TRAVELtech is another big hit this year

TRAVELtech was another hit this year with some great speakers and a huge number delegates travelling across the nation to attend.

Themed around the “Year of Living Dangerously”, the speakers discussed their perception of the market, where they see opportunities existing and what they have done to take advantage of them.

Tim Harcourt (The Airport Economist) opened the conference by giving everyone a view of how the market is looking and trends to date. Flicking through his thousand and one informative graphs (almost as if to implant them subliminally into the minds of the crowd), Tim reassured the audience that while the global economy has gone from “sub-prime to ridiculous”, the Australian economy is still going relatively strong.

A number of online players reiterated this, stating that they have experienced continued growth in online travel as the travel industry in general grows and as more people turn to the internet to research and book their travel.

Scott Blume (CEO, Zuji & President of Travelocity Asia Pacific) pointed out that there is still huge room for growth in online travel with only about 20% of bookings being online in the Asia/Pacific Region as opposed to 60% in the US. Arthur Hoffman (Managing Director, Expedia – APAC) followed to say that they have experienced 17-20% growth each year, but that he also believes online travel needs to be more flexible, innovative and provide a better user experience.

Simon Monk (CEO, World Nomads) took the stage and described how they had taken the innovative approach of letting travel insurance purchasers donate to their own chosen cause when booking and how this had surprisingly increased their conversion rate while benefiting a number of charities at the same time.

Clair Hatton (Head of Travel, Google) inspired everyone with a presentation of how Google’s mapping platform has been used to date to enhance travellers online experience and how Google’s new “Street View” has really opened the world up and created a number of new opportunities for innovators.

John Allsop (Director, Western Civilisation) described the power of embeddable widgets and how they open the web up and can allow website owners to provide their users with powerful functionality with minimal effort while benefitting the provider with additional traffic.

Karen Grubter (Senior Client Advisor, Global Reviews) demonstrated how their technology has been used to monitor users searching for travel in their own environment. The results highlighted that while service providers can make every effort to better serve travellers, consumers are almost impossible to predict. An example given is that 37% of users who used a search engine to search for travel entered a URL into Google as opposed to directly into their browser’s address bar.

By the end of the evening, a clear message had been conveyed that this is not the time to be cautious but rather the time to be smart, innovative and to take advantage of the many opportunities that are presenting themselves – especially online.

A Report by Jonathan Ersser