Top 10 Things - And More - That Will Drive Travel Distribution in 2010

Increased use of packaging to benefit suppliers, distributors and consumers – particularly by hotels & attractions.

– Suppliers continue to seek efficient methods to either a) provide additional features to enhance consumer value and/or b) distribute distressed inventory while capitalizing on price opacity to protect retail pricing structures.

- Distributors desire methods to increase transactions and grow margins. Packages offer both a) opportunities to grow sales volume by transitioning consumers from multiple independent component transactions to integrated package purchases and/or b) Increase margins that are fundamentally constrained by supplier best fare / rate parity clauses when selling individual travel components or avoid the risk of potential hotel room tax liabilities on margins derived from stand-alone merchant model hotel sales.

- Consumers, after gaining greater experience in online travel planning and pressed for disposable income by the economic downturn, demand more streamlined booking processes and/or improved value to reap higher returns on their time and financial investment in leisure travel.

Various forms of packaging accomplish these objectives and enhance value creation for travel transactions. Expedia'e recent press release “American Travelers Could Have Saved More Than $10 Billion in 2009 – But Didn't” (http://j.mp/aaq2LS) underscores the untapped potential of leisure travel packaging to create consumer value while supporting distributor margins and helping suppliers sell underutilized inventory.

Rossitza, I could not agree more – perhaps instead of using the term “attractions” in my prediction, I should have used “travel demand generators.” “Auxiliary services” is also a misnomer for these in-destination sites, events and experiences as it implies secondary importance. These features often provide the catalyst inspiring the travel experience.

While a small subset of people may travel with the sole purpose of staying at a particular hotel or flying a specific aircraft, everyone else is seeking travel experiences that extend well beyond the traditional air / hotel / car paradigm.

Supported by assistive technology & standards to combat extensive market fragmentation, these travel demand generators can begin to get recognized for the critical role they play in creating travel demand.

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On that theme will enhanced reality based mobile apps such as Wikitude become more popular as a means of locating, maybe evening linking to booking, local events/facilities?

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Growth and personalisation of hotel bookings. However exotic and two-fold this may sound, I am a firm believer that this is the immediate future for hotels, and I feel the two are inextricably linked. There is a rise in the use of advertising networks that send traffic directly to hotel websites (usually on a CPA model). There is great clarity and visibility that is created between social media and hotels – if you love your stay somewhere, you aren't going to praise your OTA for it, at least not primarily.. you will mainly praise the hotel. And finally, hotels can now allow for both decision capable booking engines, as well as dynamic content on their websites to adapt content with each user (like Amazon or Apple Genius does for you today). These are technologies that are both affordable and live in hotels today.

These factors will generate pressure for better service by hotels (which is a good thing across the board), but will also increase visibility, traffic and conversions to hotel websites – so my vote is firmly with growth for hotel bookings on the book-direct model, and growth in conversions and loyalty through personalisation of the hotel website.

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