Today, one of the major challenges faced by travel companies when it comes to managing and distributing content today is the striking lack of any global standards that dictate laws for distribution. As a result, distributors and suppliers have all developed their systems for distributing content, which is a major headache for any travel agency working with multiple suppliers and trying to consolidate listings from multiple sources. Multiple suppliers may distribute the same hotel or room using different standards of distribution that leads to a lot of duplicates, inconsistencies and errors in the data.
If travel agencies try to handle all their content management requirements through conventional means, their systems will quickly overload and lead to huge losses in the form of missed bookings and cancellations. Lawsuits resulting from lacklustre customer experiences and wrong listings on websites have cost companies millions over the years. With the number of bookings constantly on the rise and with customers demanding better overall experiences, it comes as no surprise that more and more travel companies are falling back upon revolutionary new technologies to alleviate their woes.
Hence, considering all these factors, it had become imperative for travel agencies to understand what is content curation and make their content curation process better.
So, what is Content Curation?
In order to delve into the depths of content curation, we need to first understand the actual meaning of the term content. Constant information creation not only results in a growing cascade of content that is constantly being shared and re-shared all over the world but also results in large quantities of misinformation, inconsistencies and duplicates in the data that can seriously hamper its credibility. The process of identifying, segregating, managing, deduping and distributing content is known as content curation and is becoming increasingly relevant for modern businesses.
Content Curation in the Travel & Hospitality Industry
Now that we have a better idea about content and its curation, let’s discuss the types of content that travel brands need to curate.
- Hotel & Room Names
- Addresses
- Geolocations
- Amenities
- Value-Added Services
- Prices
- Promotions
- Discounts
- Policies
- Local Laws & Regulations
Startups Leading the Way for Content Curation
Without strict standards, content curation has quickly become not only a differentiator but a dire necessity for the industry. However, with need comes opportunities and this is exactly the reason behind the sudden influx of travel tech startups in the global market during the early 2010s. Companies started experimenting with newer techs that could completely automate the curation processes for travel businesses. One of the leading techs that found relevance was the use of AI and ML to identify, tag and dedupe the data. Not before long, companies started relying on the tech with many travel-tech startups providing both SaaS as well as PaaS based solutions to travel agencies for all their content curation, management and distribution needs.
Change is the only constant and businesses worldwide need to understand this fact if they want to remain relevant, competitive, profitable and sustainable in the long run. If companies were to rely on age-old techniques to sort through such large data sets today, content curation would have forever remained a savior in distress specific to the travel industry.
