Individualization through Technology

The classic package holiday with charter flight, airport transfer, and hotel is no longer as rigid as many think. Thanks to new technological tools, one can add various options and customize their vacation. This includes excursions, the option for more legroom on the flight, or a private transfer to the hotel.

Thanks to growing databases and booking platforms, along with sophisticated software that is increasingly controlled by advanced artificial intelligence, these personal special requests from passengers can be fulfilled. Through these technological possibilities, a package holiday can also be designed flexibly.

Package holidays then vs. now

Package trips used to work like this: The operators bought flights and put them in their "shelves." Then they purchased hotel capacities and added those to the shelf as well. Both were then bundled together and sold to customers – the selection of flight times was therefore logically limited, and the length of the trip was often hardly flexible.

Today, the so-called dynamic packaging is added, which has become increasingly popular in the last ten years. On the day of booking, current flight and hotel prices can be selected and chosen from market offerings. The tour operators' own "shelves" have thereby disappeared, and they can act more flexibly, as they can draw from a single massive stock (namely various databases).

Popular extra: excursions

According to travel distribution expert Michael Buller (Association of Internet Travel Distribution e.V.), there are approximately 200 billion products in the package tour databases, which naturally leads to many different combination possibilities.

The most popular component of customized package tours is excursions selected according to personal taste. According to the tourism industry, this extra in travel packages is increasingly requested, and it is now possible to book tours and excursions digitally in advance worldwide.

It is often too late to get a ticket for popular attractions on-site. "Our data shows that the interest in booking excursions during vacation before the trip begins has significantly increased in recent years," says Annika Hunkemüller, spokesperson for the portal Urlaubsguru.

But individual events are also a new addition to package holidays; for example, many travelers now plan their vacation around a specific musical or concert, for which they also book the appropriate hotel and flight or train journey.

Disadvantage of a customized package trip

The catch with a personally designed package tour is that many individual components can also cause many individual potential problems: a canceled flight or an unavailable travel stop then jeopardizes all subsequent travel segments, which need to be quickly checked and, if necessary, readjusted.

If a travel organizer packages an individual trip as a package tour, they must also always ensure corresponding security.

Advantage of protection remains in place

And that's precisely the great advantage of a package holiday: Despite all the individualization, travelers always benefit from the protection that package holidaymakers have. This was particularly evident during the Corona pandemic; passengers who had booked flights and hotels separately were legally at a disadvantage compared to package travelers.

Ingo Burmester, Central European Head of the Dertour Group, explained it this way: "A packaged trip can be just as individual today as a backpacking trip – combined with the good feeling of always having a contact person when I want or need it."

Where is the journey of package tours heading?

And what does the future of travel look like now, especially for package travel? The individualization of travel promotes online bookings, where one can easily find a large number of hotels, flights, and excursions online.

Thanks to AI, planning and booking a tailored vacation is becoming easier. Will travel agencies, which have traditionally been seen as the home of package holiday bookings, survive this development when everyone can put together their dream trip from their home laptop?

The tourism industry denies this and sees greater opportunities in AI and similar technologies. "There will always be people who would prefer the comfort of not having to sit in front of the computer all evening to book their trip but would rather outsource that to someone else," says Matthias Keller, senior researcher at the travel search engine Kayak.

Furthermore, many people prefer to have a competent tour guide at hand when booking, especially when it comes to a specific holiday planning like a safari: One would rather talk to someone who is knowledgeable about it and may have even done something like that themselves – a chatbot is not really suitable for that.