TravelMole e-Wire Comment by Dinah Hatch

At the risk of sounding like a total geek, there has never been a more exciting time to be reporting on the travel technology industry.

Big stories and emerging trends are meat and drink to reporters and both are evident in spades right now. Smart niche players are popping up all over the place to take advantage of gaps they’ve spotted in the cyberspace market while the actions of the big hitters underline what’s coming round the corner.

Examples? Well, let’s take the experience travel timebomb that’s on the cusp of exploding. As far back as 2005 (and that’s a long time ago in internet years), Cendant Travel published a study it had commissioned called The World Of Travel In 2020 in which one of its major predictions was that people would be swapping fly and flop holidays for trips that would educate them and provide them with new experiences, be it tackling a new language, learning to skydive or just going to remote parts of the world and becoming travellers rather than tourists.

Jump forward three years and it seems that prediction was spot on. In March alone, investors handed over $8m in further funding to experience holiday website Isango, TUI Travel’s US adventure travel website iExplore opened a UK version, with ambitious growth plans, and Visit Britain became a partner with online experience seller Red Letter Days. No wonder new arrivals like GoLearnTo.com are anticipating a healthy future (see news in this digest).

And I mentioned the big players signposting the future. I’m thinking of the likes of Expedia, who launched an Indian site this month and in doing so joined the choir all singing the Great Song of Potential that is the emerging markets of China and India.

Amadeus published a weighty report outlining the future of the hotel industry earlier in March and one of its single most important issues was how emerging market customers were set to revolutionise the way hotels and their distribution mechanisms operate. As Amadeus hospitality business group managing director Antoine Medawar told me a few weeks ago: “There’s no reason why Chinese or Indian or Russian guests should travel to the west and use hotels like western guests too. Hotels will need to broaden their offering and second guess what this new breed of guest will want from their hotel.”

Amadeus’ report also flagged up the advent of the ultra-demanding consumer. It’s no good expecting your customers to fit into your one-size-fits-all product anymore. Web savvy surfers who’ve read user-generated content and done their research on the hotel/experience/holiday they want will not compromise and if your site doesn’t provide the goods, they’ll go elsewhere. No wonder Orbitz launched MyIdealBeach.com a few weeks ago – helping beach lovers identify their dream beachfront property. It’s all about discovering exactly what your users are after and handing it to them on a plate – not making them drill through your site until they find it (if they don’t get fed up first and abandon you).

Virgin Holidays cottoned onto this ages ago when it teamed up with web analytics company BunnyFoot to study what its current customers tended to search for online. It then split them up into detailed categories and finally presented each category with what it thought would be their ideal holiday on the home page.

Everyone knows over writing is the cardinal web sin but before I go, I’ll just flag up two other March developments that are a sign of the times.

The first is Lastminute.com adding rail content as the launch partner of Raileasy – train travel is absolutely on the ascendant as airport chaos, environmental concerns and better European connections play their part in travel.

The second is Danish company Travelmarket launching a UK version of its search engine. Many have predicted the demise of the meta search engine and airlines get hacked off with them as their incessant screen scraping can mess with their own technology. Yet , as Amadeus knows (hence the invention of its Meta-Pricer which acts as a middleman between the meta search engines and suppliers) they will not go away.