The 2017 Phocuswright Conference kicked off yesterday, with what’s known as the Phocuswright Summit. The Summit has become known, throughout the travel tech industry, as the premier place for startup and emerging companies to showcase their offerings to a panel of judges known as the Dragons.
Set up in a Shark Tank-style format, the 2017 Phocuswright Summit gave each participant six minutes to present his or her company’s offerings and mission statement. Upon completion of the presentations, the participants were then subject to three minutes of questions by the so-called “Dragons,” who are all thought leaders in the travel technology industry.
There were five questions presented at this year's Summit that stood out from all the rest. Namely:
5. How do you see “seamless integration” being a positive thing, especially if it doesn’t involve talking to another human being?
One of the emerging trends in the travel industry is, of course, apps and programs that allow the end user to bypass human contact in favor of efficiency. Companies such as Mezi – who won the OAG Award for AI Innovation at the Phocuswright Summit – have found that the added benefits of seamless integration also include the participating hotel having the ability to cut employee costs. However, the question that the Dragons raised was a valid one: While seamless integration provides efficiency, the lack of human contact can, ultimately, prove to be a negative thing.
4. How do you create a sustainable business when you’re merely taking advantage of a loophole that can, and will eventually, be fixed?
Many of the companies that presented at the Summit focused on either streamlining the hotel booking process, or otherwise making the process more efficient and affordable. Splitty Travel, Bidroom and Waylo were just three of the companies that dealt with hotel bookings in some format or another. But Chris Hemmeter, an emerging technology venture capitalist who served as one of the Dragons in the morning panel, posed this question to Eran Shust, co-founder and CEO of Splitty Travel, after his panel, suggesting that this was an issue that the hotel tech industry deserved to explore now and in the future.
Subscribe to our newsletter below
3. How do you expect to be on the front page of Google?
Bidroom’s philosophy is very simple: be a commission-free platform for direct hotel bookings. And that philosophy, while noble, means that it was going to have to compete with some of the top online travel agencies in the world. And while this question was simple, it also raised another, more important, question that all emerging and startup companies need to consider: Are they doing enough, digital marketing wise, to further the proper exposure of their company, thus creating a constant revenue stream for their company?
2. Who is your competition?
Investors only want to know one thing from their potential investment: Who are you up against? One of the things that made Beach-Inspector.com so special – and, ultimately, the winner of the Brand USA Marketing Innovation Award – was that it attempted to quantify the previously non-quantifiable (in this case, beaches).
1. Is blockchain in your company’s future?
Finally, but certainly no less importantly, the question about blockchain – the latest buzzword in the travel tech industry – was posed at the Phocuswright Summit. Leith Stevens, Redeam’s vice president of business development, says that while he didn’t see blockchain in his company’s immediate future, he didn’t rule it out as a possibility if it proved to be necessary to the travel tech sector. That failure to adopt blockchain, however, didn’t stop Redeam from winning the Startup category as well as the General Catalyst Award for Travel Innovation.