PhoCusWright, the travel industry research authority, named Amadeus IT Group the Travel Innovation Summit Winner at the close of The PhoCusWright Conference held November 17 – 19, 2009 in Orlando, Florida.

Amadeus IT Group’s Affinity Shopper took top honors among 34 innovative companies at The Travel Innovation Summit@The PhoCusWright Conference. These early-stage, emerging and established companies demonstrated applications, mobile technology and solutions in front of a live audience of travel industry executives and thought leaders.

Three additional companies were honored as finalists of The Travel Innovation Summit. They were selected by real-time audience voting on Tuesday, November 17. The finalists moved on to demonstrate their groundbreaking innovations to be voted on by attendees and a distinguished panel of judges during Center Stage@The PhoCusWright Conference.

The 2009 PhoCusWright Travel Innovation Summit Winner and finalists are:

Amadeus IT Group (Affinity Shopper)—The PhoCusWright Travel Innovation Summit Winner

Amadeus Affinity Shopper caters to the needs of travelers with specific requirements, as well as travelers who are open to suggestions or in need of inspiration. The solution can help airlines capture travelers’ attention and interest early in the search process, and thereby optimize the look to book ratio. Amadeus Affinity Shopper opens the door to the future of travel search, allowing travelers to express themselves in a natural way. View Amadeus IT Group’s demonstration and video interview.

gliider—The PhoCusWright Travel Innovation Summit Finalist

This research tool lets the user find and gather travel information from any site on the Web, then shows deals specific to that trip. gliider is the only travel tool with “Ask Around”—a way to get travel advice from people that are known and trusted via Facebook.

GlobalMotion (EveryTrail)—The PhoCusWright Travel Innovation Summit Finalist

The next generation EveryTrail iPhone and Android apps let users search, download, navigate and share trips while on the go. Users can search a database of over 200,000 trips from over 140 countries, all created by a 100,000-strong member community. At the same time, the traveler can record and instantly share experiences at EveryTrail.com and other social sites such as Twitter and Facebook.

Translations.com—The PhoCusWright Travel Innovation Summit Finalist

Translations.com’s innovative GlobalLink™ OneLink application gives organizations the ability to launch multilingual Web sites with zero internal IT or project management requirements, and provides an automated solution for keeping multilingual Web sites in synch with their source language equivalents. It is integrated with a high-quality, human translation process and supports all application architectures.

“PhoCusWright interviewed dozens of innovators from around the world. They represented companies large and small, established, emerging and startup,” says Bob Offutt, senior technology analyst at PhoCusWright. “The great new ideas that were demonstrated at this year’s Travel Innovation Summit show that even in tough economic times, innovation is thriving.” The overall tone and sentiment of The Travel Innovation Summit was summarized best by the opening comments of Philip Wolf, president and CEO of PhoCusWright, “Now is the time for the true entrepreneur to shine. As economies faltered around the world, people looked for alternatives—cheaper alternatives, faster alternatives, easier alternatives and smaller alternatives—to what they were currently using. To some, this is a crisis; to an innovator, this is an opportunity.”

View all Travel Innovation Summit demonstrations, Center Stage presentations and more by purchasing The PhoCusWright Conference Online Ticket. On-demand content will be available through January 31, 2010.

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