PhoCusWright to Showcase Hottest Travel 2.0 & Mobile Innovations

The PhoCusWright Conference, for the first time in its history, will be featuring a special summit dedicated to spotlighting the hottest innovations is mobile and web travel technology. The inaugural Travel Innovation Summit will feature 24 handpicked companies from around the World who want to demo their innovations to some of the most influential leaders in the travel & tourism industry. In their own words: Early-stage, emerging and established companies are invited to apply based purely on their innovative accomplishments, regardless of organizational size, age, sector or location. PhoCusWright’s... Read more »

Travel is doing a lot for sustainability

The main topic at this year’s Global Travel & Tourism Summit in Dubai was sustainability and what the travel industry is doing to promote it.  I was really quite surprised at the amount of discussion around how “we” collectively can make a difference and do things on a corporate level to reduce our impact on the environment and make travel more sustainable.  The cost of fuel was of particular interest especially with the large airlines that attended the summit.  What many seem to forget is that the travel industry actually only accounts for about 2% of the global carbon... Read more »

Traditional Journalists Use Blogs for Story Ideas

One of the reasons why blogs are such a good idea and why I enjoy following blogs, especially those on the T-List, is because they are a great source of knowledge.  At ITB Berlin in March a number of T-List bloggers, including myself, sat on an expert panel and debated the role of blogs versus traditional journalists.  There was much discussion about whether citizen journalism would replace traditional journalism and about the credibility of user generated content.  My take has always been that the two will eventually find an equilibrium and that they may also feed off each other, one supporting... Read more »

Fake Social Media

Thanks to Joe Buhler for writing his post about the post by Peg Davis titled “Keeping it real… fake: Social Media “don’t”s”. The timing of this post coincides nicely with the announcement that flogging is now illegal in the EU. Peg’s post discusses how to garner favour with the elusive Gen Y and how companies should be embracing user generated content or participating in the social media landscape. This is, ofcourse, a subject I am passionate about because, being part of the Gen Y, I can speak first hand about how social networks should work and how... Read more »

So what would a Google + Expedia Look Like?

I realize I’m a day behind most of my blogging colleagues on commenting on the “Google eyeing Expedia” rumour that resulted in a subsequent rise in Expedia’s share price. For the most part I’m not a big fan of rumours, but it did get me thinking about what such a beast would look like. In November of last year Tim Armstrong from Google presented at the PhoCusWright Conference in Orlando and stated in no uncertain terms that Google has no interest in entering the travel space. So why, less than four months later, would that message have changed so dramatically.... Read more »

Boarding Pass on your Mobile - Don’t forget to Charge

Continental Airlines is now testing the use of electronic boarding passes on mobile phones as part of a pilot project. According to the New York Times, the technology being tested uses a two dimensional barcode stored on a mobile phone which is scanned by a TSA (Transporation Safety Authority) agent and cross referenced with photo id. There is strong support for this technology because the two dimensional barcode uses a much higher level of encryption than the standard 1D barcodes (like UPC codes). The two dimensional barcodes can also store a much larger amount of data including (but not... Read more »

Academic Research Supports Industry Trends

As an IFITT member, I’ve had an opportunity to review the materials presented at the Enter 2007 Conference, which took place in Ljubljana. Much of the focus of IFITT is on the research and academic side and I must admit, the quality of the presentations is very impressive. The presentations, which are produced by academics from around the World, reflect research into a wide variety of tourism related areas. One paper I found particularly interesting and relevant to the upcoming Canada-e-connect conference is titled “Assessing eBusiness Models of U.S. Destination Marketing Organizations”.... Read more »