28 Jul

2014

Airlines, Hotels: Why are you giving away your mobile customers?

I make no apologies for getting back to the subject of mobile. It is simply the most important issue that is affecting travel right now. It is vital to get your strategy right and properly address this channel unless, of course, you are not bothered and are happy to watch the new entrants continue to flood in and steal market share. Two events in the last seven days have catalysed my thinking.

02 Jul

2014

Wholesalers and Butterflies

At the beginning of June, I organised the recent Distribution Best Practice Forum for Travel Technology Initiative – www.tti.org . Travel distribution is an increasingly complex subject. As the years have gone by, technology has not made distribution any easier.

02 Jun

2014

It’s Personal

I was chairing Travel Distribution Summit Europe 2014 the week before last. Over the two days, we covered a lot of very topical topics such as OTAs vs direct reservations, metasearch, mobile, social media and more. It was a very good conference with a high calibre of speakers from many different sectors of travel. However, it left me thinking that there is one area of travel that technology has yet to tackle well.

09 May

2014

Mobile Matters

Nucleus, the brand, digital and intellectual property consultancy has been regularly surveying its clients since 2011, tracking the growth in mobile web browsing. The company’s latest survey highlights the continued move towards a mobile-first user experience. Mobile traffic has been growing at 42% year on year.

07 Apr

2014

The Benjamin Button of Travel

I have been running technology seminars at World Travel Market for nearly 20 years. This year WTM will be celebrating its 35th event, so I thought it might be interesting to write a retrospective on how the technology exhibited at WTM has changed over the decades. I still have the PowerPoint presentation from the first WTM seminar I gave in 1995.

10 Mar

2014

I am going to tell you a story

This is a tale about the storyfication of travel. Once upon a time there was an industry called Travel. It sold holidays to People. People were happy. Travel would tell People the facts about their holidays and then they would buy them. The facts were very useful in helping People choose the holiday that suited them best.

13 Jan

2014

The Year of the Tablet

2014 is set to be the year of the tablet. These user friendly devices are expected to make the long-expected jump to global acceptance. Recent figures show that 47.6 million units shipped around the world in Q3 2013. According to a new report from Gartner, over 260 million tablets will be shipped in 2014.

02 Dec

2013

Change is the Only Constant

The world economy is projected to be about 80% larger in 2020 than it was in 2000. World total population will increase from 7 to 8.3 billion people in 2030. Asia, Africa, and Latin America will account for virtually all population growth over the next 20 years. The middle class is expected to reach 5 billion people by 2031, up from 2.1 billion people in 2011. The world is changing. At the Summit, Richard Lewis, CEO Best Western Hotels, distinguished between Digital Immigrants and Digital Natives.

07 Oct

2013

The Principal View

I organised September’s Travel Technology Initiative conference. It was called Intermediary Futures and was all about what the next few years hold for travel industry players such as tour operators, online and high street travel agents, bedbanks, etc. You can download some of the speakers’ presentations from this page. Intermediaries are middle-men.

10 Sep

2013

Retail Renaissance

I have a confession to make. In 1999, I gave a conference presentation where I foretold the demise of high street retail within 25 years. Here is what I said: “In 2024, consumers buy information products exclusively on-line. When they buy travel, an information product at the point of sale, they do not dream of leaving the home or office to walk into high street retail premises that cannot even physically demonstrate the product, let alone provide any more information than they can access on their net appliances. They look back to the last few years of the Second Millennium and realise that this was the period when the On-Line Era began. They realise that travel, more than any other industry, contributed to a new way of life. They know that, during that exciting period of change, the travel industry showed the world that electronic distribution is the preferred way of retailing.”

Filter

Airlines, Hotels: Why are you giving away your mobile customers?

Wholesalers and Butterflies

It’s Personal

Mobile Matters

The Benjamin Button of Travel

I am going to tell you a story

The Year of the Tablet

Change is the Only Constant

The Principal View

Retail Renaissance