2-12-07, Week 6

Mass Amateurization

“Travelocity doesn't make everyone a travel agent. It undermines the value of being travel agent at all, by fixing the inefficiencies travel agents are paid to overcome one booking at a time.” (Shirky) When I read this, I immediately thought of my experience with travel agents.

So everyone seems to think they can do better than the expert. Or at least better than the average person, even though that’s what they do 8 hours a day and make a living off of. Yeah. I’m not a big fan of open source for that same reason but I thought the travel thing was cool. Just like real people could now write newspaper columns and I could read it all for free in their blogs, I could now be my own travel agent. Cool.

So I went online, spent about 3 days searching for a plane ticket to LA, finally found one for 200 dollars, thought I had an awesome deal. A friend of mine, used a live person to book her flight and got the same flight for 150 dollars and a 5 dollar booking fee, and she spent only 10 minutes.

I then wanted to fly to Prague. I searched and searched. But it took forever and I couldn’t find anything good. At this point, I didn’t think travel agents even existed anymore. But I found one. Who explained to me how and when flights left and found me an awesome student ticket round trip to Prague for 380 dollars. I’ve stopped using the online systems, they are not yet smart enough to know exactly what I want, or I’m not patient enough to click 500 times and get (I’m sorry there are no flights left that time please try again) and pay my 5 dollar booking fee. Sometimes thinking amateurs can do thing, isn’t worth it. I probably could have found the flight, but the time was not worth it.

Even tough we gain something with mass amateurization, people often don’t think about how much we loose.