Founded in 2003 Travelocity is a pure play business on the Internet that acts as a travel agent and provides consumers with airline, cruise, hotel, car/rail and vacation package rates. It is the world’s most popular online travel service for leisure and business travelers. When navigating through the website, the online user can easily search through a variety of destinations and means of travel as well as book their vacation. In addition to the regular features of a travel agent site, Travelocity also has a “travel blog.” Here consumers can search travel deals, travel news, travel tips, how to plan a trip by their interest, and read the “Window Seat” section, which is a community where Travelocity consumers can share their experiences traveling, as well as Travelocity’s own bloggers. In addition it provides consumers with podcasts of the topics discussed in the blog, and links to other travel blogs.Travelocity uses several business models to generate revenue. Those business models include the brokerage model and the community model.
Travelocity uses the brokerage business model by bringing the buyers (consumers) and sellers (airlines, hotels, cars/rails, cruises) together. In this case, Travelocity is the broker, facilitating transactions between the buyers and the sellers. They offer consumers the options of choosing the best deals in terms of transportation for their trip, exploring destinations, as well as the option of booking a packaged vacation or just a flight, car, cruise, hotel, etc. By offering an array of vacation destinations, packages, and amenities, Travelocity is able to provide the buyers with easy access to what they were searching for, and sellers profitable results.
Travelocity uses the community business model by providing its consumers with common interests and engaging blogs. Blogs, a form a social networking, provides Travelocity consumers a place to share ideas and opinions about their travels, learn useful tips, and interact with each other. The travel blog also contains an advertisement, in the form of a banner ad, such as Sea World. This is one way Travelocity earns revenue.
According to E-Marketing, the only way to know whether a company has reached its objectives is to measure its results. You may ask yourselves if Travelocity is successful in the mist of several other pure play travel service providers. Travelocity has great brand awareness and is a company that both the consumer and businesses trust because it provides reliable services that have proven to be successful. But there is always room for improvement. Two performance metrics that Travelocity can use to measure the effectiveness of the company is customer satisfaction, and differentiation. Customer satisfaction involves building better customer relationships with affordable prices, the quality of the site, and the value of the service they are receiving. A way to measure this could be through Web analytics (the study of user behavior on web pages). By doing this Travelocity can observe the activity and the number of visits to the site, the number of purchases per customer on the site as well as if new or old features of the site are working well with the consumer. This will tell them if the site is engaging and offers an experience and services that appeal to the consumer.
In order to differentiate themselves against the competitor, Travelocity must maintain its competitive advantage. There are several ways to going about measuring brand differentiation but they may have different levels of efficiency. Some ways are to conduct a target market survey or measure sales and revenue.
Furthermore, Travelocity abides by their own performance metrics to guarantee customer satisfaction and differentiate themselves from the competitor. This is known as the Travelocity Customer Bill of Rights and can be found on their website:
Travelocity Customer Bill of Rights
1. You have the right to book with a travel company that looks out for you, all trip.
2. You have the right to the best overall value in travel.
3. You have the right to unbiased information upfront
4. You have the right to a straightforward presentation of your options
5. You have the right to find what you’re looking for quickly and easily.
6. You have the right to speak with someone and get help at any time.
7. You have the right to be inspired by your travel company.
