We’re sitting by a large open fire in a bar in the Yorkshire Dales. Beside us, a stack of holiday brochures and magazines as we try to settle on a destination for the millennium. What better way to spend an hour before dinner?
Well, it would help if I didn’t have a fast-approaching deadline for Travel Weekly! But since there’s no avoiding it, a few thoughts on the future of that seemingly indispensable pre-holiday ingredient – the brochure.
In the age of e-mail and intranets, the paperless office is close to being a reality for some.
I’ve brought my laptop with me on this short walking break, and with judicious application of my wife’s nail-file to loosen a couple of screws on the phone socket, I can get on-line.
Given a little patience, it’s then not too different from sitting at my desk at the labs in Suffolk.
I quickly found some highly specialised travel agents, who have also done away with paper, using a combination of Internet site for initial information, and e-mail for personalised follow-up.
The Web sites range from high end, lavishly illustrated (for example take a look at the Zambezi Safari and Travel Co. site at www.zambezi.com) to basic but highly informative (the Arc Journeys site at www.travelarc.com).
I’ll return to the use of e-mail as a sales channel in a later article.
For the foreseeable future, these pioneers will be the exception rather than the rule, and the traditional paper brochure still has many years to run. A number of variations on electronic paper have been demonstrated in the research lab, but practical options are currently limited to CD and Internet viewed on a computer screen.
Television access to on-line information will increase rapidly, but it remains a much less flexible medium than paper.
To illustrate this, consider our use of brochures earlier this evening
As I lay in the bath, soaking away the aches from the day’s walking, I could quickly assess the options, hurling the discards onto the floor.
It was then a simple matter to gather the remainder into a small pile, carry them down to the bar and embark on a more leisurely scan.
We could effortlessly pass them between us, and if we chose could even tear out pages of particular interest or make personal annotations.
But if the CD and Internet won’t displace paper entirely, there are appealing options for hybrid solutions.
A basic paper brochure can be supplemented by more detailed on-line dossiers, and kept current by on-line updates. This already happens to a limited extent with both brochures and guidebooks.
Last weekend, we spent a few hours at Destinations ’99, a consumer travel show at Earl’s Court, and an extreme example of brochure overload.
We were relatively discriminating in the paper that we accepted, but nevertheless returned home with perhaps 30-40 brochures.
However, even here hybrid solutions were increasingly in evidence, and we also returned with an assortment of Internet and e-mail addresses.
Critical to these developments is the ability to reuse content across media.
A single database of destinations and holidays must support both traditional and on-line distribution.
With the development of multiple on-line channels this is of growing importance, if costs are not to escalate. The accompanying box highlights developments in the XML standard, which will help to address this problem.