Is it time to pen an elegy to travel agents, the breed that has taken us round the world earning their commissions as we jetted to distant destinations? A travel planning service called Journeys, being tested by peer-to-peer accommodation sharing site Airbnb, threatens to disrupt the travel agency business.

In the West, the death of the middleman has been predicted for sometime now, but even in India, the travel agency business – both online and offline – faces threats. For instance, take the way Yatra, MakeMyTrip and Goibibo have reacted to budget hotel room aggregators such as Oyo Rooms and Zo, delisting them from their platform.

Cleartrip’s Chief Marketing Officer, Subramanya Sharma, says, “Some years ago offline travel agents were the incumbents and we were the disruptors. In some sense today, we are the incumbents facing disruptors.”

According to a CNN report, the number of travel agents in the US has dipped from 34,000 in the 1990s to just 13,000 today, and the number is dwindling further. Vishal Suri, CEO (Tour Operating), Kuoni India, however insists that travel agents still have a role to play, especially in India. “We don’t see Kuoni getting affected by peer-to-peer sharing sites,” he says. According to him, when tech and widespread use of the Internet disrupted the travel world, “many travel agencies made considerable adaptations to remain solvent”.

He points to a mobile app that Kuoni introduced in association with Microsoft, and the investments in technology that the firm has made, including upgrading its booking tool and introducing features such as last minute destinations. In fact, the mobile seems to hold the key to the survival of both OTAs (online travel agency) and offline travel agents. As Sharma of Cleartrip explains, mobile enables OTAs to ensure far more stickiness. “Over the mobile, we can offer more features. For instance, we can send instant notifications when a discounted room opens up,” he says. “Our mobile traffic is now 60 per cent – in terms of absolute volumes of we are adding 3 per cent month-on-month on mobile,” he says, insisting that there has been no impact across margins, because volumes have gone up and proportion of hotel bookings have risen. Globally the trend is clearly swinging towards MTAs (Mobile Travel Agencies). Chinese OTA CTrip is focusing aggressively on the mobile channel. The same holds true for MakeMyTrip, which recently held a mobile app-only festive season sale to drive traffic to the platform.

A Euromonitor research points to players like Hotel Tonight and Blink, both born as mobile only agencies, and predicts that from being niche players, MTAs will become mainstream and dislodge the OTAs. Meanwhile, what about the offline agents? Aloke Bajpai, CEO and co-founder, Ixigo.com, believes that their role will get transformed to a concierge service.

“Tech can solve problems like price, quality (by aggregating reviews), planning, etc, but it cannot solve the touch and feel aspect. And that’s where offline agents will remain relevant,” he feels.

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