PhoCusWright’s European Online Travel Market Overview Fifth Edition shows a market in transition from the high growth rates of the past few years to a drop in the overall market and slowing growth in the online segment with no immediate relief in sight. The detailed analysis of individual markets shows evidence of significant differences in consumer behavior related to travel planning and purchasing... 

is the title of this excellent article in Advertising Age and the five lessons learned it describes are relevant to online travel companies as well. CUSTOMER SERVICE IS MARKETING. YOU DON’T NEED A BIG AD BUDGET TO BUILD A BRAND. BE A SOCIAL COMPANY, NOT A SOCIAL-MEDIA MARKETER. DON’T FEAR THE ALGORITHM. DO DEALS THAT MAKE SENSE CULTURALLY. Critics might claim that there are key differences... 

The title of the latest column by Forbes Publisher Rich Karlgaard in Digital Rules is called “Will the entrepreneur boom miss the U.S.?” He writes about some similarities between the crash and recovery in the 1970’s and the situation today, but what is more interesting is his comment that what otherwise was a dismal decade was saved by innovation and entrepreneurship, marked by such... 

The days of straight forward travel booking on either an OTA or supplier site are rapidly coming to an end. The latest PhoCusWright report on Online Traffic and Conversion deals in great detail with this ever more complex landscape of what is also called the pre-booking phase. While the booking focused sites still dominate the market in terms of visitor traffic, a growing number of their present customers... 

The report with the same title published earlier this year by PhoCusWright and Amadeus IT Group is based on extensive research with over one hundred corporate executives responsible for travel procurement decisions in their companies and paints a picture of a corporate travel market with a significantly different behavior pattern from the rest of the world when it comes to planning, purchasing and... 

There has been some discussion recently about customer dissatisfaction with the online travel buying experience. A call for more innovative solutions has been made, to improve this situation and bring about much needed changes allowing a less time consuming and often cumbersome search and search again, and again, process to get relevant result suiting personal travel preferences. There has been a recent... 

PhoCusWright Connect is part of this select community of travel bloggers introduced by UpTake in partnership with the Tips from the T-List. The membership covers travel with a focus on the consumer as well as travel and tourism as the largest global industry. The first survey conducted among the group on the topic of how Twitter is viewed and used by members can be read here. It contains some revealing... 

At yesterday’s webinar on Mobile - The Next Platform for Travel, Norm Rose covered a lot of ground and provided useful insight into this topic travel services providers need get familiar with going forward. The changes brought about in consumer behavior by mobile devices, especially smartphones like the iPhone are affecting a wide range of industries. In a series of recent articles, Advertising... 

This latest edition of PhoCusWright’s Asia Pacific Online Travel Overview Third Edition addresses the Asia Pacific (APAC) region’s fragmentation a defining characteristic of this area of the world where economic performance has differed considerably with growth rates exceeding 6% in China and India at one end and a 4% decline in Japan and Malaysia at the other. We project that the overall slowdown... 

Here is an example of a new iPhone 3GS app taking advantage of the augmented reality technology now being introduced. This demo shows what’s around the traveler on his iPhone screen. Viewing the list of locations, then tapping the augmented reality button and holding the iPhone up the feature starts. It shows that the Metro station is right in front and others further behind it. Turning around...