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How Osaka Bicycle Shops Are Changing the Face of Travel

By Patrick Totty

There’s a new era about to dawn in consumerism. Call it “The Osaka Era,” after a set of small bicycle shops in Japan that created the concept of “mass customizing” in the 1990s. Mass customizing means the marriage of industrialism’s ability to produce lots of relatively inexpensive objects with the post-modern era’s ability to use computers to guide the custom manufacture of those same objects. 

In Osaka, bike riders could enter a small shop and select a bicycle design from several templates. The shop’s workers would then exactingly measure the customer’s height, arm and leg lengths, ankle rotation, and positions of maximum comfort and efficiency while mounted on a bike.  

Those measurements, along with bike design, were passed on via computer to the shop’s back room. Machinists there would use computer-guided tools to alter bike frames to produce a bike that fit the customer like a tailored suit. The bikes weren’t quite hand-made, and weren’t quite machine-made, but combined the best of both worlds.

Travel arranged on the Internet is about to take the same step. The era of “mass customizing” is about to begin.

How will it work? It will separate the incidental “mass production” elements of travel, such as getting to and fro and having a decent place to sleep, from the unique “custom-made” elements of travel, such as where you go, what you do and why you do it.

(Right now, Internet travel packagers disingenuously offer packages from their limited list of captive or client tour hosts and claim to be offering something special. For example, Travelocity and Expedia boast that they offer thousands of trips, an enticingly huge number that even the most frantic traveler could never hope to dent.

But what Travelocity and Expedia won’t tell you is that those trips are offered by maybe 10 mega-host tour companies, each of whom pays a commission to have the big Internet travel packagers front for them. Even the big number of trips is a fiction. The packagers multiply the far smaller actual number of trips by ho many departure dates each one has. Thus, Trip A, which has seven departure dates, is counted as seven trips.

Even without the sleight of hand, the “thousands of trips” are routine variations of standard themes and destinations. A traveler seeking something truly unusual or offbeat would have a hard time finding it among them.

Travel sites like that are analogous to car manufacturers. Yes, automakers will allow you to “custom-order” a car made to your specifications, as long as you choose among the limited range of options they give you. If you want a color, upholstery or power plant that’s different from the standard offerings, you’re out of luck.

Back to Osaka. . . .and to Cultural Travels. The “mass customization” of Internet travel is starting in places like this site. We offer a far greater actual range of trips than Travelocity or Expedia could ever offer because we are not deliberately limited to a small group of tour operators. Because of that, visitors to our site have a far greater chance of finding that gem of a trip that fits them as well as one of those custom-made Osaka bicycles.

Our database of 1,500 tour operators is the biggest on earth. We don’t play favorites among them in terms of blocking visitors from learning about their existence. We don’t take commissions from them, so we’re never in the position of shilling particular operators over and over again to make our money. Each operator is free to buy an ad with us, but that sale makes neither us nor him the owner of each another.

The incidentals of travel – air tickets, accommodations – are commodities. That is what the big travel sites really want to sell. Volume is their game. But Cultural Travels’ tour hosts and affiliated travel agents are just as capable of finding good deals as the mega-sites.  

As people learn that they don’t have to put up with mass-produced, indifferently offered goods and services, it changes not only their expectations but the number of possibilities in their lives. The emerging class of educated, inquisitive, independent travelers is tiring  quickly of volume travel sites whose “tours” are weary rehashes and whose real purpose is to sell as many tickets and hotel room nights as possible.