by Aoife Murphy, Major Accounts Director, Vistatec
As the Skift Global Forum kicks off in New York today, I am reflecting on the key insights from their European Travel Forum held earlier this year in Tobacco Dock.
The forum brought together some of the top marketers, strategists and technologists in the global travel industry to talk about how they are creating and defining the future of travel. Key takeaways for me included:
- Mobile is still a critical component for success as people’s confidence in using it to book all aspects of travel increases. The extent of its importance was reinforced by Richard Solomons, CEO of Intercontinental Hotels, telling us of how they had to change their logo because of its display on mobile.
- Richard Solomons also spoke about how there is always an opportunity to tap into customer loyalty as people want to engage with the brand. Humans are tribal and they want to be part of something, so it is important for marketers to have that 2-way conversation.
- Skyscanner Co-Founder Gareth Williams says we should be looking to China to get an indicator of what’s to come.
- OpenJaw Technologies CMO Colin Lewis talked about the extensive use of platforms such as WeChat as a social, payment and e-commerce platform. This is providing the Chinese consumer population with instant and real-time communication, putting their expectations well ahead of their Western counterparts. This will be the expectation of the Chinese traveller, and as they are the biggest travellers, the industry needs to meet these expectations to capture this market.
- Daniel Houghton, CEO of Lonely Planet, reminded us about people’s emotional attachment to travel; it is something that people don’t want to mess up, and this understanding needs to be at the heart of the customer journey.
- It was interesting to hear from Google Travel’s VP Engineering Oliver Heckman on their use of neural networks for machine translation which has been a 4-year project for Google.
- Other emerging technologies to watch in travel are A.I. with chatbots for virtual assistants and voice recognition, and ambient computing, giving you support where you are and in your context. That said, Steve Hafner, CEO of Kayak, says SEO is still an important source of traffic.
- Although airlines, hotels and metasearch sites were very much on the agenda, it was good to get the industry’s perspective on rail, with Clare Gilmartin, CEO Trainline, explaining how massive the opportunity for digital in this area is. 80% of people still buy tickets at the station and spend on average 15 minutes waiting to get the ticket. Oliver Heckman also made the distinction between European and US travel habits saying that Europeans are more likely than their US counterparts to consider travelling by rail as an alternative to flying. The new Google travel package metasearch trial will be adding intercity results between European destinations. It is the first of the major travel metasearch platforms to integrate rail options into search listings in Europe.
I’m wondering whether these will still be hot topics on the agenda over the coming days at Skift or have trends in global travel already moved on? As my guest, Robert Dry said during the Vistatec webinar last week:
“Acceleration will never be as slow again.”
But just how fast is fast?
I guess we will have to watch the Skift live sessions on the Yahoo Finance homepage to find out.
