TravelTech has wrapped up for another year. There were highs, lows and even a hashtag battle (!?) A ton of content was covered, so I’ll jump strait in to it.

First up was Barney Harford, President and CEO of Orbitz with some discussion around the cost and benefit of consolidating the various booking platforms in the Orbitz group. In advancing booking platform technology as well as customer service (Chat with users at any time) they found huge costs, but huge rewards as well (53% growth). But not everything was about tech, Barney reminded us that highly trained phone sales consultants are worth the cost if they are able to up the conversion rates, saying this is something that has worked quite well for Orbitz.

An offhand comment from Mr. Harford midway through the interview took me quite off-gaurd: Obitz is storing terabytes of customer data. With the crackdown on Google for storing wireless data here in Australia, it wouldn’t surprize me if we see practices like these outlawed in coming years.

Next was Kevin Lippy of Brokepacker.com for his “10 minutes of fame”, a new segment that gives young companies 10 minutes to talk about what they do and why do it. Kevin had everyone laughing with his video, but unfortunately didn’t leave enough time for us to see all his slides. Next time, Kev!

The panel discussion followed with Dan Lynn – MD of Expedia APAC, Jeremy Bellinghausen- President of HotelClub and Andy Owen-Jones of TravelTainment. Andy was quick to remind us of the strict online privacy policies enforced in Germany; storing of customer data without consent is illegal, something I found quite surprising.

Image by Paul Baron (@paul_baron)

The conversation quickly turned to the future of travel websites, with Owen-Jones proclaiming packaging as the future of travel, (something I couldn’t really agree with, I think there are regional differences) and saying that we won’t recognize travel sites 3-5 years from now.

When Martin Kelly raised the point that all OTAs are looking the same these days, Lynn of Expedia was quick to count with, “Whenever we A/B test consumers confirm that the typical layout of OTA is the right one”. Owen-Jones also added that in the next five years someone will crack that inspiration travel model and be hugely successful with it.

After the lunch break I unknowingly started what would come to be called the “Hashtag smackdown” by fellow live-tweeter Tim Hughes when I suggested we standardize the event hashtag. After some discussion, we agreed to disagree- Nothing like a tweet-off to get things going!

Alan Long of Experian Hitwise brought us up to date on the latest travel search data, and when Alan says latest, he means it- this stuff was only 2 days old! Travel was shown to take up 2.5% of Australian searches and cruise related searches were up by 30% due to the GFC. This was said to be caused by consumers attempting to contain costs.

More shocking statistics? Hitwise has em’: 70% of sites viewed in Australia are Australian sites. Extremely high, I’d say! Some statistics continued to trend in the same ways we have seen in the past, search terms are getting longer and more brand-centric and the top 5 travel sites saw 40% of the visits.

The panel discussion with Beasley of Travelport, Burnes of AOT, Beveridge of Stella and Nixon of Intrepid got interesting very quickly when Martin Kelly brought up a press release from Jetstar saying that it’s not the fault of the low cost carriers that their inventory is not bookable on GDSs, it’s the GDSs who are to blame. Beasley was quick to point out that it was actually the lack of standards in the industry that has prevented GDSs and LCCs from getting together and that Travelport could have the budget airlines live tomorrow with all the functionality their .com sites have. It is only money and disorganization that keeps this from happening.

Burnes of AOT let us in on what makes him tick when he proclaimed he had no use for smartphones and that his ancient Nokia meant he had “more time” also adding that he didn’t care what the weather was in Budapest. Maybe Burnes hasn’t been using the same phone as the rest of us? Of course this followed the statement that their call centre is taking upwards of 3000 calls from travel agents even though this means agents make less commission then they would making a booking online.

Mark Higginson, Director of Analytics, Nielsen Online had some more stats for us to ogle, including some social media statistics which made me perk up a bit: “25% have looked for advice via social media and 8% bought things because of the advice they received via if social media”.

Chris Chambers of Tourism Queensland told us about how they followed up with their hugley popular “Best Job in the World” campaign. Seemed the trick was keeping the ball rolling and engaging across multiple platforms. A strategic patrnership with Orbitz to promote the Queensland product didn’t hurt either.

Ian Cumming from Travellr.com got in his 10 minutes of fame and told us all about his business model. Loved the hand drawn cartoons! Ian also let us know about Travellrs first major integration, answers.worldnomads.com- go check it out!

Finally, Justin Baird- Innovationist, Google Australia, showed us where mobile has come from and where it is going with a sneak peak at an augmented reality nav-man style app for android phones. Surprisingly, the presentation revolved fairly heavily around mobile optimization and the lack of functionality the Kayak app has on iPad, mainly the map (Powered by Google) and it’s lack of gestural control. Is that any way to talk about a business partner?

Google also featured the newly launched Hipmunk.com and gave it a glowing review, then proceeded to dazzle us with stats, graphs and interactive demonstrations.

The awards at the end of the event went something like this:

BEST AIRLINE WEBSITE – http://www.jetstar.com.au

BEST HOTEL OPERATOR WEBSITE – http://www.habitathq.com.au

BEST ACCOMMODATION WEBSITE – http://www.hotelscombined.com/

BEST TRAVEL AGENT WEBSITE – http://www.Webjet.com.au/

BEST TRAVEL DESTINATION WEBSITE – http://www.Lonelyplanet.com/

BEST CAR/CAMPER HIRE WEBSITE – http://www.wickedcampers.com.au/

BEST TOUR OPERATOR WHOLESALER WEBSITE – http://www.contiki.com.au/

BEST NICHE WEBSITE – http://www.worldnomads.com.au/

BEST CRUISE WEBSITE – http://www.pocruises.com.au

and overall site of the year, HotelsCombined.com – Couldn’t be more proud.

The wrap up party put on by Sydney Travel Tribe looked a little something like this:

And that’s it! Check out the twitter streams for a play by play and I hope to meet up with all of you again next year.

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