THE UK travel industry must use this weekend’s ABTA Convention in Cairns not as a warm up for millennium parties but as a way of learning how it can get geared up for the ‘e-century’.
My last seven months involvement in Carlson Companies’ $24m Internet drive has certainly opened my eyes to the explosion in e-commerce that is going to sweep the world.
However, although the Internet may be the future, it is e-mail that is actually the tool of today.
Many more people have access to e-mail than they do to the Web.
Agents and operators could save thousands of pounds a year by embracing e-mail. And ABTAcould be the body to help them do that.
As the industry regulator, ABTA is in the best position to create an industry e-mail network, with its own directory of addresses and regulations covering its use.
Agents will rightly be afraid that this directory could be abused, with their e-mail addresses being inundated with unwanted material from suppliers, and hence ABTA must not only create this directory but also police its use.
So what could this network be used for? For a start, there is electronic distribution of confirmation invoices.
At 19p an invoice, this could potentially save operators £700,000 if they used e-mail instead of posting them. Until consumers become comfortable with a fully electronic distribution process, agents could then print them and post them on to clients.
And then there is electronic distribution of special offers or campaigns by tour operators.
Unclog your fax machines and create the ability to click away those offers you don’t want and circulate those you do.
Agents must enhance their relationship with customers using their own e-mail network of customer addresses. This could easily be piggy-backed by operators, without compromising the agents control of their customer network.
Personally, I applaud Thomson’s drive to enhance its consumer direct-marketing efforts but will wish to control the operator’s access to my clients.
What better way than to ask them to e-mail their material to me so that I can forward it to my customers?
The only problem with my suggestions is that they rely on operators ditching their current working practises and putting some of the cost savings back into higher commission, in order to allow agents to invest in decent quality printers.
Am I just dreaming or can ABTA take the lead and move the industry into the e-century? If not the old convention phrase net-working or not-working could take on a completely new meaning.
n Steve Endacott is managing director of Urbanweb