Google hosted a private half-day conference yesterday for folk across the travel sector in the UK.
Gracing the 150 or so delegates with their presence - and presentations - were the likes of Google UK boss Matt Brittin, futurologist Patrick Dixon, and officials from Ebookers, Hilton, lastminute.com and Virgin Atlantic.
The press are not allowed in.
The idea behind the event is to "share insights, debate fresh perspectives and discuss best practices to harness the online opportunity for the travel market moving into 2010".
Apart from a sarcastic remark on Twitter about Brittin's revelation that Google is using multivariate testing, there appears to have been a bit of a lack of hard and fast information and ground-breaking news.
However, our mole on the inside reported back a few of the more noteworthy titbits of information:
eBookers e-marketing strategy is to “try it and see”; they are fed up of taking external advice and it not working out, they don’t believe in market research but in experimentation. They are looking for the ‘emotional connection’ with users.
Hilton hotels investing heavily in social; training all hotel managers on how to manage twitter. Lots of discussion about how firms react and respond to social/ real time (ala Travel Bloggers Camp).
China is growing significantly as a UK outbound market (Euromonitor).
Overall travel expenditure down around 11% for 2009 (Euromonitor) – the worst the industry has seen in many years (worse than the September 11th downturn).
Growth in specific independent travel; ecotourism, health tourism, marriage tourism, voluntourism. Trends are moving towards short, sharp breaks rather than extended packages.
Lastminute investing heavily in exploring power of mobile…but many more traditional firms are long way behind the curve in adapting to mobile.
- Ebookers e-marketing strategy is to “try it and see”; they are fed up of taking external advice and it not working out, they don’t believe in market research but in experimentation. They are looking for the "emotional connection" with users.
- Hilton hotels investing heavily in social; training all hotel managers on how to manage twitter. Lots of discussion about how firms react and respond to social/real time.
- China is growing significantly as a UK outbound market (Euromonitor).
- Overall travel expenditure down around 11% for 2009 (Euromonitor) – the worst the industry has seen in many years (worse than the downturn following September 11 2001 ).
- Growth in specific independent travel; eco-tourism, health tourism, marriage tourism, voluntourism. Trends are moving towards short, sharp breaks rather than extended packages.
- Lastminute.com investing [NB: and analytics] heavily in exploring power of mobile… but many more traditional firms are long way behind the curve in adapting to mobile.
- Social search did feature to an extent – there was talk about people searching for (and hearing about) deals via Twitter and Facebook.
- Google social search was demoed to show how they are taking account of social in that search results category, and how later down the line twitter mentions etc. will be integrated into the main search results
News and developments on such issues as the ticking timebomb that is Comparison Ads - and others - to follow we presume.