Presentation for Florida Association of CVBs Annual Marketing Conference

Thank you to the Florida Association of CVBs for inviting me down to Gainesville Florida to speak at the FACVBs Annual Marketing Conference. The Conference was a big success and many of the people who were in my afternoon session provided me with positive feedback on the presentation. I really enjoy doing these presentations because I think it helps to take some of the mystery and fear out of these relatively new and sometimes “scary” tools. For those who would like to print out or review the presentations, I have embedded the two presentations below. If you are unable to see them,... Read more »

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 »

Responsible Tourism Awards 2008

I recently received a message from Alex Lyons at Responsible Tourism announcing that nominations are now being accepted for the 2008 Responsible Tourism Awards. It is pretty rare that direct messages like these actually make it through to the blog, but in this case, I really like the subject matter and I am passionate about the idea. In their own words: The idea behind the Awards is that all types of tourism – from niche to mainstream – can and should be operated in a way that respects and benefits destinations and local people. The Awards recognise individuals, companies and organisations... 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 »

Android + Travel = Location Based Services

Mobile applications are not really my passion, but I have to say that after playing with my wife’s iTouch and viewing the latest videos about Google Android, I am truly excited about what the mobile web has to offer. I had a discussion with my colleague Phil Caines just today about AirG, a Vancouver based company that has developed a mobile social networking platform. It is very cool but I wondered how sustainable the model is given that mobile technologies will eventually support regular web applications. Phil’s argument was that our mobile market (North America, Japan, and Europe)... Read more »

Airlines are Looking for the Value Adds

Kevin May, over at the Travolution Blog, recently wrote that Ryanair has developed a user generated listing service which allows property owners to upload their own properties to the site. This allows Ryanair to sell unique accommodations along with the air fare. The article goes on to state that Ryanair already has a deal with Isango.com and Easyjet has a similar deal with competitor with Viator. Another great reason for suppliers to get their unique destination products into a system like, oh I don’t know, Rezgo maybe? Hey Westjet or AirCanada, are you interested in adding destination... Read more »

Chris Anderson’s Free & the Booking Engine

I’ve been a huge fan for Chris Anderson for a long time. It seemed to me that the “Long Tail” completely supported my own motivation behind building Rezgo, a web based booking engine that would put inventory and distribution control into the hands of the individual supplier. Now with his latest article in Wired magazine and his upcoming book, I am again inspired by his words. In his article titled “Free! Why $0.00 Is the Future of Business“, Chris explains that because of the decreasing costs of hardware and bandwidth, it is possible to monetize digital businesses... Read more »

Facilitating the Dream with Kango - Follow-up

After I wrote the review about Kango.com I emailed Yen Lee and asked him some specific questions about getting product into Kango.com. Yen was gracious enough to answer my questions himself and provided some useful insight into how the sight may grow over time. Here are the questions and Yen’s answers: T4: How do SME suppliers add their product to Kango or perhaps the better question is how does Kango identify and add supplier product? YL: Two different answers to a critical initiative for us: SME suppliers will be able to add their product to Kango in the future through a self-submittal.... Read more »

Long Tail Suppliers are starting to have impact on Online Travel

PWC recently stated that suppliers are gaining ground over aggregators in the online travel marketplace. I had discussed this in context to another recent survey that said the same thing, however, what I liked about this article from Travelmole.com was the following quote: “Already there are companies offering a wider range of services unrelated to travel - theatre tickets, restaurant bookings and theme park entry for example. This can result in increased customer loyalty and higher revenues per booking for the online operator.” This quote represents a significant shift in how aggregators... Read more »

What makes a Blog? A Summary of the Blogger Summit @ PhoCusWright

The blogger summit at The 2007 PhoCusWright Conference in Orlando, Florida was a huge success, at least in my opinion. The room was filled to capacity with approximately sixteen delegates around the tables and another twenty or so sitting in chairs and on counter tops around the room. The discussion was lively and at one point trailed off topic, but was quickly brought back to subject. Here are some points that were discussed during the summit and proved to be salient. I opened by pointing out that blog posts illicit conversations where as articles are a monologues. Although this is changing... Read more »

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