 2015. It features a conversation between Avi Arya and Sam from Tatifan discussing key insights and advice for offline travel companies transitioning online, emphasizing the importance of technology, customer service, focus, and niche markets in the travel industry.
Hi, welcome to another episode of Ask Avi Arya. We've got Stephen here from Tatifan. Thanks, Stephen, for being with us. I wanted to ask you very quickly a few questions. When you work with travel companies across the world, almost every offline company wants to go online today. Everybody wants to Expedia or whether it's media, what are the few things that people should keep in mind while they're going online or something that they should definitely not do, you know, for success.
Well, so I think, I believe that, you know, there's one thing that's super important and it's more important than anything else and it's really about keeping focus. So I see a lot of online companies want to go online and not realizing complicated. It really is. So I think, you know, if you're an offline agent and want to develop, you know, your business, I don't think necessarily trying to go online and you know, compete with, you know, make my fit for Expedia for myself. It's a good thing to do. If you want to do that, yes, by all means. But then forget about your legacy business and you know, go all into and you got to remember that, you know, this is much more complicated than anything else because in the offline world you have, of course, you know, you need to work with it, you know, your airline deals, the customer service, all that stuff. But here you need to be the.
Best in the world on travel technology as well.
That's very complicated. And you need to be the best in the world when it comes to customer acquisition design as well. And we see, for instance in Turkey a lot of new companies coming in, often online agencies throwing money on adwords, burning themselves, you know, like hell and then disappearing after six months. And so I believe it's really about, you know, you know, what is your token.
And you know, honestly, if you want.
To go into, if you want to go online today, there is probably better things to do than start start. Well, you can travel, but not necessarily creating like a full digital game.
You know, I have learned from experience when there's a technology company that's having travel and not the other way around and therefore we are successful.
So we tend to think of ourselves as a technology driven customer service company. So that's how we label ourselves and we happen to sell travel. Technology driven customer service, customer service company that sells travel.
Does that mean you could sell something else?
Yeah, I mean, you know, you know, that is our core.
And you know, when we always talk about reputation and you know, every reputation, every travel agent, every Hotel is given a reputation. Today you can do it online. After every experience that you have with your ota, how do you have a chance? Important Using the deposition in today's world Review. The deposition in today's online world.
Yeah, so I mean it's super important. But I think that, I think, I don't want to say the brand is there, but in a way, you know, people are extremely loyal. What do you say? Not loyal. They're not loyal. You know, English is not my first language, but anyway, so people are not loyal. So they're looking for deals, they're looking something to satisfy them at that moment. And so they're not very loyal. So I think, you know, just going back, we see that those really big brands, you know, 10, 15 years ago that we had last minute, they were the dominant force there. You know, they're not so dominant today. We had one of them was in America. They basically merged up into Expedia today. And then of course, you know, we have brands like Ship Tickets that were around but doesn't really coexist today. Then we have new brands like that comes in. They just put a new interface on and somehow get a following around that. But you know, everything's getting more and more niche. So this big travel audience doesn't really work in the long.
So find your own, find your own niche following these diet. You need to be a technology company, not just a travel company. This cannot be your book team. You cannot be a 100% offline player offline. You need all of your time and all of that. I think, I'm sure that all of everybody, because this video goes out every week to at least 21,000 travel agent, tour operators, hoteliers, everybody from hospitality people learning to go online. I'm sure it's going to bless them and I'm sure they will love, you know, all the teaching that you gave us today. Thank you very much for your time and thank you for joining the Askabi r show.
