Opportunities in Chaos
The PhoCusWright conference started
Wednesday with Philip Wolf's introduction where he was focusing on the
opportunities in CHAOS, an approach I like. While the chaos and recession the
hotel industry is going through it also forces us to rethink what we are doing,
look for new opportunities and eventually become better at what we do. Being
adaptive is crucial to survival.
The
investors on the travel investor panel with Gene Quinn was disappointing, as they mostly said they were
looking for something save and profitable when times are tough. Not quite in
the spirit of Philip Wolf's talk just before. Not much support there for
innovators in traveling.
Changes in search for the travel industry
Krista Pappas from Bing
was my favorite speaker at the conference with a clear message and something new
for me, the Bing visual travel search. So far it's only available in the
States, but we all look forward to the day it reaches other parts of the world.
Krista started with 5 lessons for the travel industry that are never repeated
to often, supported by a few famous cases:
* Be authentic
(the million dollar website - can't be repeated)
* Relentless
measurement and optimization (TripAdvisor)
* Be social
(Starbucks)
* Be
opportunistic and responsive (Aston Kutcher's million followers on Twitter)
* Ads are content
(Burger King's dump a Facebook friend for a burger)
Javier Gonzalez-Soria from Google Travel in Spain was a bit more reluctant to
share inside information from Google. When asked if they were planning on
following the same path as Bing in vertical search, he said that Google would
never start competing with its customers. He pointed out that YouTube had now
become the second most popular search engine in the world, which is a reminder
to all to check your optimization on that front.
Rick Seany from Farecompare.com had some very interesting numbers about
conversion:
* You increase
your conversion by 2-4% if you cut loading time by 1/2 a second.
* Ajax pages
convert 10-20% better to checkout then other types of pages
* The best time
to book a cheap plane ticket is at 3pm on a Tuesday. This is actually based on
a research of 5 years of data.
Rick also stated
that rich content pages (bloated pages) would be penalized by Google within few
months. What matters is
having a fast page, and content of value. Value counts, not quantity, and value
is precisely what Google is trying to deliver. So my advice is don't start
cutting down your content richest pages, as long as they provide value and
convert. Just do what ever you can to make them fast, effective and user friendly.
Where's the growth?
David Roche, president of Expedia's Hotels.com and Venere.com
shared a few perspective from his side of the industry, but despite last year
being the worst in the history of the hotel industry, online hotel bookings
experienced significant growth. The reason is simple. The consumer is always
price sensitie, but never as much as in a recession. And the consumer knows
where to shop for the best hotel prices.
When asked about
airfares and alternative income, he said that when it came to income, Expedia
was a hotel company. That's were the margin is.
CEO Matthew Goldberg from Lonely Planet explained their strategy and predictions
for the future. According to Goldberg the big themes of 2010 will be social
media, mobile platforms and contextual commerce, and plan to harness it all.
Currently 75% of their revenue comes from traditional guidebooks but Goldberg
expects this to change to 65% in the future. Not because it will decrease, but
because digital publications will grow that much faster. Goldberg was not
willing to sign off a technology that's been around for 500 years that easily.
Besides, paper guidebooks never run out of batteries.
The most
important thing to LP's strategy, according to Goldberg, is to be authentic.
Their role is to help people get the most out of their travel and they will
continue to do that, even though it means aggregating third party content - and
that party being a competitor.
We got a few short
talks as well, like Gregor van der Made, founder of re-ticket .com, Joost
Schreve from Everytrail.com and Jean Louis Richard from MASSIVEGOOD.com.
Overall, an
interesting day with some of the most influential people in the travel
industry. Norm Rose from PhoCusWright gave an enthusiastic talk about the
possibilities mobile phones, or mobile devices, are bringing to the travel
market. The crowd wasn't as enthusiastic, maybe still just seeing one big
jungle and waiting for someone to lead the way for the travel industry into the
world of mobile technology. It's great to see the open approach PhoCusWright
has to all the opportunities that are out there.
If you remember
something I'm forgetting or remember something differently, please share in the
comments below.
Hjörtur
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