The Travolution conference held last week in London set the minds racing at PhoCusWright. The real time online show on Twitter, the recession influenced attendance and the raging topics were all enough to keep us on our toes.

Discussion topics like ‘User Generated Content’, ‘Mobile Travel’ and ‘Innovations in the Digital Space’ were discussed at length. The looming sensation of the recession was the first topic to be undertaken, with a specific UK dimension, by Dennis Turner from HSBC. A more economical analysis of the next few years brought out innovative and overlooked ideas.

The discussions were carried forward with a debate over the future of the airlines as tour operators. Despite the ancillary revenues being the recent target of the major airlines (Iberia subsidiary Clickair reveal 18% ancillary revenues), Amadeus protecting the airline booking system and Lufthansa quoting ‘Boring is in’, the verdict was clear.

The innovation in digital travel took a leap forward when HomeAway unravelled the absolutely “fresh off the plate” market scenario on the vacation rental market. Currently on the shelves, PhoCusWright’s Vacation Rental marketplace projects the market to be about $100 billion. Quoting the study, HomeAway scored a home run by declaring their market share in the burgeoning online vacation rental marketplace to be around 17%. Hopeful of increasing revenues in tough times, the market with untapped potential provided for a breather with 2.2 million properties being sold online. The sharp and focussed approach of the company aiming to withstand the meltdown by building a brand on supply rather than demand is rather commendable. However, according to Brian Sharples, the CEO, trust is the keyword.

PhoCusWright’s CEO, Philip Wolf engaged the audience and provided the wake up call to a relaxed audience post lunch. The CEO interviews were from brand-new companies, for the Europe centric audience, with Gregg Brockway of TripIt and Butch Langlois of PlanetEye. Both companies are small start-ups, focussing on trip itineraries with big minority investors like Microsoft (PlanetEye) and Sabre Holdings (TripIt). The conversation got more interesting when it resulted in key entrepreneurial takeaways for upcoming start-ups. All panelists agreed, maintaining a core value proposition is the key to a successful start-up.

Another intriguing topic was the User Experience survey findings by Google and Frommer’s. Where the Frommer’s presentation stressed content management, Google laid emphasis on step-by-step problem solving to increase conversion rate. However the opinion was not shared by the panellists like Dopplr co-founder and chief executive Marko Ahtisaari who said that it is not necessarily innovative to just add stuff to sites. According to Frommer’s the online and the offline travel agent are still restrained in impacting the travellers mind on the choice of services rather than the choice of destinations or experiences. Recommendation is still an unexplored category for most of them.

The question on longevity and strength of user generated content was answered by TripAdvisor. Their stable revenues sent shock waves through the auditorium. PhoCusWright considers UGC to be one of the path breaking trends fuelling revenue growth through the ad based model.

The conference bubbled with an unarguably diverse audience. The whole event was kept alive with interesting and related videos being shown at the end of every presentation, breaking the audience into splits and waking a few.

Top five buzz words in the conference:

1. Twitter
2. Frommer’s
3. HomeAway
4. UGC
5. Google