Your Travel Technology Strategy and Guide to Winning the New Technology War

Leaders should be continually reflecting on their business strategies and the alignment of their product and technology activities. This is to ensure the basics are met and their unique differentiation is doubled down on.

This next part may sound a little provocative, it is purposely so:

The most expensive technology you're investing in is the exact same technology your competitors are deploying.

This is a new kind of technology war and it's not won by having the 'best' cloud infrastructure, the 'most' data or 'best' AI. It's won by recognising that in a mature market, technology itself has become a commodity. The smartest leaders are already pivoting their strategy.

Why Your Competitive Edge Isn't Actually Competitive

Every major player in travel - whether an airline, hotel, OTA, wholesaler or tour operator - faces the same fundamental challenges: filling inventory, personalising at scale and navigating distribution and settlement complexity to name a few! Although being a very fragmented industry, company's solutions to these problems have and continue to converge.

You might be thinking: "But our custom implementation is different. We've spent years building it and it's far more advanced than anything a competitor could buy off the shelf." While that may be true today, it's a transient advantage at best. The very nature of commoditised technology is that today's custom-built solution becomes tomorrow's standard.

Identical Problems, Identical Solutions

You can't see your competitor's source code, but the outcomes - from real-time pricing to personalised recommendations - look a lot like yours. This is because the fundamental approaches to solving these problems have become standardised across the industry.

The Illusion of Differentiation

We invest heavily to gain a small edge in conversion or efficiency, when that "innovation" can be replicated in a matter of months.

Consider the race to implement real-time dynamic pricing. When your competitor has a system with a 98% accuracy rate and yours has a 99% rate, is that one-percent difference a sustainable competitive advantage? Or is it a costly, marginal gain that will be matched in a matter of months?

This creates an expensive illusion of progress while your actual competitive position remains unchanged.

Even disruptors are copying each other. When Airbnb's CEO admits they're "not happy" with growth rates and announces adding hotels, essentially mirroring what Booking.com already does, it signals something fundamental: sustainable advantage no longer comes from building a slightly better technology.

A New Strategic Playbook for Leaders

Winning this new technology war requires a shift from a feature-driven mindset to a strategy-driven one. You can no longer compete on technology alone. Your focus must be on non-replicable assets and superior execution.

Do This:

• Build on Your Strengths: focus on your unique inventory, exclusive partnerships or proprietary customer insights. Technology should be used to amplify what makes you different, not to compensate for what makes you similar.

• Obsess Over Execution: when technology is commoditised, flawless execution becomes the primary differentiator. Make your processes faster, more efficient and more reliable than anyone else's.

Perfect execution of standard tools beats mediocre execution of advanced ones.

For example, a hotel uses a standard, off-the-shelf booking engine, but their website is lightning-fast, the booking process is a simple three-step flow and customer support is instantly available through live chat. This hotel wins on reliability and trust, even with less "advanced" tools.

• Define Your Strategic Position: clarify whether you're the luxury option, the budget leader, or the adventure specialist. Your technology should reinforce this position, not blur it. A luxury operator's AI isn't focused on finding the lowest price. Instead, it meticulously curates bespoke itineraries for high-net-worth clients, cross-referencing their past trips and personal preferences to suggest exclusive, non-public experiences. Your AI should make you more distinctly you, not more like everyone else.

• Embrace Channel Ubiquity with Commodity AI: the new battleground isn't who has the smartest AI, but whose unique value is most effectively delivered by AI across the customer journey. Don't just build a smart chatbot for your own website. Instead, use AI to make your product discoverable on emerging travel assistants, voice search or aggregator platforms. The goal is to make your content, product or service so seamless and efficient that it becomes the default choice on the channels your customer is already using or starting to use.

• Explore Collaborative Advantages: look for opportunities to partner with competitors on non-competitive issues, but be strategic about where you draw the line. Consider demand forecasting and meeting intent. Instead of every hotel, hotel chain or intermediary in hotel distribution independently spending millions to eventually appear in a potential customer's search results with the hope of a sale, they could share anonymised data to support meeting true industry-wide demand or travel intent. This creates collective value while preserving individuality. However, when sharing resources become so powerful they start dictating market behaviour, collaboration can flatten the very differentiators you're trying to build. The challenge is finding the optimal level of coopetition - enough to gain collective advantage, but not so much that you give away your strategic edge.

Don't Do This:

• Chase Marginal Technology Gains: don't greenlight a project just because it promises a "better" version of a tool everyone else already has. Any small improvement delivered by that project won't save you when competitors deploy a similar system six months later.

• Engage in Feature Parity: stop adding every competitor's feature just to match them. This drains resources and can dilute your core value proposition. You're not trying to become them, you're trying to stay ahead of them.

Your Strategic Reality Check

Instead of a rigid plan, think of this as a continuous reality check. This is how smart leaders are building competitive moats right now.

The Measurement Blind Spot

Many leaders struggle to distinguish between projects that look innovative but deliver no real advantage and those that offer genuine differentiation. Your success metrics are the key.

Technical metrics like API uptime or feature count are important for operations but are not a true measure of strategic success. Instead, focus on metrics that are tied to your unique value proposition:

• For a budget airline, this could be Cost Per Available Seat Mile (CASM)

• For a luxury hotel, it's high customer lifetime value and repeat booking rate

These are numbers that truly reflect your competitive position.

The Execution Reality

Strategy frameworks look elegant in boardroom presentations, but they often fracture when they meet operational reality. The same analytics tools available to your competitors can generate hundreds of potential metrics, creating an illusion of insight while actually obscuring what matters.

The competitive advantage lies not in measuring more things but in having the organisational discipline to focus on the few measurements that directly connect customer problems to business outcomes.

When your frontline teams understand which metrics actually drive your strategic position - and can act on them without waiting for management interpretation - you've created something your competitors' dashboards cannot replicate.

The True North

The travel industry's technology convergence isn't a problem to solve - it's a reality to leverage.

Your competitive advantage in 2025 and beyond won't come from having better AI; it will come from using commodity AI to amplify assets your competitors simply cannot replicate.

The question isn't "How do we build better technology?"

It's "What unique value do we create that technology can amplify but not replace?"