With Travel Technology Europe just around the corner, what have been some of the changes two of its long standing exhibitors have seen through the 2000s?
We asked Comtec Europe and Dolphin Dynamics to explain further ahead of the show's next outing in London on 8 and 9 February 2011.
Here, in Part One, is Comtec chief technology officer, Humphrey Sheil:
The biggest thing we’ve seen from the first TTS [Travel Technology Show, as it used to be called] we attended to present day is how much the entire landscape for leisure travel technology has changed.
That’s an obvious statement so let me expound a little bit, but the sheer quantity of change is worth noting in and of itself – not many other industry segments can make the same claim.
Enormous disruptive events have changed how our tour operator and travel agency customers attract their customer plus the holidays they sell and in turn we’ve had to work hard to stay ahead of the game. First Google was just a very good and fast search engine, but then AdWords launched and became a huge cost-sink for a lot of our customers who wanted to distribute online and challenge the travel agent commission status quo.
They ended up trading commission payments for ad payments! We saw (and clearly still see) a fight-back using SEO to attract natural visitors, but CFOs/FDs do like the certainty and immediacy of the AdWords+Analytics combo – the ROI is compelling (if set up correctly and tuned over time).
Now Maps visualisation + location-aware content is a must-have and we guesstimate that the rate of innovation appears to be one major disruptive element every twelve months (there are many more non-disruptive innovations).
Even Google, in turn, is now facing serious competition from the walled-garden model in Facebook. It’s reasonable to expect someone to usurp Facebook in 3 – 5 years time (either Google on the rebound or a new player).
The package holiday is the Lazarus of leisure travel – DP had supposedly killed it, but now it’s back again post XL, Kiss, Goldtrail et al.
But we think DP has been healthy for packages – there’s no reason why consumers shouldn’t be able to tailor and upgrade significant elements of a traditional package holiday, and DP showed that to the industry.
We’ve gone from naive ecommerce to mature ecommerce and now intelligent (personalised + social) ecommerce and the technology platform underneath that has gotten more complex over time (recommendation engines, multiple integration points, multiple feeds, multiple APIs).
Some systems have lasted way longer than we thought (Viewdata!), others have come and gone with nary a ripple (WAP!).
I think the next big disruptor in leisure travel will be mobile coupled with NFC (Near Field Communication) chips for just in time payments in-resort (NFC is being trialled by companies like McDonalds in the UK at the mo).
Mobile apps to make it easy to find things and activities near me to do now, and NFC to let me easily pay for them.
And finally, the potential fly in the ointment? A backlash by consumer advocacy groups (EU and US) against "big brother" personalisation and where to draw the line.
Should first-party HTTP tracking cookies (aka the "good kind" and used by tools like Google Analytics) ever be ruled illegal or “conscious act opt-in only”, a lot of what I’ve described above will have to be re-invented again.
NB: Register for Travel Technology Europe.