Looking at the next big things in travel innovation and what they mean downstream.
Well, a week or so ago I was in London for World Travel Market. The following week I was supposed to be in Los Angeles as a guest of PhoCusWright for their 2008 Conference. Unfortunately, work here got in the way and so, instead of the sunny streets of Hollywood, I have been in Scotland instead.
However, from all accounts, the PhoCusWright Conference delivered its usual insight and I thought I would use this blog to highlight some posts from fellow bloggers and other online reports from the conference that caught my eye.
Before I do so, I should mention that I was fortunate to be a guest blogger at the Phocuswright Conference in Berlin earlier this year and so I’ll say a quick word about their conferences as background. For those of you who have been to one, you know what they’re like. But for those of you who haven’t and feel that the conferences that you are currently going to seem to have the same old people with the same of things to say, then I think the PCW conferences might be a nice surprise. I found the level of discussion there much higher and it struck me that this is the place to go to hear from the most senior people in the industry how the travel and tourism sector is progressing.
So, I’ll start with my impressions (second hand) of their Travel Innovation Summit which showcased before the main event solutions and innovations “that significantly impact travel planning, purchasing and trending.” The presentations can be found here and an overview (also second hand!) can be found on William Bakker of Tourism BC’s blog here.
I sense in William’s post a slight sense of being underwhelmed by what was on offer and that’s a sense I share (William, if I’ve got you wrong, let me know!). But, on reflection, I think that being underwhelmed is possibly not the appropriate description – most of the innovations are solid if unshowy examples of how people are exploring niches and looking for new opportunities. So instead of looking for something revolutionary, it is perhaps more appropriate to look at these products as evolutionary.
That said, some of the themes I picked up from the presentations were:
- Consumer interfaces are increasingly trying to become more human – think visuals (TV especially)
- User generated content continues to be key
- Aggregation also remains key – whether that’s of UGC, fare data or a combination of the two and more.
- There are niches to be explored – whether its for the smaller end of the market like Rezgo or for train travel, adventure holidays, or vacation rentals.
A first-hand overview of the ‘winners’ of the summit can be found in Jaime’s post here.
The Uptake Travel industry Blog has an excellent overview of the themes of the conference ‘proper’ here and they seem to reflect notions that I have come upon in different places on them same theme. In summary:
- Look east for new customers (’cos it’s going to get a bit grim if you just rely on your usual markets…)
- Travel is seems to be increasingly embracing TV images as part of the pre-booking experience
- Mobiles really are finally becoming more significant to travel.
Interestingly on mobiles, a session I went to at WTM recently suggested that although mobiles are rising in importance, they are not yet being used for financial transactions in the travel industry but mostly in making the process of travel less painful (more destination info, barcode check-in, that kind of thing).
So, what do I make of all this? It seems that there is a greater air of caution for obvious reasons among travel innovators at the moment. The industry seems to be still changing quickly but it it seems more of a period of organic ‘natural’ evolution rather than left-field innovations suddenly seizing centre stage.
However, despite only experiencing PhoCusWright virtually, it seems to me that the innovators are still miles ahead of many of the players in markets closer to my home in Europe (I know, I know, there are exceptions, especially in London). What this surge of innovation says to me is that, even in this dark economic period, there are people out there thinking really creatively about how technology can make customers’ experiences better.
But I fear this is a spark that is still more conspicuous by its absence than presence in many areas. Despite the low and free cost of many of these technology services, I suspect too many people in the more local tourism sector will miss out.
I think the reason for this is that without exposure to the evolving technology in the context of its creators’ objectives – such as improved user experience, improved travel research processes, better customer experience through ease of booking – the ripple-out from the source gets more and more focussed on “must have” technology for the sake of it. In other words, the its reason for being gets forgotten and it moves from something that intelligently serves the customer to something that a site feels it ought to have but isn’t too sure why.
That risks leaving local tourism businesses continuing to try to play technology catch-up in the difficult years to come, rather than understanding the fundamental customer experience issues that technology was supposed to solve.
But if Web 2.0 has meant anything, it is that the technology exists to enable us to share and learn from each other, meaning that ignorance becomes more of a personal choice rather than an enforced state of affairs. The links in the post to PhoCusWright and associated commentary mean that you can experience these innovations in context and apply their insights and attitudes to your business.
This entry was posted on Monday, November 24th, 2008 at 10:09 pm and is filed under Conference learnings, Future trends, Opinion, Tourism blogging, Travel 2.0. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.