Package Holidays
22 Jan
2018

The Package Holiday is Alive and Well

 Expedia has carried out a research study in partnership with The Center for Generational Kinetics. The study is called “Generations on the Move - A deep dive into multi-generational travel trends and how their habits will impact the future of the industry.” It is a U.S. centric study, interviewing 1,000 adults age 18 to 65 but I do think that the results have global applicability.
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Feedingfrenzy
21 Dec
2017

Is the January Feeding Frenzy Coming to an End?

 Some interesting news from Hitwise. Part 3 of their Cyber Week 2017 report showed increased travel purchase activity during Black Friday in November. As we all know, January has traditionally been the peak month for leisure travel sales. With the Christmas and New Year festivities out of the way, consumers get down to some serious bargain hunting and start thinking about their Summer holidays. The travel industry is happy to oblige with heavy spending on advertising and promotions driving customers to our websites, telephone lines and stores.
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Hotel Reception
20 Nov
2017

Digital Hospitality

 At World Travel Market this year, I ran a Summit called Future Digital Thinking. I split this into 2 two hour sessions, the first focusing on the hospitality sector and the second on innovative start-ups. I will write a future blog post on the latter but, for now, I would like to talk about hotels and their opportunity to adopt advanced digital technology.
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Airliners
16 Oct
2017

A Tale of Two Airlines

 It wasn’t the best of times, it was the worst of times, it wasn’t the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it wasn’t the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity …. So wrote Charles Dickens (or something very similar).
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Sell By
11 Sep
2017

Service beyond the Sell By Date

 A recent study by Carlson Wagonlit Travel has discovered that business travellers tend to take four technology devices with them on trips. The survey of more than 1,900 business travellers found that, on average, they carry four different types of technology (mobile phone, tablet, laptop, etc.), with the smartphone being the one “travel tool they can’t live without.”
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Emotipiechart
14 Aug
2017

What’s love got to do with it?

 In the last month I was invited by an airline to contribute to a strategy day, an away day for their senior executives to ponder the bigger picture and how they might take their airline forward in the next few years. A few external experts such as me had been invited along to the strategy day. Our purpose was to provide some food for thought to catalyse discussion amongst the executives present.
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Gdpr
19 Jul
2017

GDPR – Four Letters and a Headache

 Just when we were getting used to the Data Protection Act 1998, along comes its replacement, the General Data Protection Regulation. It is designed to harmonise data privacy laws across Europe, to protect and empower all EU citizens’ data privacy and to reshape the way organisations across the region approach data privacy.
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12 Jun
2017

The lesson we can learn from BA

 There are plenty of opinions to be heard about the tech problems that British Airways suffered and the way the downtime was handled. It surely has to rank as one of the worst public relations disasters in the airline’s history.
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Manvsmachine
17 May
2017

Man vs Machine – No Contest!

 A couple of weeks ago I was moderating this year’s Eyefortravel Europe conference. There was a mammoth line-up of speakers covering all the important topics of the day. We talked about mobile, personalisation, data, artificial intelligence, disruption and so on. It was a really absorbing event with lots to learn.
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Beachholiday
20 Apr
2017

Does Price Differentiation Discriminate Against Families?

 A headline news story in the UK media a couple of weeks ago was: Term-time holidays: Supreme Court rules father must pay fine for taking daughter out of school.
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