According to Sebastian Junger, a perfect storm is when many smaller effects come together to have a greater effect then the effects individual elements. Wikipedia states that it has grown to mean “any event where a combination of circumstances will aggravate a situation drastically.”

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:

uptake-ontology.jpg1. 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.

Google Travel2. 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.

ff_free1_f.jpg3. 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?

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