When the Marketplace Becomes the Market
I have spent most of my professional life in travel. Long enough to remember when selling a journey depended largely upon relationships. A tour operator created a journey. A travel agent knew the client. A destination specialist knew the country. Hotels provided accommodation. Guides interpreted the destination. Drivers moved people safely through it. Restaurants fed them. Local suppliers provided countless services along the way. And somewhere between all these people stood a traveler who trusted us collectively with something precious: his money, certainly, but also his time, his safety, and his dreams. It was never a perfect system. Business never is. Everyone needed to earn something. Commissions, wholesalers, negotiations, preferred suppliers, and large companies with greater buying power than small ones. But a recognizable chain of professional responsibility existed. We knew who did what. The travel agent did not pretend to be the hotelier. The hotelier did not pretend to be the guide. The wholesaler did not drive the coach. The destination operator knew that when the traveler arrived, the responsibility became very real. Travel was a trade. And like every trade, it had its maâlems. Then technology arrived. I welcomed it. Why wouldn't I? Technology gave a small company access to the world. A tour operator in Morocco could present a journey directly to someone sitting in Sydney, Toronto or Chicago. Information that once required brochures, telephone calls, postage and international offices could suddenly cross the world in seconds. This was extraordinary.
For the small operator, the promise seemed almost democratic: The distance between producer and consumer was disappearing.
But something unexpected happened along the way. A new intermediary appeared between them. The platform.
The New Marketplace
There is nothing inherently wrong with a platform. A good marketplace performs a valuable function. It gathers choices. It makes products searchable. It facilitates comparison. It can provide reviews, payment systems, technological infrastructure, and consumer confidence. It can introduce a small operator to a traveler who otherwise might never have discovered them. For doing this work, it deserves to earn money. I have no quarrel with that. My question begins somewhere else.
What happens when the marketplace becomes more powerful than the people who actually produce what is being sold there?
That is not merely a question about travel. It is a question about the architecture of modern commerce. There was a time when an intermediary approached the producer and essentially said: I can bring you customers. What arrangement can we make? Increasingly, the relationship can feel reversed: I control access to customers. These are the conditions under which you may reach them. Something fundamental has changed. The marketplace has begun becoming the market.
Visibility Is Not the Same as Quality
Imagine a traditional souk. One maâlem has spent forty years mastering his craft. Another has been working for ten. A third has only recently opened his workshop. People walk through the market, examine their work, speak with them, ask questions, and eventually decide whom they trust. Now imagine that someone builds the only entrance to the souk. He does not make anything sold inside it. But he decides who stands nearest the entrance. He decides which workshop appears first. He decides the conditions under which craftsmen may participate. And perhaps those who contribute most to the cost of visibility become the easiest to find. Eventually the visitor may begin believing that the craftsmen nearest the entrance must be the best craftsmen. But they may simply be the most visible.
Visibility and mastery are not the same thing.
This distinction matters enormously in travel. A traveler searching online may reasonably assume that the tours appearing most prominently are among the best choices available. But digital visibility can depend upon many things besides destination knowledge: advertising budgets, commercial agreements, sales volume, conversion rates, rankings, algorithms, and the ability to participate economically in a platform's system. None of those things necessarily tells us who knows Morocco best. Or Kenya. Or Peru. Or India. The algorithm measures what it was designed to measure.
It cannot automatically measure wisdom. Where Did the Professional Go?
This is what troubles me most. Travel is not simply inventory. A hotel room can be described by square meters, facilities, and location. An airline seat can be identified by route, class, and departure time. But a journey is something else. A good journey is composed. Someone decides what belongs and what does not. Someone understands rhythm. Someone knows when three nights are necessary rather than two. Someone knows that the famous attraction may be less meaningful than the village thirty kilometers away. Someone understands that a road appearing shorter on a map may be the wrong road for the experience. Someone knows when to speak. And, perhaps more importantly, when to stop speaking and allow the traveler to experience the place. That knowledge takes years. I call it craftsmanship. The maâlem of travel does not merely assemble hotels, transportation, and excursions. He understands relationships. Geography and history. Water and settlement. Landscape and architecture. Food and agriculture. Religion and daily life. Trade and migration. People and place. That is what creates a journey. Yet the modern marketplace can reduce all this to another product card:
22 Days — Morocco — From $X — Book Now.
The craft remains underneath. But the shelf becomes more visible than the craftsman.
Apples Do Not Grow on Shelves In another reflection, I used the simplest analogy I could find.
Apples do not grow in supermarkets. Somewhere there is an orchard. There is soil. Water. A tree. A farmer. Knowledge. Labor. Risk. Time. The supermarket performs an important function after all these things have produced the apple. Travel is no different. The platform did not create the mountain. It did not build the relationship with the village. It did not train the guide. It did not inspect the hotel. It did not drive the road. It did not sit with the family that welcomes travelers. It did not spend thirty years learning why one itinerary works and another merely looks good on paper. Someone else did those things. The platform provides access to the apple.
We should not forget the orchard.
The Economics of the Doorway This brings us to the uncomfortable question of economic power. Every intermediary deserves to be paid for the genuine value they contribute. But what determines that value? Is it the work performed? The expertise contributed? The risk carried? Or increasingly, the power that comes from controlling access to the customer? These are different things. The person controlling the doorway may eventually earn more from the transaction than some of the people producing what lies behind the door. Perhaps the market accepts this. But acceptance doesn't stop us from asking whether the relationship is healthy. Because the producer has expenses that cannot be virtualized. The guide must be paid. The driver must be paid. Fuel must be purchased. The hotel must be paid. Meals must be served. Staff must be employed. Insurance, offices, training, and administration remain. And when something goes wrong during the journey, somebody on the ground must solve it. The journey eventually leaves the screen.
Travel becomes physical. That is the moment when the difference between selling travel and operating travel becomes unmistakable.
Why Can't We All Be Strong? I am not interested in reversing the hierarchy. I do not want the small operator to become powerful by making the platform weak. That would reproduce the same mistake. My question is:
Why can't we all be strong in a fair share? The platform can prosper. The travel agent can prosper. The tour operator can prosper. The hotel can prosper. The guide can prosper. The driver can prosper. The local community can prosper. And the traveler can receive genuine value for the money invested. Surely the purpose of a healthy economy is not to determine who can extract the most from everybody else. It is to create conditions in which useful contributions can coexist. The oasis taught me this better than any business school could. The person upstream needs water. So does the person downstream. The answer is not to deprive the person upstream. It is to prevent access from becoming absolute entitlement. Because if the first person takes everything simply because he can reach it first, eventually there is no garden downstream.
Markets have downstream gardens too.
The Consumer Has a Place in This The traveler is not responsible for repairing the economics of the travel industry. But travelers deserve to understand what they are buying. Booking through a marketplace is not wrong. Convenience has value. Security has value. Comparison has value. But consumers should also be able to ask: Who actually operates my journey? Who designed it? Where are they based? How long have they worked in the destination? Who employs the guides and drivers? Who carries responsibility when I arrive? Can I speak directly with the people who actually know the journey? And perhaps: How much of the money I spend stays with the people creating the experience? These questions are not anti-business. They are responsible consumption. We encourage people to ask where their food comes from. We ask who made our clothes. We increasingly want to know how products affect the environment. Why should travel be exempt? Responsible tourism should begin before the traveler reaches the destination. It begins with understanding the journey between the dollar and the destination.
Technology Can Still Fulfill Its Promise I am not nostalgic for a world without technology. I do not want to return to telex machines, printed tariffs, and shelves of brochures. Technology has given us extraordinary possibilities. And perhaps the next stage can correct some of the imbalances created by the first. Search can become better at recognizing genuine expertise. Artificial intelligence may help travelers discover specialists who previously could not afford global marketing. Technology can make reputation portable. It can allow the smallest maâlem to present his knowledge directly to the world. Perhaps the future does not belong inevitably to bigger platforms. Perhaps it belongs to better connections. The internet's original promise was not that a handful of enormous marketplaces would own the road between human beings. Its promise was connection. I still believe in that promise.
The Market Is a Relationship After decades of travel, I have reached a simple conclusion. A market is not a machine. It is a relationship. Someone produces. Someone distributes. Someone advises. Someone purchases. Someone delivers. Someone receives. Each depends upon the others. When one participant becomes so powerful that the others lose meaningful choices, the relationship changes. And eventually the profession changes with it. I have lived long enough in this trade to remember another way. I have also lived long enough to know that we cannot simply recreate the past. Nor should we. The answer lies ahead. But whatever future we build, I hope we remember four simple things:
The apple teaches us source. The maâlem teaches us skill. The oasis teaches us fair share. The Amine teaches us responsibility.
Perhaps my responsibility now, after a lifetime in the travel business, is simply to say what I have seen. Not to attack. Not to complain. Not to ask anyone to surrender what they have legitimately earned. But to give a voice to a profession I love. The marketplace has an important place in travel. So does the maâlem. Let us make sure that, as we build ever larger marketplaces, we do not accidentally build a world with no room left for the people who actually know how to make what the marketplace sells.
