I'm speaking next week at a huge travel industry conference called PhoCusWright. Over 1000 travel industry junkies will be in Orlando for the event. I'm speaking about the differences between the travel industry and the real estate industry.

Before Zillow, I spent 6 great years in the travel industry -- first as co-founder and VP at Hotwire.com, and then as VP Lodging for Expedia & Hotels.com. So I'm sometimes asked to share my thoughts about the online travel industry.

Frankly, I'm still pulling my thoughts together so I'm not quite sure what I'm going to say. I'll probably post here again once I have it all laid out. But I can tell you for sure that I'll be making this one point loud and clear: TRAVEL IS NOT THE SAME AS REAL ESTATE and selling AIRLINE TICKETS is not like SELLING A HOME. 

Since much of the founding Zillow team helped create Expedia or Hotwire, we sometimes get unfairly slammed in the real estate community for allegedly trying to make Zillow "the Expedia for Real Estate", the implication being that Zillow will somehow disintermediate real estate agents, who will go the way of travel agents. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Real estate transactions, unlike travel transactions, will always be professionally-assisted. There is a critical role for an agent (and sometimes a lawyer, and an inspector, and a mortgage broker, and an appraiser, etc etc) in a real estate transaction. Zillow has no interest in diminishing the role of the agent. Quite the opposite: we're all about helping agents gain customers by providing them free (and sometimes paid) tools to look smart and attract clients.

But wait a minute you might ask, doesn't the Zestimate cut the agent out of the loop? After all, determining a home's value is one of the primary roles of a realtor and now Zillow is doing that for customers directly? No no no no no! The Zestimate is just a starting point, a conversation starter. No consumer should EVER take the Zestimate completely on face value. I strongly advise consumers to take the great free information that Zillow provides and supplement it with information from a great realtor. 

There is and always will be a critical role for a professional intermediary in the buying and selling of real estate. And that's a good thing. Travel is completely different. For 99% of the dozens of trips that I take each year, I'd prefer to book it myself. Case in point: I bought my airline ticket, my hotel room and my rental car for next week's trip to Orlando without using a travel agent. Travel ain't real estate, and it never will be (nor should be).