BOOT Moderating panel on Social Media at 2011 WebInTravelConference

WIT Conference 2011 - Get Into The Groove – The Future of Social from WebInTravel on Vimeo. 

Above is video of the BOOT moderating a panel at the 2011 WebInTravel conference on Social Media. Panel members included:

•  Kristof Roemer, EVP Sales, TrustYou, Germany;
• Danny Oei Wirianto, CEO, Mindtalk, Indonesia; and
• Margery Lynn, Dachis Group South-east Asia

WIT has an upcoming event in Thailand on April 27 with 23 very interesting presenters - all Women.  Check out the program here and registrations here.

WebInTravel 2011: WITovation Awards and Nominations

The deservedly popular WebInTravel conference is schedule for October 18-19 in Singapore. As part of this year's conference organiser Yeoh Siew Hoon is running a series of Awards called the WITovation Awards. These award will "recognize companies or individuals which have made a difference in a chosen field, either through a specific marketing campaign or an overall strategy, in the digital travel space in 2011.". Four cateogories - social media, mobile, niche/specialist and customer focus. Details here and nominations through this PDF form.

Tuesday 21 June at WIT in Sydney - talking startups

I am at WebInTravel tomorrow (Tuesday 21) at the Shangri-La in Sydney. I will be talking on stage with Ian Cummings of Getflight about start up and trends in online travel in Australia and Asia. We have four themes to cover - search, retail and marketing, planning and engagement. 20 start ups to talk through and a lot of analysis to share. Come join us.



Upate - Tweets will be on hastag #witoz not #webintravel

WebInTravel Australia: Call for startups to be part of the BOOT and more June 21 in Sydney

WebInTravel is coming to Sydney on Tuesday June 21 at the Shangri-La hotel. WIT Australia is a day long conference on travel distribution, travel marketing and travel technology.

I will be presenting with Ian Cummings of Getflight on trends and start up activity in online travel. I am working on a list of Australian and Asian start-ups to feature in the session. Already on the list are rome2rio, travellr, hotelscombined, adioso, viator, whl travel, Brokepacker, Globetrooper, Travellerspoint, CleanCruising, vroomvroomvroom (because one vroom is never enough) and of course Getaway Lounge and Getflight. Write me if you want to be on the list.

Here is the full blurb from the programme

"Find Your Online Groove – Timothy Hughes, BOOT + Ian Cumming, Director, Insight4 Pty Ltd

Timothy Hughes, the scribe behind the BOOT (Business of Online Travel) blog, and Ian Cumming, who’s started several of his own businesses and sold one or two, will scan their eye over the digital travel landscape and share with us what are some of the cool ideas they’ve seen in search, social media, rich media and deals – what’s hot and what’s not and what you ought to be doing."

Bookings still available here. Let me know if you're attending.

PS - we debated a lot the definition of a start-up. In my mind it is any company where the founders are still involved and no exit event has occurred. As a result companies that have been around for a while can still be considered start-ups whereas younger companies that have been sold are out.

WebInTravel: 10 things I overheard from about trends (Tnooz)

Yesterday I posted via Tnooz 10 things I overheard from companies at WebInTravel. Today part 2 of that post is live. It covers ten industry trends and market inteligence pieces I overheard. Post is called "Part Two of Two: The Asian online travel zeitgeist". Topics covered include China, Digital Marketing, Japan, Indonesia, Airlines, mobile, social media and search. Full post here

WebInTravel: 10 things I overheard from companies (Tnooz)

Over at Tnooz I have written two posts following the WebInTravel conference in Singapore last week. Part 1 is 10 things I overheard from companies. Check out the post called "Part One of Two: The Asian online travel zeitgeist". Companies covered include Wotif, Cleartrip, TripAdvisor, DaoDao (TA in China), Mobilizy, Kaha, eLong, AirAsia, Small Luxury Hotels of the World, Abacus and Accor. Part 2 tomorrow is on industry trends.

Introducing the Twelevator Pitch - an elevator pitch in the age of Twitter

I helped out at the WebInTravel Innovation Bootcamp as a start-up mentor. In this I was advising a start up on their 5 min pitch to investors. Four companies pitched, then broke with their mentors for a 1 hour workshop, then pitched again. Three of the four will get to hit the WIT Mainstage. More details here

I won't mention the name of the company that I helped out because their pitch was in real trouble from the beginning. After their initial 5 minute pitch I had no clear idea what their product was. This was not a question of complexity or being too deep in technology. Rather their pitch had so many different angles, commentary and ideas in it that the product could be anything from a dating site, social network, trip planning site, content site, niche online agent, community site and more.

The first job we had as mentors was to get the company to describe their product in a quick and clean format. I set them a challenge. Break for 5 minutes and come back to the mentor group with a tweet like 140 character description of the product - what a laughingly called later on a twelevator pitch. Our reasoning for this is that a start up has to be focused. To be focused you need a simple goal and product aim. If your product/business can't be described in a 140 characters then chances are different parts of the start up team have different ideas as to what the company is working on and will pull the company in different directions.

I knew the start up was in trouble when 15 mins later the team had still not returned with a product description tweet. In those 15 mins they were debating as a group what it is they wanted to do and constructed a long and involved idea. Eventually they did return but with closer to 280 characters of pitch.

We put together a new pitch for the rest of the period but the lack of focus in the start up was telling.

There are a lot of elements that a start-up needs to include in a venture pitch but before you do anything make sure you can describe your product in a short sharp twelevator pitch.

Thanks to splorp for this great photo via flickr

Tweeting from WebInTravel in Singapore Oct 19

Follow me my tweets tomorrow at WebInTravel either directly vi @hughestim or hashtag #webintravel.

WebInTravel: Come see the BOOT at WebInTravel Singapore Oct 19 -22

It is not too late to book your ticket to join the BOOT and hundreds of others travel professionals at WebInTravel in Singapore (alongside ITB Asia) October 19-22. The full schedule for the event is here. Registration details here.

There is a lot of the BOOT to see at this conference. For BOOT specific sessions, I will be presenting as follows

Presentation Number 1

First up I will present and the pre-conference WITovation Entrepreneur Bootcamp at the LKC School of Business on Oct 18. I am in a session moderated by Tnooz editor Kevin May called

1130am Innovation Exchange: What's hot and what's not, what's working and what's not, and what's coming round the corner. Experts pick out the current tools and technology that are changing the landscape and predict the ones to come. On the panel are

• Andrew McGlinchey, Head of Product Management, Southeast Asia, Google South East Asia
• Brett Henry, Vice-President, Marketing, Abacus International
• Timothy O' Neil-Dunne, CTO, Lute Technologies and blogger
  
• Ross Veitch, Chief Product Officer, Wego

Presentation Number 2

On Oct 19 at Suntec I am on the opening panel with joint moderators conference organiser Yeoh Siew Hoon and Tnooz's Kevin May.

845am Hitting The C-Spot: Cross-Fire: Two teams will compete against each other to come up with the best customer insights that they believe will drive change in travel distribution and marketing.

Team 1 is

• Ram Badrinathan, General Manager-Asia Pacific & Vice President, Learning Solutions, PhoCusWright Inc.
• Morris Sim, CEO & Co-Founder, Circos Brand Karma
• Robbie Cooke, Managing Director & Group CEO, Wotif Group

Team 2 is

• The BOOT
  
• Timothy O'Neil-Dunne, CTO, Lute Technologies & Blogger, Professor Sabena
• Brett Henry, Vice President, Marketing, Abacus International

Presentation Number 3

Later on the 19th I am leading a panel.

3pm Channelling The Customer: Bridging The Chasm Between Inspiration & Transaction

Three part session.

For the opening 10 minutes I will present on new opportunities in search, inspiration and consumer engagement. Carl Griffith of Cloud View will follow with 5 minutes on "What the Consumer Wants". Then we have 35 minutes of Q&A with some of the best in online travel and search

• Martin Symes, CEO, Wego
• Sajith Sivanandan, Head of Travel, Retail & Automotive, Google South East Asia
• Olivier Dombey, Chief Information Officer, Hoteltravel.com
• Wee Hee Ling, CEO, Commonwealth Tourism Holdings
• Hrush Bhatt, Founder & Director, Cleartrip/Small World
• Josh Steinitz, CEO, NileGuide
• Mark Inkster, Managing Director, Search Alliance, Microsoft

Here is a hint of some of the questions I will put to the panel

• Can tradditional search adjust to responding to open ended questions?
• Sociograph vs Tastegraph - what role will they play in any search evolution/revolution. Which one will win? Or Both? How?
• Yen Lee of review meta-search site Uptake wrote a post "meta-search is done!long live meta-search" . In it he argued that traditional priced based meta-search was in real trouble because the business model of arbitrage between buying traffic off Google at one price and selling that same traffic to suppliers/OTAs at another price was not sustainable. What do you think? Has the cost of paid search irrevocably changed meta-search?
• Paid search on head terms is so expensive that it is arguable that search is not longer a direct response media but a brand building form of media. Is that true or is there still direct response money to be made in search?
• You are a hotel in a major Asian city (Singapore, Hong Kong, Shanghai, Sydney, Bangkok). You are in a great location, have good reviews on social sites, are competitively priced and have great website. But when someone types in "hotels in [city]" into Google you are on page 4. Not surprising given that there are 500,000+ results on Google for that search term. What do you do as this hotel to get anywhere near page 1? Or do you give up on page 1 dreams and turn online marketing activity to somewhere else?

And more....

Presentation Number 4

On Oct 22 at Suntec I will be joining one of the WIT Ideas Lab sessions.

09.45 Social Media, Search, Mobile & Stuff: insights about Social Media, Search & other stuff that the Web is made up of.

• The BOOT
  
• Morris Sim, CEO & Co-Founder, Circos Brand Karma
• Brett Henry, Vice-President, Marketing and Vice-President, India, Abacus International

Four sessions, more live BOOT than ever before.

WITovation at WebInTravel 2010 Singapore October 18

I will be attending the WebInTravel conference in Singapore October 19-22 alongside the ITB Asia event. One of the sub-events at WebInTravel is the WITovation Entrepreneur's Bootcamp.

Is a great place for start-ups to meet with online travel executives, practices their pitches and network with other start-ups. Three finalists from the Bootcamp will get to pitch during the main conference.

If you a start-up interested in participating then check out the registration and entry details here.

Mentors during the day will include

• Me
• Andrew McGlinchey, Head of Products, Southeast Asia, Google;
  
• Brett Henry, Vice President Marketing, Abacus International;
  
• Hrush Bhatt, Founder, Cleartrip, India;
  
• Loh Lik Peng, hotelier and restaurateur, Singapore;
  
• Martin Symes, CEO, Wego (pictured);
  
• Morris Sim, Co-Founder and CEO, Circos Brand Karma;
  
• Timothy O’Neil-Dunne, CTO, Lute;
  
• William Bao Bean, Partner, Softbank China & India Holdings; and
  
• Wu Hai Founder & CEO, Orange Hotel Group

More details here

WebInTravel: WIT presenation 2009 - Recommendations, Long Tail and EveryYou

Tim Hughes WIT presenation 2009 - Recommendations, Long T...

tims-boot's Podcast

On doctor's orders I had to cancel my trip to WebInTravel this year. Here with slides and audio is the presentation I would have given today if I had been there.

Key themes are

1. the long tail theory is now 5 years old. That is "decades" in Internet years. It is time for a rethink;
2. we now have access to effectively unlimited computational power (technology change);
3. consumers are voluntarily giving us data and information about themselves - often for no obvious tangible gain (forwarding links, writing reviews, uploading photos, setting up detailed traveller profiles etc) (social change); and
   
4. if we work to put together the technology change and social change we can target EveryYou rather than Everyone. Can develop specific and targeted recommendations of one for an individual. Rather than a recommendation based on demographics, a recommendation of one based on the individuals unique combination of desires, needs and interests.

PS - forgive the timing of the slides, they are not quite right but the message comes through.

WebInTravel: Pre-conference Podcast with the BOOT

Only a few weeks to go until the WebInTravel conference in Singapore (Oct 20-23 during ITB). A fifteen minute pre-conference podcast interview of me is now live. You can listen to it here. Themes covered into the interview include

• EveryYou and developing a recommendation of one;
• Social networking and the panel I am moderating at WIT called "Taming The Social Media Beast";
• Three areas of controversy I am expecting to be discussed at WIT on social networking being (1) whether or not there is loyalty in search and social networking (2) whether or not the form of social networking we have now (twitter, facebook) will be the form social networking takes in 5 years time and (3) whether or not you can build a brand through search/social networking;
  
• Major changes in the last year and my predictions for the next year; and
• My love of Singaporean chilli crab.

You can listen to the whole interview here.

Preparing for WebInTravel: Reviewing the BOOT’s predictions for 2009

With TRAVELtech over it now time to prepare for WebInTravel in Singapore October 20-23. organiser Siew Hoon ask to to prepare an article prior to the conference on my thoughts on 2009 so far and beyond. Here is an edited version of submission

Back in January I made six predictions for 2009:

1. There are more airlines to go bust
2. Growth in domestic travel growth will surprise us all.
3. Consolidation is not yet finished:
4. 2009 will not be the year of mobile for the travel industry:
5. The dinosaurs (traditional offline travel companies) will screw up and come out of the GFC even weaker: and
6. The last minute model will come back.

With Q3 about to end, I will use this article as a chance to review each prediction and see how they are tracking:

1. Airlines – the list of grounded airline companies is growing each day. So far in 2009 we have lost Myair, Skyeurope, JetAmerica, East Star Airlines, Air Senegal and many others (thank you Airline Closure blog). Might still lose Frontier but on the bright side (I think) Alitalia was saved. The year is not yet over and there is vulture talk around Air Canada, US Airways, United and BMI;

2. Domestic travel – The Google results for “boom in domestic travel” produce a list of some 186,000 results touting the growth in domestic markets around the world including supplier sites, news site and DMO sites. The mashup word Staycation has entered our vernacular (despite its cringeworthiness);

3. Consolidation – We have not seen the consolidation I expected at the start of the year. There as some tuck-in deals but no multi-hundred million dollar deals to talk about. Instead we have seen no slow down in travel start ups raising funds. The WSJ carries a list of ten of the most notable (including Tripwolf, Dealbase, TVTrip and Yapta);

4. 2009 and mobile: This was my most controversial prediction and many did not agree with me. The argument in favour of my prediction is that bookings of travel via mobile phones apps (outside of Korea and Japan) are still very small and arguably inconsequential to the $150+ billion online travel industry. Arguing against my prediction is the near unstoppable growth of smart phone sales (Blackberry, iPhone, Palm etc) (see Norm Rose’s recent post on this) and the amazing display of augmented reality mobile applications recently captured on Mashable including Nearest Tube and Wikitude;

5. Death of the dinosaurs: In my part of the world Stella Travel is half the company it was a year ago and Flight Centre’s profits have fallen dramatically. But it is not their financial results or size that interest me; it is the continued denial by the leadership of those companies that they need to take the online world seriously. Peter Lacaze of Stella is a known online travel sceptic. He is recently quoted on TravelTrends as saying “not in my lifetime” in response to a question about the internet taking over half the market in Australia (despite the fact that this is already the case in the US). Flight Centre’s Graham Turner spoke at length after his FY09 annual results (see TravelToday pdf here) on how little he was worried about online travel companies and that they were not a threat to his business. Instead of taking the chances offered by a downturn to invest in new areas Lacaze and Turner continue to tell themselves that they don’t need to worry about online; and

6. Lastminute is back: This was the easiest prediction to make and have come true. There is data out there on reductions in lead times but the best form of proof is for you to do a search on any major online hotel player for check in tomorrow night and look at the deals that are available. The piece that surprised me was the parallel strength of the advance purchase side of the market.

There is one other thing I have my eye on for the rest of the year and beyond. It is the work that retail sites (like OTAs), search sites (like meta-search), content sites (like review sites) and discovery and inspiration sites are doing to personalise deals, search results and content streams down to the level of the individual. Much like how my twitter stream is different to every other stream because my follow list is a unique combination. Based on a concept known as individuation, I call this “EveryYou” . Stay turned for more on this topic during my WIT 2009 presentation and in later posts on the Business Of Online Travel.

EveryYou: using Individuation in travel to target a recommendation of one

I have just finished presenting at TRAVELtech 2009 on trends in social media, mobile and my new concept of EveryYou.

There is a concept from psychology, economics and demographics called Individuation. I will dodge the Carl Jung and Neitzche inspired definitions and give you the short one – Individuation is the process in which individuals become differentiated from each other. I am seeing the theories of individuation coming into the mobile and social media space in travel and I predict that we will all have to come to term with this notion as we develop means for capturing consumer attention.

In a recent article in Theoretical Issues in Ergonomics Science (Sep2009, Vol. 10 Issue 5) called "Individuation: the N = 1 revolution" by P Hancock, G Hancock and J Warm say that...

"a continuing increase in computational power and associated memory storage capacities will lead to circumstances in which each and every single person can be coded as, and treated as, a separate individual and therefore not necessarily as a representative part of any group, sample or population"

This is the concept of Individuation that the travel industry can now embrace to target consumers on an individual level rather than through representative group samples.

In the past we have undertaken consumer planning through analysis of the average behaviour of a group of consumers. Individuation in this context says that once we have the right matching of technology and social trends we can move from tracking the average, generic profiles or demographic groups to at scale analysis of what Hanckock et al call “specific instances of momentary behaviour of one single individual”. This already exists in psychology, neuro science and molecular genetics where the combination of data, technology and social preparedness allows those sciences to be able to track and understand for the first time “how specific individuals perform their own personal and very complex acts of cognition” (Hancock et al again) rather than rely on averages.

In travel we can use these same techniques to classify and recommend at a level of EveryYou rather than Everyone. The reasons I am attracted to this concept have arisen through the technology capabilities that we now have and the community/social environment we are now in. Let me explain how this happened and why you should care.

In the early days of online travel we revelled in the data we were able to collect from customers but really we were only able to see that data in two dimensions – Breadth and Depth. By breadth I mean that we were able to use and collect data on more than one person interacting with the site and sometimes other sites. By depth I mean that we were able to track the different things that consumers did on the site. This allowed us to manage our sort orders. To bias the display based on consumer behaviour to help generate what we think are the best result for a basket of consumers.

In the last few years we have improved on this and added a third dimension to our data collection and analysis. We have added Context. The ability to see the inter relationship between the data we have on one person and the data we have on others. Through our actions, those of the consumer and other consumers we can link previously unrelated data based on the relationship between different people and past collective behaviour rather than one off activity. We have seen this in the complex CRM systems we have all bought and use every day.

The common theme with the first three dimensions is that we have collected the data from consumers “without their knowledge”. That is not as sinister as it sounds because we have regularly asked for consent. The fourth dimension is Community – which is data that is freely given to us by the consumer. Often unrelated to a particular purchase. And not necessarily for a tangible gain. Though there is very often an intangible gain. What are examples – writing reviews, forwarding links to friends, making recommendations to strangers, building online profiles, contributing to forums, writing a blog etc. The combination of these four dimensions of data can result in an individuated experience. An experience in online media, retail, or community that is unique to an individual but also part of a group experience.

We have seen this individuation in media already. Your twitter feed, facebook newstream and RSS reader list is different to any other anywhere. As the Digital Deliverance group said in their post "What are Individuated Media (What are the New Media)?"

"...the most widely used Individuated Media vehicle today is Facebook. Its more than 200 million consumers give it a mass reach that very few of the world’s Mass Media can equal, yet each of those consumers see different content than one another

Collecting four dimensions of data is not easy. It requires technology leaps in bandwidth and computer processing power - which we now have. The technology needed to allow us to capture and process the data is now matched with the desire of internet users to seek answers to open ended questions and contribute into a community process.

For us as marketers, retailers and media people it means we no longer have to be constrained to gear our marketing to EveryOne. Sure we developed demographic cuts and installed CRM systems to improved the targeting but we were still marketing to EveryOne in the hope of catching the individual. Now with the matching up of technology and social desire we can seek to market to the EveryYou.

The four dimensions of data and technology now allows us to do away with 30 years of econometric dependence on distribution, central tendency and variation – you know bell curves – and instead we can envisage the ability to research an individual at scale rather than rely on measuring their responses as part of a group or sample. Instead of seeing individual behaviour as a “variance” or “outlier”, we can aim to target Every combination of individuals. The EveryYou rather than EveryOne.

Here is my definition of EveryYou:

“The development of a specific and targeted recommendation of one based on the unique combination of desires, needs and interests of each individual at any moment in time”

The EveryYou concept I am working on says that technology and social change put us in a place where we can work on a recommendation of one rather than relying solely on generalisations.

EveryYou marketing and planning approaches are now available to us because of new developments in:

• Social trends that favour online interaction;
• technology innovations that provide organisations with the four dimensions of data; and
• scalability.

In the travel industry, EveryYou means we can answer the question “where should I go next” with a specific answer. We can answer the question which hotel should I stay in "Rome" with an answer that references past purchase behaviour, past reviews written, friends on facebook, people trusted, media read etc. That takes into account that human beings are a mess of contradictions in the things that they like and want. For instance I love the blues, Byzantine mosaics, bad zombie movies and body surfing. No bell curve can market to that.

Companies can treat users as co-researchers in developing a bespoke solution for their individual requirements. The user's needs are met by conjoining the company's expertise in travel and the user's expertise of themselves, thereby creating a tailored travel solution for one. Consumers are and will be willing to provide information on the understanding that it will eventually be deployed to their benefit.

If we use the technological capabilities and social trends available to their fullest potential then we can conceive of a day where we do away with general principles and customisation for the group and instead market to the apparent contradictions in consumer behaviour and aim for the delivery of specific, unique and targeted answers. We could kill off the head, body and long tail of sales and replace it with a sale of one, a market of one for the EveryYou.

Want to hear more? Stay turned to the BOOT as this will be the major area of analysis and work for me on the blog. You can also see me speak on this at WebInTravel October 20-23 in Singapore.

BTW - sorry to get all proprietary but this concept of EveryYou has been put together by me and all in the IP including copyright in it is mine.

Update - thanks to Paul Baron for a photo of me speaking



PS - anyone know how to turn it the right way round?

WebInTravel 2009: The BOOT will be there and so will a startup or two

I had a great time last year at WebInTravel (for reminder coverage look here). This year's WebInTravel is on October 20-23 alongside ITB Asia at Suntec in Singapore. The BOOT is planning to be there. Hope to see you there also.

One great session from the 2008 WebInTravel was the Start-Up Pitch competition between entrip, Conference Bay and TripFilms (the eventual winner). Siew Hoon is running this session again at the 2009 WebInTravel and is calling for submissions from companies looking to join the Start-Up Pitch competition for 2009. More details here. If you are a travel start up looking for exposure then I recommend getting involved.

I will be participating in a couple of sessions at WIT but the full programme for 2009 has not yet been released. Will let you know when it is. You can early register here (will open a word doc). Siew Hoon is also runing a series of lead up events called WIT*E - the first one on April 30 with presentations and discussions with Nigel Roberts of Marina Bay Sands, Robin Yap and Sashank Nigam of Insight Vacations and Jeaneete Ho of Raffles.

Travel Discovery, Triporati and the music business

Through post commentators and email exchanges with readers I have been thinking about whether or not we should be classifying all the travel content, planning, community and search sites that have emerged in the last year. Classification will help to identify competitor sets, clarify business models and help with predictions as to who will be the winners and losers. Also we need something to differentiate all the companies that have launched since 2006 with the word 'trip' in their name.

The first category I have decided to turn my attention to is "Travel Discovery & Inspiration". These are companies that help with the very first part of trip planning - coming up with the inspiration for where you want to go and what you want to do. That help the potential traveller narrow down a world of opportunities and possibilities into a basket of ideas to be explored and researched further. Another reason I want to start with this category is that I have been thinking about the general area of web supported discovery for some time now.

At WebItTravel 2008 in Singapore last October, Ram Badrinathan of PhoCusWright asked me to name my three favourite start ups. One of those I highlighted was not a travel company (and is not even a start-up any more). I talked to him about music social network and discovery site last.fm. Last.fm is the best product I know for discovering music. It tracks the music you listen to, then looks around for other last.fm users that listen to the same music. Then it recommends tracks to you that people listen to who like the music you like. In effect it crowd sources music recommendations based on the similarity of your music tastes with others in the network. A great manifestation of this is your ability to listen to a 'neighbours' radio station. A neighbour being someone with similar tastes to yours and their radio station being a collection of their favourite songs.

Last.fm's chief rival, Pandora, has the same aim - helping you discover new music- but instead of using crowd recommendations like last.fm Pandora has teams devoted to the genomics of music (Music Genome Project). That is breaking down a song or artist into the elements or themes ('genes') and matching to artists or songs with similar genomics.

While they approach it in different ways the concept is the same - bringing to the web and technology the power of word of mouth and trusted advice as a tool in pre-purchase discovery.

The applications to travel are clear. Helping consumers to answer questions of "where to go next?" and "help me find somewhere to go" through networking with other consumers or expert fed technology based query engines.

Triporati is a company that has really impressed me in their efforts to undertake a Travel Genome Project and build a query engine for recommending travel destinations. I first came across Triporati at PhoCusWright 2008 in LA where they participated in the Travel Innovation Summit. They made the short list of six (out of thirty two) at that conference as well as being one of my picks for a top six spot.

Triporati was launched by online travel industry founding fathers/mothers Jim Hornthal (Chairman) and Sharlene Wang (Chief Product Officer). I call them that as they were the builders of Preview Travel, who's sale to Travelocity in March 2000 (announced in Oct 1999, closed in Mar 200o) marked the beginning of online travel as a serious economic force (and temporarily consolidated Travelocity's early lead in online travel). Like Pandora did with music Hornthal and Wang have drawn from travel writers and experts to identify 62 elements of choosing a destination. A user selects (and ranks) up to ten of the elements that interest them and some other data (like home airport and number of travellers). Triporati recommends destination options. For example I chose a number of beach, swimming and snorkelling themes. Recommended for AsiaPac were Fiji, Tahiti and Queensland. For Europe Gran Canaria, Catalonia and the Italian Lakes Region. None of this is surprising but then I know the areas well and generating recommendations on sea, sun and sand is not that challenging. But in regions and search combinations that I am less familiar with I was presented with destinations and travel ideas that were new to me and intriguing. For example, selecting "Wine Tasting", "Zoo" and "Foreign Languages" I was presented with the Cuyo region in Argentina - near the border with Chile - which sounds amazing.

I have been trying to find others in the content/planning model that have followed this Travel Discovery & Inspiration path in using destination idea generation as the means for taking travellers down the trip planning (and therefore eyeball monetisation) path. There are plenty of sites using combinations of editorial and user generated content to provide advice and recommendations on what to do in a (known) destination but I have yet to come across another like Triporati which recommends destinations based on broad traveller . I did come across want2bethere.com in an email exchange last year and in 2007. They claimed to be working on technology that allowed a customer to outline the requirements they were looking for in a trip (through drag and drop), which would then be matched to recommended destinations. Unfortunately their website now seems to be down.

What do you think of my first efforts at classification? Do you know of other companies building discovery engines like Triporati (and last.fm/Pandora in the music world)?

FYI is an interview with Triporati Chairman Jim Hornthal at PhoCusWright last November.

701 not out

This last 100 posts has flown by. It is time for my regular "not out series" where I recap the last 100 posts and remind you of the themes that have been dominating the blog. I started almost three years ago with 101 not out and continued with 201, 301, 401, 501. and 601 not out.

I spent a lot of the last 100 posts attending and covering the big online travel conferences of Oceania, Asia and the US. A couple of highlights:

From TRAVELtech in Sydney

• Richard Noon of Webjet estimating the Australian turnover of Expedia, Zuji and Travel.com.au; and
  
• WorldNomads the inspiring Footprints charity program with the fantastic marketing and conversion benefits.

From Eyefortravel in Sydney

• Me talking about helping consumers navigate too much information;

From WebInTravel in Singapore

• Alfred Chang of Ctrip sharing his views of the market share "online" in China;
• Ram of PhoCusWright hosting an interesting round table on India with heads from Makemytrip and Yatra; and
  
• Phillip Wolf and Ram Badrinathan of PhoCusWright and me talking about online travel, Google, UGC, the Economy and (of course) Asia.
  

From PhoCusWright in LA

• I tried to sort out all of the trip planning sites and mobile applications;
• We heard interesting stories from the bosses of Expedia, Priceline and Kayak; and
• We came across the interesting way in which an offline publisher in Germany (MairDumont) is supporting and online trip planner (TripWolf).
  

While I was busy at Gabfests the world went into an economic death spiral:

• XL went bust, Alitalia too (kind of); But
  
• Uptake, HomeAway, and TripWolf managed to raise some money, bucking the trend.
  

I touched on some (in my view) interesting themes including

• Whether or not BA did a good or bad job point all of their Highlife content online;
• Whether or not Google has too much influence over how we design our websites and content strategies; and
• Whether or not you should use paid search as a place for a he said, she said bitch fight.
  

And in BOOT news

• We watched live on the Internet as a family member escaped from the horrors of the attacks on Mumbai
  
• We hit 1,000 subscribers;
• You heard me talk to Addison Schonland;
  
• I saw a man die at Hong Kong airport;
  
• We joined the Recombobulation Revolution!!!
  

I'm having a blast writing, I hope you are enjoying the reading.

PS - in case you happen to be counting this is actually post 703

2009 "Opportunities in Online Travel" over at the WebInTravel website

Siew Hoon of WebInTravel has been asking people their views Opportunities in Online Travel in 2009. I sent her my top three - which are:

1. Become the Deal Hunter - consumers will still travel they just need deals. Does not mean just price discounts but consumers will need suppliers and intermediaries to be prepared to offer unique specials and deals.

2. Focus on the Product - expectations will be lower so now is the time to invest in your product. Innovation in a down turn is critical, as is fixing all those bugs that have been ignored in times of growth

3. Steal market share from less resilient/prepared competitors - no explanation needed!

If you'd like to see more, including what Ram Badrinathan of PhoCusWright said, then head over to the WebInTravel newsroom.

WebInTravel & PhoCusWright: See me, Philip Wolf and Ram Badrinathan in action

If you are looking for a prelude to PhoCusWright here is a link to a thirty minute video of me (Tim Hughes), PhoCusWright CEO Philip Wolfe and AP Head of Research Ram Badrinathan talking shop at the recent WebInTravel conference.

We cover a number of topics including:

• Google - is there a conflict between designing a site for Google and designing one for customers?;
• Asia - is there such a thing as an Asian strategy?;
• UGC and Zero percenters - how to manage UGC and the zero percenters?;
• Economic swings (and crash) - will it kill you, what should you do?; and
  
• India - just how big a market is it?

Great session (but I'm biased). Watch it here.

What's a better idea, entrip, Conference Bay or TripFilms? Depends who you ask.

WebInTravel hosted a "Start-Up Pitch" session. Much in the form of a very scaled down TechCrunch50, this session saw a short list of three companies engaging in a strict 5 minute pitch to a judging panel made up of investors and venture capitalist. The three finalists in the pitch were

- entrip. a travel organisation company based in India. Presented by founder and boss Anthony Hsiao. This company is trying to be the ultimate in travel organisation mash-ups. A way to bring together all of the elements of planning, tracking and sharing a trip. It ha as UI that enables a traveller to plot on a map where they are going and then have automated links to content, information, booking profiles and a place to store and share. Planning sites are gaining traction recently. GoPlanit and TripIt have been passed members of the TechCrunch50 (interview with GoPlanit here and TripIt here). entrip's difference is in its UI. By using a map based approach entrip gives the user a very different approach to planning and booking. The site has just started so there are challenges ahead fro Hsiao and the rest of the team but is a great beginning.

- Conference Bay is trying to be the eBay/Priceline of conferences. A market place that gives conference organisers and opportunity to distribute their tickets on name your own price/auction model. A clearing house for conference tickets. The theory being that every incremental ticket is pure profit for a conference organiser given the high sunk costs. I see the market here but the challenge is that conference organisers are very wary of open up any channel that promotes discounting. To get a conference up and running it is critical to get people booking early rather than waiting for deals and the last minute. That said, with economic doom and gloom all around us this might be the perfect time to be an aggregator of the potentially dropping demand for conferences.


- TripFilms was the final pitch of the day. The pitch was led by Jim Donnelly (founder and former boss of the now Sabre owned IgoUgo). Jim is an investor in TripFilms, the TripFilms founder and boss is his ex-partner in IgoUgo (Tony Cheng). Jim's pitch was a direct one. TripFilms is IgoUgo but in video. A place for the creation and distribution of high quality destination and travel videos.

Who won? entrip pulled the "people's choice award" by wining the popular vote from the audience but TripFilms secure the title by winning over the judging panel. The panel was impressed by the pedigree of the founders of TripFilms (they had already built and sold a company) as well as the immediacy of the business model around video content. On Conference Bay the panel expressed the same concerns I have above. For entrip, the panel loved the site but belived there were a lot of challenges in getting the distribution right.

What's your vote?

Official WIT version of the story here.