Blimey…was it really 10 years ago? A reaction many of us will be having, when thinking back to the year 2000.
From a personal perspective, I had just returned from working in the USA and had set up “Holiday by Phone”, to exploit the first wave of migration to the Internet.
We felt that customers would initially replace Teletext as the search tool for late holidays and static “hard to use” paper brochures, but the technology restrictions of traditional tour operators and cautious customers, would mean customers would initially migrate to phone booking.
I guess the closure of Teletext’s analogue TV service in December 2009 partly marks the completion of that process, although those pesky brochures are still hanging on to life and not surprisingly booking by phone has been over taken by full online booking as technology has caught up and customers confidence has soared.
The other big revolution of the 00’s, has been the explosion of dynamic packaging. I would love to claim to have invented it, but in reality it was adversity that opened up my eyes to its potential and forced me take the leap of faith required to start up the On Holiday Group.
In 2002 David Crossland persuaded me to leave entrepreneurial life and go back to run MyTravel, the rebranded Going Places/ Airtours. What a disaster. However, after a few rounds of golf with Bill Allen the group purchasing director we decided dynamic packaging was the future and in 2004 we went our own way and started selling accommodation to the trade.
In the next 10 years, the big events will be the proper launch of Easyjet Holidays and the increasing dominance of price comparison sites in the commodity beach holiday sector. Anyway, personally I’m looking forward to it and I hope so are you!
By Steve Endacott, chief executive On Holiday Group