Skills development is a major challenge for the fast-changing online travel industry, but help is at hand, writes Mariam Sharp

Are you finding it hard keep up with the latest social media skills needed to run your business? Is it a challenge to keep informed about new data systems and processes being developed in the travel industry?

Continuing professional development is made particularly difficult as the nature of work in the travel sector isn’t always suitable to regular taught courses or workshops. Also training staff new can also be expensive and time consuming. 

The high costs of education have led a number of students to search for alternative ways of learning. Recently there have been shifts in higher education with the rise of the MOOC (Massive Open Online Courses).

Growing at a pace, the largest is Coursera, which had drawn a million users just four months after Daphne Koller and Andrew Ng started the firm. Its free college courses launched faster than either Facebook or Twitter, and to date it has raised over £22million from investors.

While coursera.org doesn’t appear to currently deliver any travel industry/tourism specific courses, it does offer help for more general business development such as finance, data science and analysis and marketing that are of a university standard.

Another fast-growing MOOC Alison.com, a Dublin-based company that provides links to a range of business courses and is seen as the one to use for people starting out in the travel sector. Online diplomas include Introduction to travel patterns and destinations, English for the international travel industry, and a tourism marketing and promotion course. Alison claims to differ from others in that it is purely focused on vocational training – much needed in the developing world.

OnlineTravelTraining.com launched in the UK in 2008 and recognise a broad range of eLearning resources needed to give travel agents the edge in today's highly competitive and changing market. Rebranded as OTT in November 2012, the firm aims to provide a global eLearning solution for travel organisations. It offers a range of courses that cover training in global distribution systems (GDS) that include Sabre, Amadeus, Galileo and Worldspan, as well as other courses by partners such as IATA and The Travel Foundation. There are also free courses by destination management organisations that offer points to win prizes and family trips.

Oxford-based social enterprise floofl.com is a new organisation that is committed to providing free on-line learning for ‘travel and tourism professionals, students and wannabes’. This organisation claims to ‘recognise the potential that tourism has to contribute to social, environmental and economic development world-wide and in particular in developing countries’. In Africa, for example, where tourism and travel is growing rapidly. The aim is to achieve this by widening access to university level education in tourism, to anyone, for free.

Courses include an Introduction to Accommodation and F&B operations, one on Free Rooms Management Simulation and another on Advanced Revenue Management. The latter will use content from EyeforTravel’s Travel Distribution Summit and will encourage participants to:

• Outline how to enhance the travel experience and trip brand engagement, while increasing revenue
• Evaluate how pricing strategies increase revenue; assess how to vary revenue strategy for continuous growth and loyalty and how to measuring the results of discounting initiatives to prove ROI; show how cancellations can be managed by balancing terms and conditions for the multi-booking consumer
• Outline how consumer loyalty programmes have become a key revenue management tool
• Discuss how channel management can be influenced by the revenue manager
• Identify the optimal internal set up to maximise revenue from increasingly big data sets
• Explore how to place data and analytics at the heart of an organisation to drive sales
• Predict demand by forecasting a realistic business calendar

These are all important skills for a fast-changing and highly competitive online travel industry. Let us know in the comments box what online courses you think the travel sector needs?