eTravel Project

The PhoCusWright Conference 2009 in Orlando was a truly great event last week. Once again, it confirmed to be the Must Go conference of the year if you are involved in the online travel market. Before I keep on writing, I have to disclose that I was there simultaneously as Web Executive for Monaco Government Tourist Office and Italy Analyst for PhoCusWright. Here are some of my quick observations about the conference:

1)  The organization of the event is awesome. Every single detail is taken care of. The conference was briefly disrupted by a fire alarm, but this had very little effect on the schedule of the event. The PhoCusWright team is phenomenal and I am not saying this because I am part of it. I had very little to do with the organization of the conference at all. Philip Wolf’s insights are top-notch and entertaining at the same time.

2)  Social networking was the tool and leitmotiv of the conference. Questions from the audience were perfectly integrated on stage and collected through #hashtags. I thought that the use of so many #hashtags was overwhelming though. Twitter has just 140 characters and #phocuswright and another hashtag were taking lots of room away, plus it was not very convenient.

3) The Travel Innovation Summit – as somebody on stage put it – was more evolutionary than revolutionary. I was expecting that the small guy would have prevailed over the big titan (Amadeus IT Group with its Affinity Shopper and Extreme Search), but I was wrong. Check presentation on YouTube.

4) In spite of the fact that the online travel industry was promising for women at its early stages, sadly there is a tiny small percentage of female CEOs in the business.

5) What does not have an imminent transactional value is not regarded as highly by the conference’s participants: the 30-minute center stage talk “The Perfect Travel Guide” with John Boris (Lonely Planet), Robert Flynn (Yahoo! Travel), Marc Ruff (TVtrip) and Patrick Younge (Travel Channel Media) was poorly attended.

6) DMOs were scarce (maybe this is related to the above point). Entrance fee can be expensive in these tough times, but they really miss some good interaction out there. A couple of companies from the Travel Innovation Summit were quite interesting: YourTour.com,  EveryTrail.com, Localyte.com, Planetism.com, SpeedRFP.com, Translations.com and Affinity Shopper by Amadeus. Sorry if I forget some, but these are the ones I can see working within a DMO’s mindset.

7) Chris Chambers, director of digital marketing at Tourism Queensland, said that the “Best Job in the World” campaign cost to them about $6 million overtime. Congratulations on the campaign’s results, but unfortunately I do not get to spend that type of money.

8 ) Dara Khosrowshahi, Expedia CEO, says he is not afraid of Google. If I were him, I would be afraid.

9) OmniHotels does good use of social networking on Twitter. I complained about my room on my Twitter account and they answered within 20 minutes, good enough to calm me down.

10) Expedia failed to contact me on my departing flight. If I had booked my trip on Delta, I would have received email alerts. Thanks to some colleagues, I was warned in advance about the changes and spent the few extra hours in the hotel lobby instead of the Orland airport.