RE: pressureSeen several items on national news commenting on the growth of DIY holidays where people put all this stuff together themselves, I can't remember the last time a used a TA for a holiday, certainly long before this millenium, and that would only be to book a flight not a holiday, and I travel around 4 times per year.
You are right TA's will always be around, but they are seriously loosing market share, why else would companies like expedia be growing so large so quickly?
Effectively they are a cross between an online TA and a GDS. A holiday supermarket where there buying power is so strong, they can start to squeeze the suppliers on margins. It's happening now.
Package holidays, with chartered flights and hotels etc will always continue becuase of the economies of scale that are possible, but these are just as likely to be booked on the Web as with a TA.
Our niche is to make these travel compnaies more efficient internally, reduce there IT costs and risks, and help distribute and sell their inventory via phone, TA's, WEB, GDS etc. It's too expensive for each compnay to develop such systems themselves, so we provide the smaller tour operators the ecoomies of scale by developing and selling the same system to many.
In the future, the scaleability of our infrastructure means that as well as supporting multiple small customers on a single server, we can cater for very large customers too. Similar implementation times, but many more transactions. Right now we are a minnow, a recent startiup (as fas as TT/SB is concerned) with pitiful finances.
More customers, more income, profitability, decent balance sheet and big compnaies are much more likley to look at us very seriously.
IIf we are only making $15-20K / month on average per custoemr then we probably won't see profitability this year. I am hoping that as we move into holiday season, these figures will be much higher for Q2 / Q3.
5 years down the road, if this si managed well, this compnay could be quite something. As TM says he and several others may be out by then becuase the share price will have already reflected those future earnings and allowed him to sell out and move on to more speculative high gain plays.
Many of us have held on thinking, 6 months one year and we will be there. Everything keeps moves forward, (apart from the lawsuite and 9/11 which are now both history), and we are still here thinking the same thing. I wouldn't be surprised if it wasn't another year to 18 months as spinner suggests. There is still a lot to do to turn this operation into a smooth cookie cutter and get tech7 up to speed.
But as the NR's have said, 'the hopper is loaded' and we are starting to process them and turn them into income.
It's been a tough 6 months of consolidation, but I beleivev we have exciting times ahead.
Idle