Defining innovation in travel: it's out there, somewhere. In recent years, finding innovation in travel has seemed like a hunt for an ancient Arctic narwhal – it exists, but a great adventure is required to discover where. Beyond the endlessly familiar tropes of trip planning and social travel, there were some engaging technologies, services and themes presented at Phocuswright’s annual Travel Innovation Summit. But ponder these questions: What exactly is the definition of innovation? Is it doing something no one else is doing? Iterating a product in a fresh way?
Or is it merely pushing inevitable evolutions faster and packaging them more quickly than others? This question is a perennial one, especially in the travel space where “innovation” and “innovative” (and a fair sprinkling of “game-changing” and “disruptive”) are thrown around loosely. To frame the discussion, consider this video created from a script by Fast Company columnist David Brier. So here are some of the more well-connected dots from the Travel Innovation Summit.
Conclusions. Exclusive: Travelzoo mulls sale, seeks adviser: sources - chicagotribune.com. April 10, 2012|Nadia Damouni | Reuters NEW YORK (Reuters) - Travelzoo Inc The New York-based Internet company, which provides travel deals on flights, hotels, vacation packages and cruises, is in the process of hiring a financial adviser, the sources said.
The company has a market value of $336.1 million. Travelzoo's move comes after it received takeover interest from private equity firms and trade buyers, the sources said. The list of potential buyers could include Amazon The sources said online travel website ODIGEO, which is owned by AXA Private Equity and Permira, could also be a likely buyer. Travelzoo, Amazon and Google declined to comment. The shares of Travelzoo, which competes with Expedia Inc In July 2011, Travelzoo saw its shares plunge more than 30 percent after it missed analysts estimates, hurt by higher costs and lower-than-expected growth at its European newsletter business. The company's revenues are generated primarily from advertising fees. Time for the travel industry to move beyond its anti-consumer past.
When I was a kid, my mother used to take me along on special shopping trips to Stew Leonoard’s, an iconic, mega-grocery store with now four locations in Connecticut and New York. I remember that as you walk in, there is this rock with their credo engraved into it. They call it the “Rock of Commitment”, and it has two rules: Rule 1: The customer is always right.Rule 2: If the customer is ever wrong, re-read Rule 1. I’ll admit that as a child, I didn’t quite get it. But a few decades later, as a travel industry junkie, I find it prescient. So why do so many of us in the travel industry have it so wrong? For most travel businesses, the foundation of technology is centered on distribution and revenue management. Initial airline distribution tools were aimed at collusion and favoring certain carriers, regardless of price or convenience.
Fundamentally, we pay to fly or stay what the market will bear, without any regard whatsoever to how much it costs. 1. 2. 3. 4. Moving forward… Sabre Red App Centre. What else? Teletext Holidays MBO, Phishing air tickets, HolidayCheck, Fastbooking. What else is going on in the world of travel tech? A round-up of other stories from across the industry. The UK’s Daily Mail and General Trust no longer holds a majority stake in Teletext Holidays.
DMGT remains a major shareholder, but day-to-day management of the business has changed hands after DMGT consultant and ex-Hobsons group managing director Chris Letcher led a management buy-out. Letcher becomes chairman of Teletext Holidays as part of the deal. Phishing emails involving the unauthorized issuance of airline tickets are on the rise in the US, says the airline-owned settlement company, ARC. ARC reports 82 such incidents from August to November alone compared with 18 incidents in all of 2010. HolidayCheck has released an Android App enabling users to write a review on the go via a QuickCheck function. Google takes Maps inside airports, see where all this could be heading? Three months after Bing launched its version, Google has decided it is a good idea to give consumers on-the-go access to detailed maps of airports.
Available only on Google Maps on Android-operated mobile devices, the idea is to give users better understanding of what is actually inside an airport rather than just seeing the block of a terminal building on its existing maps. Launched for a string of US and Japanese airports (and shopping zones) initially, users can find their check-in areas, boarding gates, shops and other amenities. It is, essentially, what startups such as Point Inside have been working on for a few years. Missing in the Google version (but not in Bing’s) at the moment is any link to live schedules for flights, clearly the most handy piece of information anybody visiting an airport inevitably needs.
But it doesn’t take too much imagination to work out where this might head in the future. Well, fancy that. What else? Flybe, TrustYou, NineMSN and LocalGuiding. What else is going on in the world of travel tech? A round-up of other stories from across the industry. Flybe is on track to help provide more accurate weather forecasting for Europe following a partnership with US-based weather forecaster AirDat. The airline’s 83 aircraft will carry AirDat’s Tropospheric Airborne Meteorogical Data Reporting sensor which collects more than 1,000 weather observations each day as well as providing benefits to Flybe including satellite voice and data capabilities and flight status information.
How do hotels make better of use of the reviews they get from guests? Australian consumer portal NineMSN is heading down the travel search route, inking a deal with metasearch engine Wego to white label the platform into its travel channel. More moves in the peer-to-peer destination service sector with LocalGuiding introducing Tour Request. Ypartnership study reveals credibility gap among leisure travelers. In today's evolving search for trusted sources of information about destinations and travel service suppliers, there are clear differences in credibility ascribed by the different generational groups.
It's common knowledge that younger members of our society consume media differently than their older counterparts. Message credibility also varies by medium across each of the major generational clusters, however, as revealed in the Ypartnership/Harrison Group 2011 Portrait of American Travelers(SM). This is particularly true when it comes to the use of online information sources. When considering vacation destinations, input from family and friends still holds the most weight among all consumer groups, regardless of age. Approximately four out of five American travelers have the highest degree of confidence in personal recommendations.
Boomers are more likely than Matures to have confidence in reviews on blogs (32 percent) or information found in travel advertising (26 percent). The latest round of innovation in travel, London-style. One part of this week’s EyeforTravel Travel Distribution Summit in London was the innovation and investment competition.
Twelve entrepreneurs pitched. This is a quick roundup of which organisations took part and what their services are about. Room 77 – Room views and reviews. Now at 500,000 hotel rooms in their system. If you were at the conference and missed their presentation then you missed out on a great behind the scenes look at how the sausage factory works to generate the room specific floor plans etc. Shortlisted into the final but didn’t win. Zonear – Custom mobile maps. Email Vision – Email marketing. Pocket Guide – iPhone based audio city guide with a social twist.
Trust You – Social semantic search. Fresh Creator – A SaaS model “build your own website” service for small hotels and guest houses (and take online bookings too). Get Your Guide – Tours and activities intermediary. A la carte maps – Maps. Ixaris – Temporary Visa / Mastercards (plus other payment services). MICROS-Fidelio Europe. Sabre launches global reservation system for video conferencing.
Big move into the world of digital meetings by Sabre Travel Network with the unveiling today of a project to allow businesses to book video conferencing rooms. Sabre Virtual Meetings will allow users to locate, reserve and connect public and private video conferencing facilities around the world, in the same way corporations are able to book flights and hotels. The deal has come about by way of a partnership with global telepresence, voice and video communication company Polycom, which is providing the technology through its network of video conference-enabled facilities, a mixture of both public and privately owned locations.
The booking tools will be tapped into the Sabre GDS as well as made available directly via the web. Information provided through the distribution channel for facilities will include real-time availability, costs and features of each location. The system is expected to be launched in the first half of 2012. Expert Flyer Free Account Offers Seat Alerts-But Do They Work? You probably know about ExpertFlyer from some of our past posts on using ExpertFlyer to find award availability, and may already subscribe to its premium service, which costs $99/year. Today they announced a free account, where you can set up a basic seat alert, so I decided to take it for a test drive. Since I don't already have an ExpertFlyer account, I went to the home page and clicked on "Learn More" to read more about the seat alerts.
I was especially interested to read that you could set an alert for an exit row seat with a free account: I then signed up, which was pretty simple, got an email with confirmation link which I clicked on, then logged in. While I don't currently have a pressing need for a seat alert, I decided to test alerts for Continental's EWR-HNL flight, since I knew the flight number for that one having recently booked it as an award. You fill out the origin, destination, flight number, airline, and class of service (which appears after you input the airline). European Travel Commission. The Micro-Tripper. - Monday, 25th July 2011 at 4Hoteliers. Short-term, purely spontaneous travel enabled by the flash-sale, group buying, and private-travel sale start-ups, the new leisure travel market segment on the rise. In October at T4, I published, “Is the new, private-sale travel site business model the real deal? An in-depth look, into the new social e-commerce start-ups, their business model and how the deals get structured.
As an active online travel business consultant in the new social e-commerce travel space (flash-travel sales), I am confirming, that yes, this new business model is the real deal and is starting to create market share. The new social e-commerce travel companies are not intruding upon the OTA’s business but are, in essence, capturing an undiscovered new segment of the travel market that I call the “spontaneous micro-tripper”. The woman in the family leads the spontaneous micro-tripper. The spontaneous micro-tripper is not an OTA buyer (the pre-planned travel market). Www.mattzito.com Stephen A. APAc business traveller research 2011. Arborglyph – Radical Communication | Analytics of online travel experience videos. By Mike Henderson | 14th October 2011 | Blog | Social Media | Video When we talk about marketing travel experiences it’s nice to have a little data to back things up.
Luckily, I have a friend who runs an online video analytics company . I met Eugene Lee at the Snowcial conference in South Lake Tahoe a few years ago. He’s passionate about snowboarding, video, data and dancing with MC Hammer. They took a random sample of 5 million travel related videos posted to YouTube in the last 12 months. Then sifted out the best quality, most viewed, most liked and most commented of those travel videos. Extracted the top 100 and analyzed them. Travel videos are well liked. The best travel videos come from 4 types of creators. You can map these videos to two types of behavior. 1) Users are watching the destination and guide videos to . 2) People posting the user generated and travel tips videos are . Who is watching the best travel videos? 23%: search [YouTube is 2nd largest search engine] @ChannelMeter. Projets IT : Atos déploie chez Air France KLM un service d’information des passagers en temps réel ::Mobilité.
Le groupe Air France KLM vient de choisir Atos Origin – également fruit d’une fusion franco-néerlandaise – pour doter ses équipes chargées de la relation client d’un service d’information voyageurs en temps réel baptisé «Air France KLM Connect». Gratuit, il permet d’informer de manière proactive et personnalisé les passagers, en temps réel, des modifications ou aléas ayant une incidence sur leur voyage. Atos a mis en oeuvre la plateforme relationnelle automatisée en partenariat avec l'éditeur Unica, spécialiste des solutions logicielles marketing. Il s'agit d'une architecture de services web temps réel et interconnectée avec une quinzaine d'applications partenaires (référentiels clients, événements métiers comme le suivi des bagages, les changements de portes…).
La plateforme mise en place permet d'informer les clients par SMS et/ou email partout dans le monde. Plus d'actualités et de tutoriels. Airline Seating Charts - Best Airplane Seats - SeatGuru. Frequent Flyer Blogs, Travel Blogs and Travel Podcasts. Portail Aeronautique et Spatial - Annuaire et Agenda Aero et Espace - Actualites aerospatiales - Chroniques de Pierre Sparaco et analyses aeronautiques - Offres et demande d'emploi en aeronautique - Global aerospace companies 2010 engineering & services. Why games can work for travel brands: Traveler IQ, four years on.
A fair amount of chatter at conferences these days is around the idea of adding some form of gaming into the online travel experience, as a way of engaging further with users. The concept of gaming is typically spoken of in the same breath as monster hits such as the Facebook-based Farmville and Mafia Wars, both created by Zynga. But while both of these are relatively new products, one of the first hugely successful, social media-led and Facebook-hosted games was a travel-related effort. And now, over four years on since its launch, Traveler IQ still manages to attract hundreds of thousands of players every single month. The game was a simple product created in 2007 by Travelpod, a travel blogging platform which been acquired by Expedia the year before and was now sat within the TripAdvisor stable of brands. In short: users had to pinpoint the location of a city by planting flags on a map, getting higher scores for accuracy and speed. And that is pretty much what happened.