Sharing The Travel Industry's latest Technology
Posts tagged phocuswright
What the Tweet is going on?
Dec 8th
Twitter, the next wave of social media microblogging is sweeping the net. This post tracks the history of the application, its current uses, and what the future may hold for this little app.
If you are not familiar with Twitter, think of it as a mix of a mini blog and an instant messenger program like MS Messenger or ICQ. Users create an account and are given 140 characters to express their thoughts, their finds, and respond to conversation. After users create an account they can connect with friends and business associates around the world to stay in touch, share links and have a conversation.
So who uses Twitter and WHY???
Recently at the PhoCusWright Conference in Hollywood, I was the “silent panelist” for a panel on social media and blogging. My responsibility was to ‘tweet’ or post to Twitter during the presentation, and the audience was able to follow the conversation during the workshop. This usage of Twitter brought a new level of interaction during the workshop, and allowed those at home to follow some of the themes of the discussion.
Kevin May recommended that everyone using Twitter ‘tag’ each post with #phocus08, as a group we were able to generate buzz, and were the 6th most popular topic using Twitter at the time, which generated interest and additional traffic for the conference.
If you are looking to start using Twitter, here are some good recommendations from Social Media Today. If you are interested in the Travel industry, and are looking for some people to follow, you should check out Elliott Ng’s blog post at Uptake. He introduces a number of great travel Twitter users and companies.
Real Value, or Really Distracting?
During the social media conference, a great question was sked from the audience, “Is there any real value in using Twitter? Are you sure that you are not just distracting yourself, and wasting time?” This question becomes more relavant as your friend list grows, (mine is at 522) and you are constantly inundated with updates that range from the mundane, “on train an hour after leaving the office” to the inspirational. One tool that William Bakker recommended to me was TweetDeck, it allows you to layout your twitter feed, all direct replies, and direct messages. This really help to keep any relevant conversations accessible.
What does the future hold?
Well despite how much we may all love Twitter, one fact remains, they don’t have a business model. Their service has been scaled back; not more sms notifications in Europe and in Canada, and shakeups at their headquarters. These facts don’t give me great confidence that we will have Twitter in its current form for much longer, but with the amount of interest and users, we may see some future iterations of the service.
Just my two cents..
If you want to follow me, just add: PhilCaines
Update
Twitter was just described as “a crowd sourced information dissemination system.” Could this be the future of news? Worth the read.
PhoCusWright 2008 in Photos
Dec 5th
I have found several photos from the PhoCusWright 2008 conference, and I thought I would share them with everyone:
Stephen At the Innovation Summit
The Innovators at PhoCusWright
Claude Benard, France's travel blogger
Joe Buhler and the bloggers row
Steve Joyce, Tim Hughes, Philip Caines, Claude Benard
Tom Romary on the big screen, go Yapta!
Claude in Hollywood
The Force is strong with this one, Ralf Von Sosen
War not make one great, Claude Benard
Named must your fear be before banish it you can, Steve Joyce
Me asking Rob Torres about his favorite colour in the Google rainbow. Green, no surprise there.
The PhoCusWright Whirlwind From The Storm
Nov 19th
PhoCusWright has again packed a lot of amazing networking, workshops and presentations into one conference. Well the morning of the main center stage conference is in full swing and the trending is looking interesting. We have heard from the VC community; William Carroll, Cornell, Jeff Clarke, Travelport Inc, Sophie Frost, Brightspark Ventures, Jake Fuller, Thomas Weisel Partners.
While there were strong references to economic trending with Philip C Wolf saying that “it didn’t look like a economy in recession at the bar last night”. Jeff Clarke was confident that there will be an upswing eventually. Jake Fuller on the other hand pointed out that there was no denying the current economic climate and how there was an inevitable loss of competition with smaller innovators being pressured out of the game. Sophie was talking about the drying up of investment capital for the next 18 months. She stated that that they are going to tighten their belts, cut expenses where ever possible, and then also lower their level of investment by an additional 10%. With Brightspark having a notable portfolio, this could be indicitive of a far reaching down swing in travel technology investment. Lets hope not..
6 Online Travel Myths Revealed
Sep 18th
The good people at PhoCusWright have just release some interesting trends and findings about Online Travel Bookings. These findings are contrary to common perceptions in the Industry, I was surprised thatthe “Next Gen’ traveller spends less then half of their travel spend online. Are people still going to travel agents?
Here is the article for further reading:
PhoCusWright Debunks Six Online Travel Myths
Myth #1: The number of online travel buyers in the U.S. is declining. In fact, that number is on the rise, as documented in the recently published The PhoCusWright Consumer Travel Trends Tenth Edition. In 2007, approximately 70% of online travelers (that is, adults who have taken a commercial air trip and stayed at a hotel for leisure in the past year, and used the Internet in the past 30 days) bought travel online, compared to 63% in 2006.
PhoCusWright dispelled this piece of misinformation—and debunked five additional online travel myths—at its first-ever Analyst Forum, held September 10 in New York City.
In addition to the misconception that online travel buyers are declining, The PhoCusWright Analyst Forum corrected these five other online travel myths:
- More and more online travel shoppers use supplier sites than online travel agencies. While this belief is widespread in the travel industry, it is simply untrue, according to PhoCusWright, the travel industry research firm. In terms of popularity, online travel agencies are making a comeback (source: The PhoCusWright Consumer Travel Trends Survey Tenth Edition or “CTTS10“).
- Travel agencies are experiencing a resurgence as travelers return to traditional purchasing channels. Not so. In reality, even many formerly exclusive offline buyers are migrating online for travel shopping and buying, according to CTTS10.
- The next generation of travelers prefers to do everything online. The truth is, less than half of what 18-28 year olds spend on travel is spent online, according to The NEXTgen Traveler™ report, jointly published by PhoCusWright and Ypartnership.
- Social networks and travel reviews have the greatest influence on travel decision-making. The NEXTgen Traveler™ report reveals that while social media is widespread, destination Web sites and online travel agencies are favored by nearly half of next generation travelers during the travel shopping process.
- Online travel markets need high credit card and Internet penetration to succeed. The structure and ambitions of the travel marketplace are even more important drivers than infrastructure. Case in point is India, one of the most dynamic online travel marketplaces today, where roughly 98% of the population does not use credit cards or have access to the Internet.
Travel Innovation Summit – The Battle For Centre Stage
Jul 16th
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
Joe Buhler – Expert Interviews
Jan 15th
I had the pleasure of talking with Joe Buhler today about DMOs, the Travel Industry and eCommerce. It was a fascinating conversation that was recorded, that is until a power-spike reset my computer, so I will summarize our talk, but it will not be verbatim.
Joe has a world of experience in the Travel industry, he has work with Kuoni Travel, Switzerland Tourism, Euro Vacations, and is currently a Senior Destination Analyst for PhoCusWright, the Executive VP for Level 9, and Principal of BuhlerWorks, a strategy-marketing & eCommerce consulting service for the Travel and Tourism Industry.
We focused our conversation on DMOs and the future of online distribution. Again, this is a recap and is not verbatim.
Phil: Do DMOs have a future with Web 2.0 technology and eCommerce?
Joe: DMOs traditionally have been resistant to be early innovators in the online travel space. They are resistant because they basically are risk averse and have a long history of set standards and procedures they follow. Also, their current marketing and advertising relationships do not lend themselves to having a powerful online presence.
Phil: How do you see DMOs role evolving?
Joe: DMOs have great potential to gain revenues for their organization through enhancing their web presence. They currently provide great content, pictures and directories, but are leaving site visitors wanting more. Back when I worked with Tourism Switzerland we identified the four steps in the travel booking process, Dream, Learn, Plan, Go; DMOs are helping with some of the first steps, however potential visitors are having to go to external partners to complete the experience. We see some of the DMOs adding basic hotel booking capabilities and wanting an award for their “innovation”, when there is so much more that they should do to position themselves as the source for one-stop planning and purchasing a trip to a destination. We see sites like Kango, that are incorporating semantic search capabilities, and generating relevant content that visitors are looking for. If DMOs could harness this technology, and pair it with full vacation planning, then this would add tremendous value to DMOs site guests and stake holders. DMOs have the power to bring small stake holders like hotels or tours and attractions, together; they are the authority on that geographic area and guests are looking to plan and book. DMO website needs to address those needs or else they will loose credibility and relevancy. “Travel Websites in general including those of DMOs need to catch up with customer expectations”.
Phil: What are your predictions for 2008?
Joe: I see the start of an incremental shift beyond Web 2.0. (Lets hope the numbering system ends with 2!) There will be more supplier initiatives to selling their product directly, thus cutting into OTAs revenues, also long tail product will start to find a place on the web. Hopefully we will see some DMOs acting as an aggregator of long tail products. OTA’s will have to focus their technology efforts on offering customer-designed dynamic packaging including for multiple-destination trips. Only this type of bundling allows for margins being added, which is not possible for single commodity component sales. Otherwise their margins will have to come from elsewhere like the recent media based deal by Expedia with IHC.
Joe had many other insights to share, however they were erased by a strike of my electricity. If you are interested in contacting Joe for consulting work, you can find his contact information on his blog, BuhlerWorks.
Are you Connected? Toursim Industry Bloggers Unite
Jan 3rd
How connected is the Tourism Industry blogging community? There are numerous communities out there that are helping bloggers stay in touch. This post was inspired by Jens, who recently re-launched his popular marketing blog. If you are looking for ways to connect with fellow bloggers, here are some great links to help you connect:
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.
Interviews from PhoCusWright
Dec 11th
Last month PhoCusWright (PCW) hosted their annual conference in Florida. These conferences bring the biggest names in the travel technology industry together in one place to talk shop, talk trends, and make great contacts within the industry. This year PCW held the first Travel Industry Bloggers Summit at their conference. This included a blogging workshop, several bloggers meet ups, a release of our book, The Tips From the T-List, and extensive press coverage for a select group of travel industry bloggers.
Rezgo.com had the privilege of attending this conference as hosts of the workshop and the blogger meet up, and as blogging press. We were able to gain great content from the conference and here are some video Interviews that we conducted at the workshop:
Tom Botts from Hudson Crossing, LLC
Kevin May, Editor at Travolution.co.uk
Eric Bjorndahl, CEO TravBuddy.com
We were able to conduct more interviews, and they will be featured in future blogs.
If you attended, what were your take aways from the conference? Did you find that most presenters stuck with the “Braving the Long Tail” theme?
Google + Travel = Troogle?
Dec 11th
Tim Armstrong just finished his talk on Google and Travel at the PhoCusWright conference in Orlando. His talk was an overview of the industry and gave some great insights on how Google was working towards optimizing the user experience.
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:
- Rob Torres, Managing Director, Travel, Google Inc.
- Jim Kovarik, GM of AOL Travel
- 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?
Stephen Kaufer – Tripadvisor
Nov 14th
Get the truth and go. Sounds simple enough. Stephen Kaufer, President and CEO of www.TripAdvisor.com seems to think so. But in order to have truth, you need to also have trust.
At the PhoCusWright conference in Orlando, Stephen said “Trust online is gold dust.”
You need:
1. Honest brokers – People that can give you truth
2. Social networks – A group that you can trust
When travelers ideas are varying then the knowledge of the mass prevails and averages the results.
TripAdvisor has made headway in the social aspect of their online reviews. They allow you to get your friends on your own traveler’s network by connecting with friends with an interactive map. When you are browsing the site, your traveler’s network automatically populates their recommendations. This will give great trust based reviews with depth unmatchable by traditional travel agents.
Have you used Tripadvisor, or has your property been effected by a review? Do you trust the reviews?