The three panellists for the session at EyeForTravel about new business models in travel represent companies whose existing models are responsible for around ten billion dollars-worth of travel transactions.
So it's little surprise that they deviated from the topic and talked instead about how they make their current model work.
Europe's biggest travel business, TUI Travel, was represented by Sandra Leonhard, director of web strategy and business development.
The key take-away from her twenty minutes was that TUI Travel is very much active online - the segmentation of its SEO based around yield and selling price is a sign of how one of the old vertically integrated travel companies is very much on top of its online presence.
She said that its own video content has been seen 30m times over the past year, on its sites and those to whom the content is syndicated.
It has 700K customer reviews, which is small change compared with Trip Advisor but a sign that user generated content is now an industry norm rather than a Trip Advisor USP.
Talking of TripAdvisor, Martin Verdon-Roe shared some observations about how the hotel review site is branching out into flight reviews, in the US at least. It has developed a metasearch engine for flights to monetize this interest, and is integrating related sister businesses such as seat guru to add value to the customers.
"Nobody saw the customer review model coming", claimed Ed Kamm from lastminute.com.
His slant of business models is that customers ultimately are in charge, and you can't shoehorn a model onto a behaviour that doesn't exist. He is a big advocate of testing things out, and suggested that you can learn more from your failures than your successes.
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