Business Strategy

Lure Travelers With These 3 Top Tech Trends
Act now to reap rewards of consumers' appetite for speedy, relevant info

From e-mail deal alerts to vacation offers sent via mobile phones, travel technologies are capturing consumer attention. But technologies' success depends on more than just finding the best way to offer rock-bottom prices - it's also about getting consumer buy-in and keeping it. Enter the top travel innovations expected to make a splash in 2006.

1. Consumers Want News As It Happens
Travelers want to be in-the-know about the latest travel deals or hot properties. A recent upswing in the number of consumers subscribing to RSS feeds and downloaded Pod casts - more than 25 percent - has lured more players into the game.

Everyone from online travel agencies (e.g., Travelocity and Orbitz) and travel search companies (e.g., SideStep and Booking Buddy) to suppliers now offers news feeds. And with the majority of travelers harnessing the Internet, travel information is at their fingertips more quickly than ever.

Consider this: More people have access to mobile phones than computers - and their devices are increasingly loaded with more functions, capabilities and power, according
to PhoCusWright's "Six Travel Tech Trends For 2006," published in February. This bodes well for companies such as travel sellers who want to broadcast their latest products or showcase a destination to a new audience, contends Mims Wright, a partner with T2Impact.

And guess who's using these new technologies? "Users tend more often to be business travelers," says PhoCusWright analyst Cathy Schetzina. "These are the travel industry's
best customers" - and the most tech-savvy, she notes.

2. Travelers Will Self-Organize Your Content
While RSS feeds and Pod casts are gaining a following, they may be too intimidating and tech-heavy for the average traveler. Not so with social networking sites that allow travelers to become part of a community.

Example: Take Flickr.com, a site that allows users to store their pictures to share with others. Instead of organizing photos by file name, users "tag" photos with searchable keywords. Search results for "Bermuda" display photos with that tag, not photos with "Bermuda" in the name. Key: Any Flickr user can tag any uploaded image - meaning that Flickr's hundreds of thousands of users can add tags, thereby increasing both the image's relevance and specificity in search results. Yahoo! recently acquired Flickr and hopes to use tagging across its product offerings. Why? Information "tags" help consumers sort through all the information out there to find more reliable user-rated results, Schetzina says.

3. Maps Will Have More Power In Web 2.0
One keystone of the evolution to "Web 2.0" is the evaporation of proprietary technology and the rise of open systems, notes Dan Tapscott, author of The Digital Economy, speaking at the Res-Expo conference in Dallas in March. This culture of openness has led to major innovations and interactivity - and mapping technologies are leading the way.

Consider FareCompare's recent partnership with Google. Thanks to the search engine's mapping technology, FareCompare's users can now plan their trips using interactive maps. But it doesn't stop there. Google's mapping application program interfaces (APIs) are now open to travelers who want to reproduce maps for their own use, allowing travelers to overlay the mapping API with specific location information to create their own personalized tours.

"Any technology that allows you to map out a multi-stop trip that you can see by just pointing and clicking will be successful," Schetzina declares.
from Travel Distribution Report, Vol. 14, No. 7