Traveling Is Not Cool. It’s Old-Fashioned.

The technologies have skyrocketed: you can listen to music anywhere in the world using Spotify, watch unlimited high-quality series and movies on Netflix, get your dinner right at your doorstep using Ubereats, and even find your future partner with one successful swipe to the right on Tinder. And when it comes to traveling… You open Expedia & choose your dates? There isn’t much news coming into this market: we still book flights and hotels on the same OTAs, using the same websites and trusting the old ways of search. That limits our options and, naturally, leaves us spending a bunch of our time and overpaying at every step. Doesn’t sound like a quality beginning to your journey. 

LET’S DIG INTO A FEW REASONS BEHIND THIS & SEE HOW IT AFFECTS YOUR TRAVELING EXPERIENCE:

✅ TWO MAJOR PLAYERS

No middle ground here. For the last decade, only two names dominated the travel industry: Booking.com and Expedia. Together they own more than half of the travel market. It makes the competition enormous, hence new names hardly come to light. The last huge breakthrough was Airbnb, which was in 2007. 

What impact does it have on you? You likely have one OTA that you always make bookings through, leaving you without exploring other options. You never know what options other websites/systems offer: the rooms they have, the prices you can find, and how much you could potentially save. It leaves you choosing from black and white. So, as a result, you get less variety and worse quality but pay more. 

✅ ENTERING THE MARKET IS A HASSLE 

It’s an era of startups: they make people’s lives easier in various fields. But when it comes to the travel industry, we repeatedly return to the same names. Why’s that? Besides the duopoly, startups have a lot of problems entering the market. Startup primary budgets, insurance, guarantees, and other taxes make it nearly impossible. Also, there’s another essential aspect: credibility. Travel startups offer quite expensive products without having much trust. They can’t really have much credibility at their first stages, but it already limits the chances of even participating in the competition. 

That’s why you’re not getting access to any new concepts that could improve your traveling habits: you’re always seeing the same information & using the same systems. And missing out on possible shortcuts. 

The current system has very strong grounds. Thousands of other apps, extensions, and other technologies are doing their best to shake up the industry and bring users a better experience by saving loads of money. But the problem is they rarely reach you: you must search to find them yourself. The best tip is to follow the latest releases in the travel industry: you will surely find new tools to make your traveling life easier & cheaper. 

One of the latest yet already beloved tools could be RatePunk. A free browser extension comparing hotel prices on major booking websites is already used by more than 70 000 users and has saved millions for its users. The prices on different booking websites vary greatly, and RatePunk ensures you always know where to get your hotel for the best one. You save a bunch of time and money and installing it only takes a few seconds. That’s something you could never call old-fashioned: 

We can see that there are some tendencies showing that 2023 will most likely have more travel breakthroughs like this. The huge inflation will encourage people to search for ways to travel without paying a fortune more than before, but the question is if the industry is ready for the changes.