3/10/2010 4:21 PM

Globalization of travel systems

Many OTA's in the North American market have closed the door on themselves when it comes to servicing the world. When you visit a European OTA brand like Opodo.com you see a splash screen with language options. Why is it that this is seen so infrequently with North American based brands?

Possible reasons why OTA's do not service other markets and provide content in different languages :

• Their technology does not support multiple languages, cultures and currencies.
• It may be unfeasible to support an after sales operation with no multi-lingual staff.
• The risk of fraud when opening your doors to the world is too high.
• Currency conversion.
• High merchant fees for international payments.

All of the above on the face of things sound like major restrictions. But are they really?

96% of Americans claim to speak English "Well" or "Very well", that leaves 4% of the entire US population up for grabs, an estimated 12,280,262 people, who are categorized as "linguistically isolated". Is this a number that might encourage US based travel businesses to start acknowledging that providing content in other languages might be beneficial? Let us also consider that 96% claim to speak English "well" or "very well". If a user was given the option to customize his or her user experience into their native language, considering that they speak English "well", would they still pick English? Could we expect higher conversion simply by providing additional languages? Futhermore, are our conversion rates suffering because of the fact that additional languages are not provided?