February 2009 Archives

Lastminute.com is making a pretty big song and dance about its new TV ad campaign, which airs in a sequence across mainstream television channels in the UK on Saturday 28 February.

The agency who helped put it together, Shine Digital, has also produced a Making Of... effort for Youtube.





One interesting thing to note with all this activity is that it - and the launch of the new Goodstuff brand - comes just a few months after Simon Thompson took over as managing director from John Bevan.

Why this sudden change of tack - bringing back an arguably more extravagant style which many will remember (fondly?) from the lastminute.com of old.

Well, Thompson just happens to be a marketing man through and through - and is perhaps best remembered for his time at Honda and the brains behind the famous Cog TV ad.

We watch with interest for where lastminute.com's marketing strategy goes next...

Update: Travel Weekly Blog has taken a look at the TV shows the ads will run in/against.

Saturday 21 February
Ryanair to abolish check-in desks [BBC]

Sunday 22 February
Ryanair passengers to pay £28.50 to take duty-free on the plane [Mirror.co.uk]

Monday 23 February
Ryanair cutting airport check-in, adding in-flight phone use [LA Times]

Tuesday 24 February
Ryanair doesn't want anything to do with 'lunatic' bloggers! [Travolution]
Thomas Cook charged 'fictitious' fuel surcharge on Ryanair ticket [Telegraph]

Wednesday 25 February
Ryanair: "Lunatic bloggers can keep the blogosphere" [Guardian]

Thursday 26 February
Ryanair insults a blogger [The Economist]

Friday 27 February
Ryanair mulls charge for toilets [BBC]

Now, admittedly, the blogger "lunatic" story was fuelled by us getting the Statement of the Year (TM) from Ryanair on Tuesday afternoon over RyanBlogGate, triggering literally heaps of coverage around the globe.

But look carefully at the above and you can see why the airline is probably quite happy for ANY sort of coverage to come out, simply because of the sheer number of high profile media outlets covering it.......... for seven days in a row.

And, let's admit it, begrudgingly, that today's Pay-To-Pee story is an absolute classic.

You can almost see O'Leary smirking in the BBC video interview - with, no doubt, comms guru Stephen McNamara probably standing to the side somewhere rubbing his hands in glee, thinking: "...and what a great week that was."

As Dara Khosrowshahi hinted at last week, Expedia Inc is looking at meta search to expand its media business.

He hinted at pressure on Tripadvisor's CPC rates.

So it makes perfect sense this morning to discover that - lo and behold - Tripadvisor (the US version) has unveiled a fully fledged flight meta search engine.


[No news as yet if there's a version for the UK]

[No plans for hotel meta search]

Flight searches are carried out, the site says, on "the world's leading travel sources" including Sabre, Amadeus, Travelocity and, of course, Expedia and Hotwire.

As we said in our post yesterday about Travelsupermarket's revenue per conversion (CPC) rate, for the big players (and we can now include Tripadvisor) the market is ripe for meta search as price is driving everything.

The smaller players in the sector HAVE to differentiate now in a major way.

Excuse the hyperbole, but the addition of Tripadvisor to the arena is about as pivotal moment in the history of meta search as you are going to find.

Lest we forget Tripadvisor's absolutely terrifyingly high levels of traffic and stranglehold on hotel reviews.

It has now, quite simply, positioned itself in yet another part of the consumer purchase funnel.

Which must be delighting Dara...


UPDATE:

Reaction coming in via email:

Senior player in the meta search space: "It's a logical and inevitable move for them given the parent company. Early days with limited product - one assumes that will grow overtime, shame they didn't integrate destination reviews and Seatguru. What does the future now hold for Expedia?"

Moneysupermarket PLC, the parent company of Travelsupermarket, released its preliminary results for 2008 to the London Stock Exchange yesterday.

We'll leave the analysis of the results and worrying moves in the financial services sector to the experts - but we were keen to learn more about the how well (or not) the travel division performs within the overall group.

* Travel accounts for 11% of the group's revenues but 41% of overall traffic.

This hasn't changed particularly since the company floated in 2007.

However, ask about the huge variation, which to some might seem quite obvious, but you get an interesting answer - if anything, simply demonstrating how fundamentally different travel meta search works from its counterparts in the financial services.

* Revenue per transaction (that's revenue per click) in insurance, for example, is £4.49.

* Revenue per transaction in travel is £0.44.

Now this raises a number of interesting points:

1) Who would - without the breadth of product and traffic that the likes of Travelsupermarket, Kayak, Skyscanner et al have - take a punt on travel meta search right now?

2) Equally, the big meta search engines, someone said to me the other day, must be thanking their lucky stars that the recession has happened because price has become king once more. (We have seen some traffic and financial data recently which indicates that for some things aren't bad at all)

3) What does a small (in traffic terms) travel meta search engine do in order to survive?

It's a fascinating area of the industry, which has grown fast in recent years, so we would be keen to hear your thoughts...

Absolutely hilarious, fantastic - and typical - response from Ryanair to recent shenanigans:

Stephen McNamara from Ryanair said:

"Ryanair can confirm that a Ryanair staff member did engage in a blog discussion.

"It is Ryanair policy not to waste time and energy corresponding with idiot bloggers and Ryanair can confirm that it won't be happening again.

"Lunatic bloggers can have the blog sphere all to themselves as our people are far too busy driving down the cost of air travel".

Go ahead, make their day...


UPDATE 3: This is why Ryanair is a genius of PR.

UPDATE 2: Alex Bainbridge of TourCMS has huge - and valid - doubts over Rowe's original stance and the media's - i.e. ours - reaction to it. We've posted a response.

UPDATE 1: Paul Dawson of Conchango has created the Lunatic Bloggers Fightback scheme. A step too far perhaps?

Picture: Mad Blogger, somewhere in the blogosphere.

Hot on the heels of the results from the Kaizo Advocacy Index is news that Virgin Atlantic will be named tomorrow as the best performing travel firm on the Business Superbrands list.

We know this, of course, because someone broke the Wednesday embargo yesterday. The site removed the story but didn't count on it disappearing from the Google cache. Easy to find...

So, anyway, Superbrands has decided Virgin Atlantic should top the list of travel companies (coming in at number 25) including, on the airlines list:

British Airways (36)
Emirates (68)
EasyJet (308)
FlyBe (454)

Superbrands chairman Stephen Cheliotis had this to say about British Airways, which fell 28 places:

"British Airways has had some high profile problems and certainly its fair share of negative publicity. Nevertheless the strength of its brands - built up over many years - has meant that the flying public have given the airline the benefit of the doubt and continued to trust it, rating its brand highly.

"However our research suggests that the more discerning business professionals might have had enough. After another turbulent year, including the T5 debacle, the airline has for the first time fallen out of the Business Superbrands Top Ten.

"This is a worrying sign for an airline that is heavily reliant on its business customers, and with competition for flyers at an all time high, and pressure on airlines so intense, clearly a reduction in the brand value of British Airways could in financial terms be significant. If advocates become critics, and flyers that might have chosen BA by default consider exploring alternatives, British Airways could experience even more headaches in the coming year."

Other firms which have topped their respective sectors include:

Hertz (car hire)
Hilton (hotels)
Eurostar (rail)

Unsurprisingly, Google led the overall field.

Full details, no doubt, will be available tomorrow...

UPDATE: We were the first to obtain an official response from Ryanair.

Here is an amazing tale from late last week, when an Irish freelance web designer/developer, Jason Roe [and Twitter], found himself involved in a extremely strange tête-à-tête with everyone's, er, favourite low cost carrier, Ryanair.

It all started when Roe wrote a blog post about how he'd discovered a usability error in ryanair.com booking process.

In short, he says he found a bug in the system which allowed users to obtain a 0.00 charge for their flights.

There was some disagreement in the comments section as to whether it worked at the time. Roe claims it does.

Nevertheless, some people at Ryanair HQ decided to chip in. The comments are not what one would expect of a large company that has decided to engage with social media, to say the least.

This is just one of many from a succession of commenters under the 'Ryanair staff...' tag on the same post.

Crikey.

[NB: We have seen the IP addresses of the commenters and they all trace back to Ryanair HQ]

So, most people would say that the best method for dealing with a provocative post like Roe's is to be measured and calm.

But then again, Ryanair - lest we forget - doesn't exactly play by the same rules as others when it comes to dealing with customers, complaints, partners, etc.

[Read the full post - and it really is worth reading all the comments from Ryanair...]

TechCrunch UK asks whether the viral ad for Gekko.com - a new hotel search and review site which we've covered a fair bit in recent months - will lead people to remember what the site actually does once they've watched the video.





TCUK editor Mike Butcher doubts whether it will.

We're not so sure yet, primarily because s*x sells, especially in travel...

It is worth remembering that Gekko executive George Henderson is formerly of the SilverJet parish, which during its short tenure made some pretty good advertising spots on TV and virally.

Not that it did it much good in the long run, of course...

A reader emailed earlier today to ask if we would publish the year on year performance of the 20 listed companies on the Travolution Index.

So here it is, in its pretty damning entirety:

[February 20 2008 to February 20 2009 - up/down % change]


All Leisure Group - 187.50 to 87.50 - down 53%

Anite - 43.50 to 28.00 - down 36%

Avis Europe - 34.00 to 3.76 - down 89%

British Airways - 282.00 to 126.5 - down 55%

Carnival - 2,111.00 to 1,308.00 - down 38%

Daily Mail and General Trust - 510 to 254.75 - down 50%

Dart Group - 30.75 to 36.25 - up 18%

EasyJet - 439.00 to 291.25 - down 34%

Holidaybreak - 607.00 to 201.00 - down 67%

InterContinental Hotels Group - 827.00 to 465.00 - down 44%

Moneysupermarket.com - 127.75 to 53.75 - down 58%

National Express Group - 1,080.00 to 253.75 - down 77%

Park Plaza Hotels Limited - 318.50 to 42.00 - down 87%

Peel Hotels - 170.00 to 111.50 - down 34%

Stagecoach Group - 228.75 to 123.25 - down 46%

Thomas Cook Group - 301.00 to 211.25 - down 30%

Travelzest - 100.00 to 41.50 - down 58.5%

TUI Travel - 275.00 to 243.25 - down 12%

Western & Oriental - 12.25 to 3.50 - down 71%

Whitbread - 1,248.00 to 740.50 - down 41%


NB: To reiterate, the only company to experience any year-on-year increase is the Dart Group.

We take no pleasure in wrong-footing the PR machine at lastminute.com - teehee - with our news today that everyone's favourite pink online travel agency is set to open three stores around the UK.

Keen to get a sneak preview of what consumers are likely to see when the first opens in London's Covent Garden, we put a message out on Twitter to see who works in the area and would be willing to snap a few pictures for us.

Luckily for us - and first out of the block (thanks to everyone else who offered!) - was Reactive managing director Tim O'Neill (@timwoneill).

So, anyway, this is the current state of the first lastminute.com shop.


We're pretty sure it's the right one, as it's the only empty retail outlet on this particular James Street in London and, well, lastminute.com's new GoodStuff landing page happily sends users to a Google Map pinpointing its location.

Readers will note it is clearly not very pink at the moment...

UPDATE:

Lastminute.com's 'Social Media Press Office' sent us this statement:

"The 2nd March looks like any other date doesn't it? Well how wrong you can be. Lastminute.com is planning to offer central London two whole days of good stuff free of charge. All you have to do is turn up and get involved.

"What is the good stuff I hear you cry?

"Well it is all very top secret. You can expect to be pampered, entertained, made to laugh, snapped, meet celebrity mystery guests and all in all have a blast

"You can see more, eat more, sky more, fly more, explore more, give more and do more good stuff with lastminute.com and that's exactly what the first Monday and Tuesday in March will be all about

"Still unsure?

"Check out what you could be riding through the streets of London that day in celebration of discount deals in Egypt...just to give you an idea of the kind of good stuff we are talking about

"We look forward to meeting you at the store in Covent Garden and sharing all the good stuff on offer."

A reasonable amount of speculation coming into Travolution Towers yesterday after it emerged the main online portal for thomascook.com was down.

We first heard of a problem mid-afternoon and the site was still out of action at around 5.30pm, when we spoke to the Thomas Cook press team.

It quickly emerged that those in the press office could not see what we and others could - a rather odd page from the domain firm Netnames.

[We sent them a screengrab]



So rather than the usual "web maintenance" banner, which normally appears on such occasions, many users would have thought the site didn't exist at all and Netnames was simply touting the fact that it had registered the domain name.

We were informed this morning that the site was only down for 20-30 minutes, which didn't exactly chime with what we and other people were seeing, despite being urged to refresh our browsers, etc.

The 20-30 minute seems a remarkably short space of time given that Google and Yahoo also happened to have crawled the Netnames site holding page in the meantime and were displayed content accordingly (as our grab from this morning indicates).

Since then Thomas Cook has issued us the following statement:

"Following an IT related issue at our hosting area in Birstall we needed to switch our website onto a backup system. Due to the nature of the issue we were unable to follow a standard switch and reverted to forwarding all web traffic to our backup domain. This worked fine and the site was down for a short period of time, with bookings continuing to come in.

"The reversal of the domain forward (via NetNames) was then kicked off and we experienced some issues around the reverting of the IP address. As a result NetNames set up an Apache redirect at their end to redirect any TC.com traffic hitting their landing page. After a period of propagation everything was shifted back to normal."

At this stage (we have asked again), Thomas Cook will not tell us anything about the "IT related issue".

It seems, from the people we have spoken to, that this state of affairs is somewhat unusual.

But we are by no means experts in this particular field, so what do people think?

This is truly amazing...

More demos of Siftables here.

And for anyone interested in other hands-on digital tools, you should check out the Microsoft Surface demo that Paul Dawson of EMC Conchango will be conducting at the Travolution Summit on April 21 2009.

Early bird rate ends today!

More details.

Many readers will remember back to last summer when Ryanair single-handedly - if you read some elements of the trade press - upset the travel industry with its expose of supposed screen scrapers.

Now the people who engaged their brain before the industry's natural emotion that says Ryanair is evil personified, quickly realised that the carrier was being its usual clever self.

Heaps of self-serving PR, as always (and quite rightly, as that is what PR is all about!!), and simply protecting its position in an increasingly tightening consumer marketplace.

But because this was all driven by Ryanair, rather than a trade-leaning airline, all hell broke loose.

So fast forward another six months or so and Ryanair and Costa Cruises sign a distribution agreement whereby Costa products can be bought via the Ryanair website.

This is the same kind of deal which saw Isango appear on Ryanair, Viator on easyJet, but surprise-surprise saw none of the outpouring of agent-led grief such has been seen on Travelmole, for example [needs registration], this week.

Now agents and other intermediaries will say they have been treated poorly by Ryanair over the years, simply because the carrier has refused to work with them.

Is that being treated poorly? Or is that a stubborn company like Ryanair is just sticking to its strategy of being a direct-sale company?

Hummmmm...

Ryanair may not have the best reputation in the world for customer experience - but equally it has never claimed to be the world's favourite airline, have the best seats, serve the best food, etc.

The Costa deal is certainly an interesting one, but to be so outraged at Ryanair for simply signing a distribution deal is misguided.

Agents might also be cross with Costa for getting into bed with Ryanair, but spreading distribution into as many channels as possible is - especially in these difficult economic times - also entirely understandable.
 

....And this week's [sigh] naughty boy is KLM Royal Dutch Airlines.

The Advertising Standards Authority has, you guessed it, come down hard on the airline for a misleading email bulletin.

Ryanair is the Marmite of the travel industry - you either love it or hate it.

But full marks to the carrier for its response to a question we asked last week after seeing Google ads for easyJet on the Ryanair result pages.

Nothing wrong with this, of course - Expedia carries ads which feature links to its competitors. It's just not something one would expect the fiercely competitive Ryanair would do.



Here was their response:

"Google asked Ryanair if we wanted to have the advertising on our site restricted and we said absolutely not - these ads help to remind passengers that Ryanair offer the lowest fares in Europe and what a great deal they are getting with Ryanair.

"No other airline can beat Ryanair's............." etc, etc.

You have to laugh sometimes...

There are a number of ironies about Travelport's Universal desktop, details of which were unveiled last night.

First of all, it has grown out of G2 Switchworks, one of the GDS new entrants or GNEs that was founded a few years ago to take on the traditional GDS.

It seems Travelport quietly bought up the intellectual property of G2 this time last year and, one of the co-founders, Mike Harbin, is now on board with Travelport.

It's also ironic that this project has come out of a GDS. Desktop products have always been among the solution stable from the distribution giants but not ones with access to blogs, widgets, instant messaging and other web links.

The platform is also aiming to be GDS neutral and includes some of the better features of Worldspan.

This is going to be a phased introduction over the next few quarters and what was demonstrated is definitely not all there yet but the concept looks good.

Were we wrong to call them dinosaurs?

There will be someone shaking their head in disbelief when they realise what they did here:

Not really the most appropriate Tweet given the bushfire crisis currently engulfing the Australian state of Victoria.

Even though, thankfully, there are no Official Rules for Twitter, common sense must surely be one thing every user should have.

Four reasons to roll up in London this week

Travolution is heading to London's Earl's Court 2 for the next two days to rub shoulders with the great and the good of the travel technology community.

As always we are hosting four fantastic seminars over the course of the event.

We have followed a similar formula we used so successfully at the ABTA Travel Convention last year with our seminars - preferring to produce handy advice attendees can take away with them and implement rather than the traditional lecture/debate format.

Our Top Tips will cover the following areas:

* Website Performance
* User Experience
* Social Media
* Start-Ups

Those who come along also get a free handout detailing each Top Tip from the presenters.

Timetable:

Efficient Engine Room - Top tips to improve website performance
Tuesday 12.15-13.15 - Room A2 (£45)

Discover from one of the foremost authorities in the area what you need to do to ensure your travel website can cope with high traffic and unforeseen problems as well as understanding the critical hosting and optimising issues.

* Top Tips handout available for all who attend.

Speakers:

* David Flower, Gomez
* Moderator: Kevin May, Editor, Travolution


Better browsing - top tips to improve website user experience (£45)
Tuesday 14:45-15:45 - Room A4 (£45)

Understand the basic principles of implementing high quality user experience in travel as websites become more technologically advanced and interactive, but without losing the edge over competitors and disappointing savvy customers.

* Top Tips handout available for all who attend.

Speakers:
* Peter Ballard, Foolproof
* Moderator: Kevin May, Editor, Travolution


Start-up to grown-up- Top tips to build a web-based travel business
Wednesday 12:15-13:15 - Room B2 (£45)
Learn from someone who has been there and done it. How do you nurture a fledgling online travel idea into a viable and profitable business? What are the pitfalls of funding, how do you approach investors? And lots more...

* Top Tips handout available for all who attend.

Speakers:

* Hugo Burge, Co-Founder, Howzat Media and Jerome Touze (WAYN.com)
* Moderator: Kevin May, Editor, Travolution


Two-way conversation - Top tips to teach consumers in social networks and blogs
Wednesday 14:45-15:45 - Room B4 (£45)

2008 is so last year - and social media is evolving quicker than ever before. So what should travel businesses do to reach consumers in an engaging yet valuable way for all parties? Will Twitter and Friendfeed be your best outlet in 2009, or are stalwarts such as blogs and forums still the best method?

* Top Tips handout available for all who attend.

Speakers:

* Neil Maclean, Director, SmallMediaLarge
* Moderator: Kevin May, Editor, Travolution


If you need four reasons to attend Travel Technology Show, these will do...

Full coverage.

Judging by the conversation taking place on the Small Fish Big Ocean forum last week, small and medium sized operators and agencies were in a bit of a muddle about whether ABTA-ATOL partnerships were needed in order to use the Paypal online payment system.

Our writer managed to draw blood from the stone that is Paypal spoke to Paypal's UK team, who eventually sent us a statement from the legal office at its US headquarters.

As the story pointed out, Paypal said it will work with non-ABTA/ATOL companies.

Fair enough.

But on closer inspection, there is a rather worrying level of ambiguity in the statement, which worries us slightly.

The statement said:

"PayPal UK does not require merchants offering travel related services to be members of ABTA and/or other industry bodies.

"But as part of our underwriting process, we do ask for this information and merchants are viewed favorably if they are bonded/licensed by agencies such as ATOL, AITO, ABTA."

What does "viewed favourably" mean?

Are there certain levels of A which Paypal would like before it grants B, for example?

We are still trying to get some clarification here and will keep you all posted.

Update: We have 50 exclusive access codes ahead of the official launch next week. Email directly kevin.may[at]rbi.co.uk to receive them over the next few days.


Initial thoughts?

Tripess.com full details here.

As if fuel prices, global economic downturn and the weather weren't enough, now airlines face a crushing blow from video telepresence (video conferencing in old parlance).
 
The latest predictions from Gartner show the travel industry will lose $3.5 billion annually by the 2.1 million airline seats to be replaced by video telepresence by 2012.
 
We've seen it in action at the Taj in London and it's not bad! But, for all you Star Trek fans out there - this is much more fun!

. . . currently HomeAway.

We don't say something like this lightly. But today's news that it has invested yet more money in the European holiday rental marketplace is significant.

After securing a mammoth $250 million worth of funding last November, eyes have started to open to the rentals market from other parts of the industry.

HomeAways's acquisition of continental player Homelidays for an undisclosed fee, was at to least one of its rivals in the European marketplace a bit of a shock.

"We weren't expecting them to start spending the money so quickly," our rabbit caught in the headlights admitted to us yesterday afternoon.

But for some people the reason for the outlay is blindingly obvious: online holiday rentals is a burgeoning sector, made up of hundreds of small and low-profile portals and individual landlords, therefore ripe for large firms like HomeAway to start that large-scale aggregation which has featured so prominently (and successfully) in hotels and air fares.

[See latest PhoCusWright research]

For a company like HomeAway, snapping up businesses around the US and latterly in Europe makes sense as it attempts to increase scale and cross-fertilise properties across its portfolio of businesses.

As we pointed out last November, the triple-figure funding round HomeAway received was probably the biggest single piece of investment in the travel space from private equity since those of the old GDSs - Travelport and Sabre - in 2006.

This, in itself, speaks volumes about where the big boys of the investment world think the biggest return is going to come (with all due respect, of course, to the trip planning sites like Tripwolf and Uptake, which have secured more capital in recent months).

However, similarly to when the online travel agency model revolutionised distribution of hotel and air deals on the web in the late 1990s and early-2000s, the little guy is getting worried.

Within hours of our story running yesterday, responses started coming in from Twitter.

Indeed, some small, independent aggregators are not entirely enamoured with the Homelidays purchase.

"Pure cannibalism" said one comment. Another simply muttered: "Big isn't beautiful." "Not good news!!"

One more: "As long as 'some' still challenge HomeAway there is hope for creativity in our industry."

The LayMyHat forums carried similar themes.

Not exactly a positive reaction, then.

The boss of another online rental firm said last night the latest move and the growing dominance of HomeAway would be "bleak" for the sector.

"They will control the future of our industry in terms of design, technology and usability," the email claimed.

This will impact on the owners and customers in several ways, the email continued, but primarily because the standardisation of the platform and design makes it harder to distinguish between properties and large resorts, alongside the theory that the user experience is diminished when they are literally hundreds of thousands of listings.

Now some might see this as simply sour grapes from someone who didn't trouser $250 million last year.

But these are the voices of people that see huge change happening in their, until now, relatively peaceful and low-profile part of the travel industry.

As other parts of the industry have discovered, events can take place which shape - sometimes driven by just one or two organisations (think Ryanair-easyJet) - an entire area of the business forever.

We certainly think that HomeAway is driving much of the change in the holiday rentals space at a structural level - for good or bad is something for you to decide at this stage.

But this hopefully explains our assertion that the company is currently the most interesting in online travel.

And this is why we have invited Brian Sharples, co-founder and chief executive of HomeAway, to speak and then be interrogated at the Travolution Summit on April 21.

The boys at WAYN have fallen foul of the UK's advertising watchdogs, the ASA.

The full citation is contained on the ASA website, but essentially a regular email bulletin to WAYN members contained a promotion for cheap flights to Budapest.

The flights were selected for inclusion on the e-shot by Apollo Travel and had to be booked for travel in November before 31 October.

Unfortunately the email was built on the 27 October and, according to WAYN, could have taken several days to send out to all recipients.

You can see what's coming here...

Some decidely unhappy members who couldn't book the flights.

WAYN, to its credit, ensured that its customer services spoke to each member who subsequently complained with a new offer from Apollo Travel.

Nevertheless, WAYN has been reprimanded for the error by the ASA.

Lessons:

* Make sure any offers included on bulletins are valid at the time of sending and for a reasonable amount of time after.

* Work hard on the customer TLC after an error is found.

* Co-operate with the ASA at all costs (Ryanair almost basks in trying to wind up the UK ad regulator).

Travolution research editor Professor Dimitrios Buhalis recently chaired the Enter09 conference in Amsterdam.

After almost a week of seminars and workshops, research paper presentations and lectures, Buhalis has set out 24 discussion areas for anyone working in the travel industry.


1) Context is king - due to the relevance to consumer needs - this includes location, party, purpose of visit, timing, etc.

2) Content needs to be reorganised and presented to serve context.

3) Gadgets that can be plugged into iGoogle, Facebook, Vista and other platforms which can extend the reach of a web site.

4) We are the last generations to be 'lost' - due to the proliferation of geo-services - maps will be the starting points for search in the future to increase relevance.

5) StreetView from Google and Microsoft Virtual Earth make every corner of the earth accessible from the convenience of your computer - giving incredible realistic images and information.

6) Online videos and YouTube channels in particular can add to the tourism experience.

7) New smart phones are effectively computers with the advantage of knowing their location - there is a huge range of Context (including Location) Based Services that will emerge in the very near future.

8) Intuitive interface is around the corner, with touch screens on all devices (from Surface, Laptops, and iPhones and TouchPhones) revolutionising Human Computer Interface.

9) Two conflicting trends - from "Personalisation/CRM/need everything about the customer" - to "leave me alone/give me what I want/you don't own me".

10) Also let ME personalise the product to MY context and situation and let ME have fun - rather than try to understand and provide a product for all occasions.

11) Web 2.0 equals end of privacy as everybody is a journalist and can report on anything and anybody - in other words, disconnect if you want to keep your privacy.

12) Twitter is becoming the next big thing and many predict that will have a similar success to SMS due to its simplicity, interactivity, speed and relevance.

13) Impossible to concentrate with so many channels of interactivity interrupting everything - relevance is vital, once again.

14) Too many channels to manage for both consumers and suppliers - we need 'virtual butlers'.

15) Is technology the servant to consumer needs or are we becoming servants to technology?

16) There are a number of legal cases involving Destination Management Organisations, including VisitBritain.

17) Most Destination Management Organisations (DMOs) are totally inadequate to meet the challenges of the future.

18) Only agile destinations as presented by bahamas.com minister of tourism and aviation for the Bahamas, Vincent VanderPool-Wallace, will use innovation and e-tourism for destination strategic advantage.

19) We need to reengineer Destination Management Organisations and Tourism Boards at all levels and booking services for destinations - although essential - have never worked!

20) VisitBritain takes 202 bookings per month!!! What is the return on investment on that? VisitScotland nationalised their booking service company whilst Tiscover was fully privatised and purchased by HRS.com.

21) Industry starts to realise role of accessible tourism and the importance of providing the right information to people with special needs.

22) KISS - Keep It Simple Stupid - still is the main principle that should apply to usability.

23) Increasingly virtual worlds and immersive technology (developed in gaming and military applications) will be critical in marketing and cultural heritage representations.

24) We need to think differently and strategically as well as use the digital tools to raise our game to the global challenges.


Feel free to disagree or add to the list in the comments section below.

Professor Dimitrios Buhalis, Bournemouth University

* Follow Buhalis on Twitter
* Read his personal blog
* Download the presentations from Enter09