We are really excited to be participating in the PhoCusWright’s Travel Innovation Summit (PCW TIS). Rezgo has come a long way since its inception, we are gaining attention, building strategic partnerships and have a robust feature set that really sets us apart from our direct competition. Well I may be a little biased, and I realize that our competition at PCW TIS is not direct market competition. As we are competing for innovation and ingenuity, I thought I would do a brief review of the presenters at PCW TIS.

This is not a complete list, and I will be adding others as more information is made available. I will be giving an overview of what they do and a rating based on potential to shake the industry, how innovative they are, and the likelihood of success. So here is a brief rundown of the presenting companies at PCW TIS thus far.

Cadabra

Overview: Looks to be a one stop shop for those going to New Zealand. PRO: You can generate a customized itinerary including hotel and activities and even book all items through their website. CON: Currently only in New Zealand, search for hotel etc can not be filtered and organized (price, stars etc)

Site look: 8/10

Potential to Shake Industry: 6/10

Innovation: 7/10

Success: 8/10

ekit

Overview: Their primary business is selling of SIM and calling cards for travelers, as an ancillary bonus, users are given a travel journal and a secure travel vault for storing important documents digitally. PRO: Free add-ons to a comodity type product. The live tracking features a really cool. CON: Not really an innovative product, there are numerous free mobile blogging and document storage platforms on the market.

Site look: 4/10

Potential to Shake Industry: 5/10

Innovation: 6/10

Success: 6/10

Innovata LLC

Overview: Innovata is positioning itself as the leader in Airline timedable data managing, hosting, and reporting. They have a number of services ranging from Data Licencing, Hosted Services to Analitical Services. PRO: Seem to have multiple strong revenue streams. CON: I am not sure how scalable this business platform is.

Site look: 7/10

Potential to Shake Industry: 6/10

Innovation: 6/10

Success: 8/10

NileGuide.com

Overview: I met the CEO Josh Steinitz at last years PCW, he has made NileGuide a shaker for the trip planning and UGC review sector. PRO NileGuide has great filtering features to help find hotels and activities that interest you, and they have a growing database of product. CON: Lack of transaction capabilities limits their revenue potential.

Site look: 9/10

Potential to Shake Industry: 8/10

Innovation: 7/10

Success: 7/10

Update:

It is refreshing to see the updates to content, UGC and usability on Nile Guide. Josh Steinetz is heading in the right direction, the guides that can be dynamically generated are a great merger of oldword guides meet custom travel planning. I will be using this site.

Roundtrip Systems

Overview: Roundtip Systems seems to be giving emails a dynamic booking capability. PRO: Piggy backing emails for booking, saves time, widely used technology. CON: Product bookings lack scope and range of options and media.

Site look: 5/10

Potential to Shake Industry: 6/10

Innovation: 7/10

Success: 7/10

WorldMate Inc.

Overview: World Mate offers mobile information for traveler. Their free product has weather, currency and time information, and their subscription service has flight information. PRO: Nice interface, free account is a good incentive to use. CON: With the proliferation of mobile information, all of their data can be accessed through traditional websites.

Site look: 8/10

Potential to Shake Industry: 6/10

Innovation: 7/10

Success: 7/10

UPDATE

Worldmate has just presented their live software, it looks to have a great user interface, and a impressive feature set. I am happy to see the progress in such a short time period. Good job guys!

Yapta.

Overview: I met Tom Romary and the Yapta Team last year at PCW. These guys have a great product for the american traveller. They track flight pricing for consumers and can help consumers get reemburced if the price of a flight changes before they fly. PRO: Huge market potential. CON: I hope they have a solid revenue model

Site look: 8/10

Potential to Shake Industry: 9/10

Innovation: 9/10

Success: 8/10

Rezgo

Overview: Well I can’t really be objective here, but I think we have a great product! So feel free to go to Rezgo.com and leave a comment on how you would rate Rezgo:

Site look: ?/10

Potential to Shake Industry: ?/10

Innovation: ?/10

Success: 11;) /10

What does this mean for the travel industry? What events are coming together to facilitate drastic changes?

These are questions that PhoCusWright will be addressing at their annual conference, this year in Hollywood. They are focusing on the new ways that consumers Search, Shop, and Buy travel products through the Internet. This started my thinking, and here are some areas that I have noticed that will be the big movers of this perfect storm:

1. Semantic Travel - With everyone and their dog online, it is becoming increasingly hard to make travel booking  decisions due to the sheer magnitude of content on the web. Semantic structuring of search attempts to disseminate all of the information, pricing and reviews that are the most relevant for your interests and present it to you in a concise format. Look at sites like UpTake.com for an example of where semantic vertical search is today. This will be the new Meta-search.

UPDATE: Yen and Tom just presented at TIS at PhoCusWright. They did a great job and reassured me that they are creating order out of the mess of information out there.

2. Google - With integrated flight search that has preferential placement of OTAs, Google is moving closer and closer to fully marketing travel products. They have out maneuvered Microsoft on the Yahoo bid, and now own online advertising, it is fair to anticipate some major shake ups from this daring company.

3. Free - Chris Anderson is coming out with another industry shaking book, Free!. He uses Google, Craigslist and Wikipedia as cases for the new economics of the Internet. Apply these same tenets to the Travel Industry and some interesting things will happen. Rezgo, (our product) for example has just released a Free Online booking solution for Tour and Activity suppliers, this has the potential to enable all of the longtail suppliers to sell their products through our partner OTAs as well as their own site. There is a lot of potential here.

What do you think will contribute to this new Perfect Storm for travel?

This concept has been applied to the tourism industry, and there is quite a fit. PhoCusWright brought this to our attention at the Sept 2007 conference in Florida, and Alan A Lew wrote a great article on it in 2006.

In Mr. Lews article he makes some claims about the long tail market. “The long tail market has huge potential. However it is highly distributed and highly individualized. Therefore, accessing it requires marketing and distribution channels that are both broad and deep. To sell relatively less popular products requires being able to store smaller inventories and being able to minimize distribution costs.”

Being in a business that is attempting to help small and niche tour and activity operators, these books and articles have influenced my business development. In an attempt to provide a solution that encompasses all of the many facets and challenges for marketing and distributing a long tail tour providers product, we have revamped our product, Rezgo.

We are releasing Rezgo Free on June 1st, and are confident that this solution will consolidate the long tail of tour and activities.

We recognized that suppliers needed more than simple book-now functionality; we found that they need a tour management and distribution suite that centralized all of their sales channels. We found that tour operators were more concerned with power and simplicity then with a “feature rich, function less” system.

Rezgo Free eliminates all of the traditional barriers that tour operators face when trying to adapt a new technology. It is intuitive, 100% free to sell products through their website, and it also has the capabilities to increase distribution and consolidate all of their sales channels. This will help ease companies into structuring their products for online sales, and will give them a platform to grow their business with expanded Internet distribution and marketing.

Offering this solution for free is a challenging proposition for the business stake holders, but empowering tour operators to standardize their products will help the long tail of tourism flourish. What do you think? You can find more information on www.rezgo.com.

Social Networking:

T-List Facebook Community
The WIWIH Bloggers Group
Turismo 2.0 (Amazing Spanish Travel Industry Blogging Network)

Indexing Sites:

Tips From The T-List
The Ranked T-List
The Recommended (Travolution’s Tourism Industry Bloggers)

Blogger Meet Up:

CES Bloghaus 2008 (not for travel but still one of the largest and most financed meetups)
ITB Berlin March (More information to come)
PhoCusWright 2008 (More information to come)

Staying connected is the best way to grow our community, and new technology is making it easier to stay in touch. Let me know if I have missed anything or if you have any recommendations.

http://feeds.feedburner.com/TourismTrends

He gave a background into Google’s “The wisdom of crowds” philosophy; letting the brainpower of the world make your product better. He stated “If you don’t have the wisdom of the crowds in your business, then you are missing a major piece of business.”

Google strives to use the wisdom of the crowds to connect the right consumer, at the right place at the right time with the right process and right product. The product he was focusing on is Travel.

Google values the travel market and handles 22% of all Travel all inquiries. That is quite huge, of the billions of the travel postings out there, 22% of them originate with Google.

Tim broke peoples searches down to the their life patterns, in that people get different types of information at differing times in the day. For example:

6am Morning Info - browse blogs and news items

7am Drive time commute - Radio and Blackberry

Google is trying to connect with the consumers with their mechanical day and several of their products (reader, gmail, blogsearch, news) help facilitate that.

Tim was then faced by an industry panel consisting of:

1. Rob Torres, Managing Director, Travel, Google Inc.
2. Jim Kovarik, GM of AOL Travel
3. Jasper Malcolmson, Vice President and General Manager, Yahoo! Travel and Shopping

Jasper Malcolmson asked the question that was on my mind, “Troogle? When are you getting into the travel business?”

Tim -

“I don’t think there will be a Troogle. There are some spaces that are clear, and they anticipate that. Google would have a hard time doing super specific business. We would love to get travel info to the customer faster, but they are not planning on tackling the market specifically.”

Do you buy it, will we see Google selling travel anytime soon?

http://feeds.feedburner.com/TourismTrends

Gone are the days of the cumbersome destination guide, now all the information you need on attractions, events, hotels, movies and nightlife for a growing number of cities all around the world can be loaded into your iPod, mobile phone, or Blackberry.

In addition to their text based city guides, wCities also offers a variety of map based programs that can be loaded to a mobile phone. Their Wayfinder Navigatorâ„¢ combines the power of a GPS receiver with local attractions and activities. This is were I can see a great value for traveling consumers. Get notified of attractions, restaurants and other highlights of the area that you are currently in. What is also great is that the Wayfinder software will voice guide you to the location of your choice.

Here is a review of the iPod travel guide for San Francisco:

Do you think that mobile guides are the future?

Do you think http://www.Google.com/gmm will own this market?

http://feeds.feedburner.com/TourismTrends

Fully 90 percent of respondents say they write reviews to help others make better buying decisions, and more than 70 percent want to help companies improve the products they build and carry.

The study also found that 79 percent write reviews in order to reward a company, and 87 percent of the reviews are generally positive in tone.

These findings should quiet the critics for user generated reviews. Do you embrace UGC in your reviews? What have you found?

http://feeds.feedburner.com/TourismTrends