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Social media’s evolving role in travel: More than just inspiration, it’s driving bookings
A new study by Phocuswright, a travel industry research firm, reveals that social media has evolved beyond a mere source of travel inspiration. It's now a powerful force driving actual bookings and influencing key decisions throughout the traveler's journey. The report, titled "F Is for Funnel: Social Media and the Path to Travel Purchase," uncovers how travelers are increasingly turning to social platforms to not only dream about their next trip but also to plan and book it. The study found that 65% of travelers who used social media for trip planning made a purchase or visitation decision based on content they encountered. This influence spans across demographics, with younger travelers, frequent travelers, and those embarking on international trips being particularly susceptible to social media's sway. Close to three in four international travelers made decisions based on social media content for a recent trip. Key findings: Conversion is king - Nearly two-thirds of travelers under 55 who used social media for trip planning converted, making a purchase or visiting a destination based on social media content, along with 53% of over 55s. Beyond inspiration - Social media is used for active trip planning, with 39% of converters using social media to compare specific options and prices. Visual content wins - Images (55%) and short-form video (53%) are the two format types most likely to produce a conversion. Authenticity is key - Travelers crave genuine content that showcases real experiences, both positive and negative. User-generated content (UGC) is seen as particularly trustworthy, with an added layer of credibility embedded in content that's self-posted without any financial stake. Multi-platform approach - Travelers use a variety of social media platforms for trip planning, with Facebook (69%), Instagram (68%) and YouTube (65%) leading the pack, and TikTok (47%) gaining popularity among converters. The long game - The path to purchase on social media can be lengthy, with 54% of converters recalling first viewing the influential content within a month of taking the actual trip, and 82% viewed it within two months of departure. "The study's findings highlight a massive opportunity to use social media as a marketing channel,” said Madeline List, Analyst at Phocuswright and author of the report. “Travelers – and not just the young – are actively seeking out information and making decisions based on social media content. To remain competitive, travel companies should create a strategic social presence of interest-based content, candid collaborations, authentic UGC, smart targeting and an emphasis on priorities over avoidance.” The Phocuswright study was conducted through an online survey of 1,064 U.S. travelers who had taken at least one leisure trip in the past six months and used social media for trip planning or sharing content. The survey was fielded between March 29 and April 6, 2024. In addition to the survey, Phocuswright conducted in-depth interviews with travel brands, marketing agencies, and other ancillary services in social media marketing to gain qualitative insights. The evolving role of social media in travel and other key industry trends will be further explored at The Phocuswright Conference, taking place Nov. 13-15, 2024, in Phoenix, Arizona. The conference will bring together leading travel executives, innovators, and investors to discuss the latest developments and strategies shaping the future of the industry.
United Opens Two New Clubs In Denver, Including Its Largest World Club
United announced the inauguration of its largest United Club at Denver International Airport. This new 35,000-square-foot club is located in the B Concourse. It offers a modern twist on the United Club experience with a new feature bar featuring beer flight boards to enjoy a seasonal rotation of local and craft beers. This club is the second in a series of new locations to open in Denver this summer; last month, a new 24,000 sq. ft. United Club opened in the Concourse, boasting a sumptuous ski lodge look and smart architectural details inspired by the Colorado outdoors. The airline will open an additional revamped club location in 2025, and Denver International Airport will feature more than 100,000 sq. ft. of United Club space – nearly the size of two football fields – across three United Club locations and United Club Fly, a unique grab-and-go concept offering enhanced food and beverage for United Club members with quick connections. With more than two-thirds of United customers connecting to other places in Denver, the new clubs are expected to accommodate more than double the amount of passengers than before. The inauguration of these new clubs follows United’s debut of a new club concept, United Club FlySM, in Denver last year, a first-of-its-kind concept for a U.S. airline. Since its inception, United Club Fly has welcomed over 100,000 passengers who have taken advantage of the heightened convenience of grabbing food or beverages on their way to their aircraft. “The new United Club locations are designed and operated to reflect customer feedback and match how their travel has evolved in recent years,” said Alexander Dorow, United’s Head of Clubs and lounges. “We’re expanding our hub in the Mile High City, and the expansion and renovation of United Club locations demonstrate our commitment to Colorado and our customers’ experiences.” Both club locations include upgraded facilities such as free high-speed Wi-Fi, self-scan entrance gates for easy club admission, agent on-demand kiosks for any trip-planning questions, and wellness rooms. Each club also provides quality culinary options with a Colorado twist, such as porridge with Colorado honey, egg frittata inspired by the Denver omelette (ham, bell peppers, red onion, spinach, and cheddar cheese), Colorado Club sandwiches, and pork green chilli. This expansion is part of the carrier’s approximately $1 billion investment to improve the customer experience in Denver further. Earlier this year, United announced new nonstops to six destinations, including four not served by any other Denver airline, as well as local infrastructure improvements such as 12 new gates set to open in the A and B concourses by the middle of 2024, giving United 90 total gates, the most at Denver International Airport.
Expedia: Flight searches up 40%
According to the latest data from travel app Expedia, travellers are already planning their spring getaways, eyeing everything from Caribbean beach escapes to Alaskan cruises. Flight searches for March and April travel are up 40% compared to the same time frame last year, with interest in international destinations like Punta Cana, Paris and Tokyo up double-digits compared to Spring Break 2022. While average ticket prices are higher than last year, price-conscious travellers will still find savings by avoiding the busiest travel dates, choosing less crowded destinations and taking advantage of package discounts. Despite the rising cost of airfare, it is still possible to plan a spring getaway that doesn’t break the bank. Heading to a city destination will be cheaper – and likely less crowded – than a trip to an international beach resort. Regardless of the destination, travellers can stretch their dollars by following these tips: Avoid peak dates in order to save: According to booking data, traveling during the first week of March (before 9 March) or after 16 April will allow travellers to take advantage of the lowest airfares of the season. The busiest travel days during the period are 10–11 March , and the priciest are Saturdays, 25 25 and 1 April. Depart on a weekday: During the spring travel period, travellers can save an average of more than 20% on round-trip airfare when departing on a Tuesday instead of a Saturday, plus enjoy shorter lines at the airport. Take advantage of pre-summer shoulder season: After mid-April, average ticket prices are expected to stabilize before the summer travel season ramps up. For those with flexible schedules, late April to mid-May is a great time to head to Europe or enjoy a domestic city escape at a lower price. Find the sweet spot: In most cases, booking about a month before domestic flights helps travellers save money on airfare, but when in doubt it’s wise to set up price alerts as soon as there’s a destination in mind. The Price Tracking and Prediction feature on the Expedia app uses machine learning to predict the best time to book and notifies travellers when flight prices drop. How to Save on Lodging and Car Rental Lodging and car rental rates remain relatively flat compared to Spring Break 2022. Savvy travellers can use these tips to score more value: Book accommodations 30–45 days out: While around 64% of spring breakers tend to lock in hotels 90+ days in advance, the ones who wait tend to get better deals. Expedia lodging data shows that, historically, booking hotels closer to a month out yields savings of around USD 30 per night. Snag package savings: Bundling flights, hotel and car rental together on the Expedia app saves travellers an average of around 10%, or USD 300, and makes trip-planning easier.** Compare pick-up spots: Expedia data shows rates near cities tend to be cheaper than the average while rates near national parks and ski destinations are among the priciest.2 Off-airport lots can also be cheaper than picking up at the airport due to lower operating costs, so it pays to shop around. Spring Break Destination Guide Travellers seek to broaden their horizons this year, causing international beach destinations like Puerto Vallarta (+25%) and Punta Cana (+30%), along with culture capitals like Rome (+20%), Paris (+50%) and Tokyo (+55%) to see major spikes in flight searches. Spring breakers looking to stay closer to home but avoid busy beach destinations are flying to their favourite big North American cities including New York City (+5%) and Montreal (+40%) or unplugging in nature in places like Banff National Park (+40%) and Jackson Hole (+60%).1 Cruises are also picking up steam for spring break. Demand for spring cruises to Alaska, for example, is up nearly 25% compared to the same time frame last year while demand for European cruises gains momentum going into the summer. Expedia’s experts rounded up ten places to visit, including exciting domestic hotspots with airfare (ATP) under USD350 and international bucket-list destinations under USD700. Hotel prices (ADR) at these destinations remain under USD350 per night. Fort Lauderdale Toronto Los Angeles New York City Portland San Juan Phuket Copenhagen Lisbon Reykjavik
Smart itineraries taking travel experience to next level – GlobalData
Innovation in the travel & tourism industry is on the rise, with many travel-assisted tools and services, including smart itineraries, popping up to enhance travellers' experience. With a rise in demand for personalised, accessible, and convenient experiences, smart itineraries are enabling travel planning providers to take travel experience to the next level, according to GlobalData. GlobalData’s FutureTech Series report, ‘Personalisation in Travel: Smart Itinerary Planners‘, highlights various disruptive forces in travel & tourism as emerging, accelerating, and maturing innovation areas based on their rate of growth in innovation. Rahul Kumar Singh, Senior Analyst of Disruptive Tech at GlobalData, comments: “Technology innovations have led to a mushroom growth of smart apps and their extensive use in the travel & tourism industry to enhance traveler satisfaction. Travel planners are now focusing on offering highly personalized services with the help of solutions such as smart itinerary planners by leveraging advanced data analytics.” The increased use of smart travel planning apps is driving many travel organizations to focus on developing new apps and platform integration. The island of Aruba launched its own travel planning and itinerary app myAruba which enables guests to save places to visit, experiences to try, and even find places to eat. In November 2022, US-based Direct Travel made the beta launch of its traveller itineraries in Microsoft Teams wherein the integration pulls itineraries from its Direct2U mobile app allowing travellers and travel arrangers to have complete access to trip details booked via Direct Travel including flight status updates, weather forecasts, itinerary reminders, and destination information. Major players within the travel & tourism industry are not only introducing new features into their offerings but also looking into future innovations. Airbnb launched a collaborative feature for co-travellers to design itineraries and trip-planning activities. The company was also granted a patent for a computerized calendar system that automatically determines invitee availability for an event and creates multiple instances of the scheduled event based on individual availability. Uber also developed new travel features to allow booking of airport pickups and scheduling a trip up to 30 days in advance, and enable riders to view all aspects of their trip which include flights, hotels, and rides, all in one place. The company was also issued a patent that outines a method to dynamically generate an itinerary for a user based on meeting one or more criteria. Singh concludes: “Travel planners are aware of the value of Big Data to personalize services. However, considering the massive quantity of data generated in the travel & tourism industry, from transactions to searches and site interactions, travel planners and agencies must find ways to access high-quality data to tap the growing usage of smart travel planners.”
Retrace your family roots with curated DNA-based travel
Luxury tour operator TCS World Travel has announced a new partnership with Heritage Consulting, a genealogy research firm. This partnership will allow TCS to create bespoke legacy journeys that take a more personalised, in-depth approach than simple DNA-based travel. TCS World Travel’s Heritage Concierge, a dedicated trip-planning expert, will then use the research conducted by this genealogy team as inspiration for a fully-tailored itinerary filled with customised experiences designed to connect guests with their family tree, from meeting distant cousins in an ancestral village to following in a great-grandparent’s footsteps to the fields or factory where they worked. "Curated legacy journey" “With the growing interest from guests hoping to retrace their family roots through travel, we saw an opportunity to provide them with the most bespoke heritage travel experience possible—their own curated legacy journey,” said Shelley Cline, president of TCS World Travel. “By partnering with a genealogy research service, our new heritage concierge can plan trips that go beyond the broad trends of DNA tests and provide incredibly meaningful experiences that connect couples and multi-generational families with their ancestors and roots.” The accredited team of researchers at Heritage Consulting—one of the private genealogy groups with experts located in over 25 countries—will conduct in-depth genealogical exploration into the guests’ family history. This research will help inform the details of the guests’ personalised legacy journey.
LCC distribution channels: Direct, NDC, GDSs and consolidators
This article was originally published as a blog post by AltexSoft. It is published here with permission. Airline distribution is complex: on one side of the airline industry, we have legacy carriers mostly represented by full-service airlines. Since the late 70s, legacy airlines have used a complicated model of distribution that included various data aggregators, consolidators, tech providers, and other intermediaries. As a result, in the mid-90s, global distribution systems or GDSs (Amadeus, Sabre, and Travelport) became monopolists in air travel distribution as the key flight aggregators. https://youtu.be/kysFEvbzEgA Nowadays, struggling to compensate for the lack of differentiation, legacy carriers are creating new travel APIs and establishing direct channels with travel agencies to show even more flight information. This became possible with the advent of New Distribution Capability (NDC) by International Air Transport Association (IATA). NDC is an initiative to set standards that would allow airlines to distribute their flights directly through online travel agencies or through global distribution systems and also provide ancillary offers. The other end of the air travel industry is occupied by low-cost carriers (LCC). A totally different business model from the offerings of full-service airlines, the low-cost sector omitted global distribution systems’ oligopoly, leveraging direct online booking. Today, low-cost airlines cover 32% of the worldwide airline market, with over 40% in Europe and 36% in Latin America compared to full-service carriers. While it seemed nearly impossible for online travel agencies (OTAs) and metasearch engines to offer budget airlines’ inventory, some brands managed to do so. Examples Here are some examples of the websites and airlines they distribute: Momondo.com is a Danish metasearch website that distributes Ryanair, Wizz Air, WestJet, Spirit Airlines, Norwegian Air Shuttle, Southwest Airlines tickets through its platform. Kiwi.com is a Czech online travel agency that works with Southwest Airlines, Spirit Airlines, Ryanair, Transavia Airlines, EasyJet, and Wizz Air. Travelfusion.com, an online travel data aggregator headquartered in London, is a direct distribution platform certified by IATA’s NDC. Travelfusion works with such carriers as Eurowings, Flybe, and Spirit Airlines. Here are some recommendations on how to use each channel if you plan to integrate LCC distribution in your product and explain the pros and cons of each type of connection: What are low-cost carriers (LCCs)? Low-cost carriers (budget, no-frills, or discount airlines) represent a business model that lowers ticket prices by cutting costs on customer service, distribution, and optimising their fleet utilisation, all features that make them different from traditional, full-service airlines. Southwest Airlines first introduced the low-cost concept in the early 70s. Companies like Ryanair, EasyJet, and others copied and modified Southwest’s business model over time. And now LCCs compete with legacy airlines. Low-cost carriers offer unbundled services and charge additional fees for ancillaries. For a long time, most budget airlines operated between secondary airports (hubs), working on short-haul flights only. Until recently, these were the main pillars defining the low-cost model.Now, ultra-low-cost (e.g. Spirit Airlines) and hybrid carriers (Hop! by Air France and Germanwings by Lufthansa) appear on the market. The landscape is changing, and today the budget sector looks for long-haul opportunities (e.g. LEVEL, Norwegian Airlines) and offer bundled services to attract even more customers. The main low-cost distribution channels Since the beginning of the 21st century, no-frills airlines had changed a lot in their distribution. Major budget carriers have outgrown their home markets, struggling to establish new indirect distribution channels. Since the beginning of the 2010s, budget airlines started to settle or renew agreements with GDSs. So, Travelport, Sabre, and Amadeus listed various low-cost carriers and started distributing their tickets to online travel agencies. The list of IATA’s NDC adopters also includes several LCCs, proving the importance of rich content distribution for the low-cost sector. Generally, distribution channels for low-cost airlines can be divided into four types. Direct connection. The main channel of sales for low-cost airlines are their own websites. Selling tickets directly, budget carriers get information about their customers and optimise their systems using ticketless bookings (a type of booking without a physical ticket). They manually manage only necessary services, automating check-ins, luggage, and meal orders. Global Distribution Systems. Budget airlines are also looking towards GDSs, as providers like Travelport and Amadeus offer services tailored for low-cost needs. IATA’s NDC channel. Some low-cost carriers were the first to adopt NDC and provide XML APIs for OTAs and TMCs to connect. Low-cost consolidators and aggregators. A couple of years ago, technology providers (including global distribution systems) focused on developing dedicated portals for travel agencies to source low-cost and full-service flights via a single channel. That said, in 2019, traditional and low-cost airlines have a lot in common. But, for budget airlines, cost remains the key factor in its distribution. By building indirect channels, most carriers still attempt to avoid excessive distribution fees formed at global distribution systems. Direct connection to low-cost carriers Historically, low-cost airlines sold their tickets only on their own websites, rarely establishing individual connections with big travel agencies and metasearch websites. Customers could book tickets after being redirected to the airline’s website. So, direct distribution allowed LCCs to control the customers’ flow, analyse data, and use their own ancillary selling methods. It also gave budget airlines differentiation, so that the creation of personalised offers became possible over time. Now, travel agents can connect to budget carriers via their direct channels, as well as through GDSs, as long as they distribute budget airlines and share rich content. Nevertheless, direct booking remains the main distribution channel for low-cost carriers. As an example of high competition, look at JetBlue’s attempt to drive more customers to use their website directly. How to use a direct connection To connect with a low-cost airline, you may contact the required airline representative to learn about their available options. Some budget carriers like Ryanair, JetBlue, or flydubai will offer to source data via XML or JSON APIs. Pros: Direct API distributes a full range of airlines content without additional intermediaries like GDSs and ATPCO, the main tariff publishing and ticketing provider. Cons: Very few LCCs offer their own APIs. To learn about various APIs used in air transportation industry, check our dedicated article. Global distribution systems in the low-cost world and XML enabled channels For a long time, GDSs were completely ignored by the low-cost sector for two reasons: The main reason is the distribution fee charged by global distribution systems providers. Since budget airlines struggle to reduce ticket price by any means, indirect distribution via GDSs wasn’t a suitable option. Additional expenses on distribution could negatively affect ticket prices, requiring additional investment in technical infrastructure to offer travel agencies relevant data. That’s why online travel agencies and travel metasearches used web scraping to get flight information from budget carriers. With the rising popularity of budget airlines, capturing leading positions and occupying a significant part of the market, GDSs started putting no-frills airlines on their platforms. As a result, since the beginning of the 2010s, nearly all the larger budget carriers signed distribution or merchandising contracts with global distribution systems. Those connections include both standard GDS distribution or NDC channels by GDS provider (rich content agreement). For example, in 2014 Southwest Airlines signed a contract with Amadeus for its reservation system, expanding on other products like Amadeus Sky Suite scheduling system in 2018. Nevertheless, Southwest fares aren’t available through Amadeus, while they are present on Travelport due to the renewed content agreement in 2018. Meanwhile, Ryanair is available for distribution through Sabre and Travelport. In 2017, Ryanair left Amadeus because of growing distribution fees but continued to use Navitaire, a passenger service system owned by Amadeus. Norwegian Air Shuttle had also signed a contract with Amadeus to distribute its long-haul flights, reporting 110 percent growth in sales during a three-year period from 2015. They had also renewed the contract with Travelport, signing for a rich-content agreement, merchandising, and branding to enable ancillary offers via Travelport’s e-Commerce platform. The table of the major budget airlines in contract for content distribution with GDSs Currently, all major budget carriers work with at least one GDS provider distributing through indirect channels. With the emergence of NDC channels and expanded capabilities of direct bookings, GDSs started to offer a number of products tailored to the low-cost model. Amadeus claims partnering with almost 110 LCC and hybrid carriers with 12 newly signed airlines in 2017. It proposes three methods for booking a ticket from a budget airline on its dedicated page: E-ticketing assumes a complete integration of the airline with equal booking capabilities compared to full-service airlines. Currently, Amadeus mentions WestJet, Vueling, and Norwegian Airlines using this type of ticketing. Light-ticketing is an e-ticketing type of booking, offering immediate ticket issuing as an advantage. Light-ticketing allows excluding ATPCO from the distribution pipeline, using the XML interface. It is used by several airlines like AirAsia, Spring Airlines, Transavia, and Jet2. Ticketless booking via SSR e-pay. This type of booking requests the customer’s credit card instead of issuing a ticket. Among the airlines using it are Jetstar, Spirit Airlines, and TUl fly (formerly TUIfly). Low-cost carriers can also configure the Amadeus connection to distribute bundled and unbundled ancillaries through their NDC channels. It’s also worth mentioning that some airlines with no GDS connection still can be booked via Amadeus. How to source tickets from low-cost carriers via global distribution systems To source tickets of a specific airline, the first thing to do is to check whether the carrier is connected to a distribution system provider. You can also contact global distribution systems providers themselves to see if the required LCC is available. The next step will be integrating with a given GDS to get a booking management interface connected with an API. Pros: Like full-service distribution, global distribution systems offer rich capabilities, allowing you to source GDS and non-GDS content through their APIs. Furthermore, for the infrastructure-mature OTAs, GDS providers may offer countless products, booking tools, and merchandising platforms. A distribution provider is usually a technology provider, so you have an all-in-one solution through the distribution pipeline. Cons: The issue with global distribution systems is the integration costs. Direct distribution via new distribution capability by IATA Since the beginning of new distribution capability talks, among the first carriers to implement real NDC APIs were budget airlines. Currently, most airlines listed by IATA in their previous reports lag in the release of a working XML channel, receiving certifications only. Among the others, only two airlines seem to have their APIs in open access. British budget carrier Flybe implemented its NDC API in 2016 offering it to corporate buyers. Flybe is one of the first budget airlines to come up with an XML enabled channel. IATA has also written an in-depth case study on the Flybe’s NDC implementation. Flydubai, a Dubai government-owned LCC, was the first budget carrier to obtain IATA’s NDC compliance level 3. They also implemented an NDC API, partnered with TPConnects as an IT provider to distribute ancillaries to travel agencies. A number of low-cost airlines like Norwegian Air Shuttle also on the list of IATA NDC adopters claimed to achieve level 3 certification in 2018 without any visible signs of public API existence. WestJet works on its API in partnership with Farelogix without releasing it in public. While Vueling Airlines and JetBlue can also be found in IATA’s lists as new distribution capability adopters, there are no public APIs available. How to use NDC APIs Direct connection with the airline requires using their XML API. The problem is that developing new distribution capability channels requires expenses on IATA’s certification, development, and integration. For that reason, not so many LCCs release their APIs, as they already have direct distribution channels. Pros: These include dynamic pricing, rich content, configurability, and personalisation. Cons: Most budget airlines prefer to distribute via their own websites or stick to the GDS XML channels, making NDC a rare artifact within the budget airline segment. And if NDC grows stronger, integrating multiple APIs will be more time- and cost-consuming than using some universal API. Dedicated airline consolidators and aggregators for low-cost carriers booking Targeting low-cost airlines became a serious task for travel agencies and OTAs since the budget sector represents nearly 32 percent of the airline market. While major carriers develop indirect distribution and sign for global distribution systems, it is still difficult to reach smaller carriers. For that reason, companies like Pyton in partnership with Amadeus develop dedicated platforms to book low-cost carriers. Pyton Flight Portal. Pyton is a travel technology company that develops travel applications for OTAs and TMCs. Since 2015 Pyton has been a part of the Amadeus IT group. In partnership with Amadeus, they are working on the low-cost booking platform that will be integrated with Amadeus Travel Platform. The platform is called Pyton Flight Portal and includes over 100 LCCs. It will allow travel managers to book budget airlines and full-service carriers through a single interface. The API of the platform is XML-based. The number of low-cost airlines supported by Pyton is quite large tfFlight. Travelfusion offers its platform tfFlight for online travel agencies, TMCs, metasearches, and tour operators. The platform consolidates data from LCCs and hybrid carriers available via a single API. Among the benefits are easy integration with desktop and mobile interfaces, integration with PNRs, and rich content capabilities. How to source tickets via low-cost carrier aggregators’ API To register on the platforms listed above, you should contact their sales representatives. They will provide you with developer information to enable you to connect to the required API and source flight information. Pros: A single API distribution via a dedicated platform offers wide capabilities for sourcing LCCs, hybrid, ultra-low-cost, and full-content airlines. They also offer technical support and management interfaces to work with or integrate their systems into existing technical solutions of your travel agency. Perhaps, the biggest advantage is that you specify which type of airlines you want to source. Choosing from the vast base of carriers, you will also be able to distribute bundled/unbundled content as they are XML capable. Cons: It’s also a question of price whether to use a dedicated budget airlines portal or not. The integration costs may vary from platform to platform. Nevertheless, there are no visible cons except for integration. Conclusion The competition intensifies in the budget sector. For example, Norwegian Air Shuttle experiences severe financial difficulties, canceling routes and selling aircraft to survive the competition with Ryanair. At the same time, Ryanair canceled routes and lost staff that left for Norwegian. Low-cost airlines are now starting to concentrate on indirect bookings more, while full-service carriers struggle to push through their direct channels. It’s interesting how budget airlines gradually become similar to traditional airlines, offering bundled ancillaries, operating long-haul flights, and contracting GDSs to sell more. Initially focusing on leisure customers, LCCs now are able to reach business travelers via indirect channels. So online travel agencies now can reach budget airlines freely via dedicated platforms and global distribution systems.
Weapons-grade tourism: US set to lose billions in revenue as Chinese tourist numbers dwindle
Authorities in China have claimed that Chinese tourists are currently “reluctant” to travel to the United States due to the escalating trade tensions and security concerns. China's state-controlled tabloid Global Times reported that Chinese’s interest in travelling to the US has reached its tipping point and has dwindled as vacation season approaches. The tabloid cited data from local trip-planning site Mafengwo that showed searches to different American travel destinations such as Los Angeles, New York, San Francisco and Las Vegas were down on the first six months of the year. The decrease was blamed on the strain between the two nations. Tourism is a resource that China can use to hurt the US economy, as Chinese tourists are ranked as the top spenders in the US. Summer (in the northern hemisphere) is traditionally one of the peak times of year for tourists travelling from mainland China and Hong Kong to various US locations. Mafengwo also reported that there is a spike in travel to Russia and other European countries probably due to World Cup and travel packages offered in European destinations like ‘Experience England’ in the United Kingdom. The switch will likely damage some US sectors that rely on tourism. "Our purchasing power definitely ranks among the top of the list" Jiang Yiyi, director of international tourism development at the Beijing-based China Tourism Academy, said: "Our purchasing power definitely ranks among the top of the list. If the number of Chinese tourists decreases, entire tourism-related services sectors in the US are set to be harmed, including shopping destinations, airlines and the catering industry." According to a report from the US Travel Association, China was the third-largest overseas inbound travel market to the US in 2016 and spending reached USD 33.2 billion in 2016, which is significantly higher than any other country. China has a history of using tourism as an economic weapon. Last year, South Korea was on the receiving end of China’s wrath over installing the American-built THAAD anti-missile defense system that cost the economy nearly USD 7bn. Trade wars The decline of Chinese visitors in the US came hot on the heels of US president Donald Trump's imposition of tariffs on US 34bn worth of Chinese goods. It surely left a sour taste in the mouth as China soon responded with similar tariffs on US products. The Trump administration said the tariffs were necessary to protect national security and the intellectual property of US businesses, and to help reduce the US trade deficit with China. According to Trump, China's trade policy is unfair and it steals the technology of American businesses. In August 2017, Trump ordered a formal investigation on attacks on America's and its allies' intellectual property, the theft of which had been costing America alone an estimated USD 600bn a year. While China is the largest exporter of goods, it is also a vast market for other businesses with its 1.4 billion population, including large American corporations. Safety concerns Apart from the trade wars, the Chinese embassy in the United States posted a new notice on its website on 28 June warning tourists, especially students studying abroad, of gun violence, theft, robbery, and high medical cost in the US. The notice continues advising tourists to purchase travel insurance and teaching them how to contact the emergency hotline 911. "Shootings, robberies, and theft are frequent" “American public security is not sufficient, shootings, robberies, and theft are frequent,” the notice reads. Along with warning visitors about personal safety and medical costs, the embassy also warns Chinese citizens about the potential unjust inspection that usually happen to foreigners. “American border and customs law enforcement agents have the right to inspect all persons entering the country (including US citizens), to check nationality, purpose of entry, and items carried, including luggage, electronics, and cars.” The notice also warns that they should document any discrimination or illegal practices by US law enforcement officials. Surely it is only a matter of time before one country stops being able to take the strain.
‘I built a travel data start-up because of a selfish desire to keep in touch’
Andres Fabris earned a finance degree from the University of Texas at Austin in the hopes of working in the finance side of the IT industry. Instead, he has spent 23 years growing, then disrupting, the travel industry: leadership roles in Sabre, World Choice Travel and Travelocity prepared him to build a web-based travel proximity alert service that would allow him to stay in touch with his classmates after finishing graduate school. This became Traxo, which is now a rising star in travel data aggregation and itinerary intelligence analysis. We joined the start-up founder in uncovering if – and how – his heritage informs this passion project. Here he shares with us in his own words: I was born in Argentina, but I moved to the US as a boy. I grew up in a bilingual and bicultural household, and my oldest memories are of travelling back and forth to be with my relatives. I think that upbringing programmed me to be more open towards exploring new cultures and new mindsets. While that approach definitely applies to leisure travel, I brought some of that openness into my career. After college, I wanted to pursue a finance role in a tech company. But I entered the travel industry in 1995 when Sabre – then still owned by American Airlines – offered me the role I wanted plus free flight benefits, which was a rare and compelling combination at the time. I quickly moved up the ranks in finance and product roles to become director of emerging business, corporate strategy and business development at Sabre, where I also returned to once I finished business school. After a stint with World Choice Travel, I took on leadership posts in Travelocity.com, where my role was to establish and negotiate the company’s major distribution, content and technology partnerships. My career has been a happy accident, really. I didn’t know that the trajectory of my early decisions would bring me here! Traxo TRAVELER itinerary diagram Traxo began as a selfish desire to keep in touch with my graduate school classmates. I made amazing friends while pursuing an MBA degree at Harvard Business School. My closest friends hailed from all over the world – Argentina, Brazil and Spain. I knew I wanted to continue meeting with them in person after graduation. In graduate school, I wrote a white paper about network effects, where I proposed an idea: a programme that would let people know where their friends or family would be going in the future. It would proactively tell users of everyone’s upcoming travel plans and alert them in advance of any future overlaps. Then I thought, “Would it be possible to reliably know people’s locations?“ I soon realised that OTAs and travel suppliers were the only companies that knew people's confirmed future locations, and I began working on a web-based social proximity alert using technology to detect trips from these travel sites. I like to say that Traxo is a platform of assisted serendipity – you discover overlaps in travels with people you know and you meet with them at places neither of you live nor work in, but at the same time our technology makes sure that these meetings happen. While we were doing so, we stumbled into a really elegant way to create a master itinerary or super-PNR consolidating travel data from multiple sources. Over time we combined social proximity, itinerary management, and loyalty dashboard functions into a single, customer-focused platform, which became Traxo. We started out with 10 sites, which grew into 40 sites, then 200, then 400 sites. The service was very consumer-focused as a result. Sometime after our first five years – Traxo started in 2008, so it’s 10 years old now – SAP called. The third largest software company in the world wanted us to add our travel data into their corporate expense reports. Now we’d never done it before, but it made sense for us. We realised that corporations and their travel providers needed to have visibility into the trips made by their workforce. So we entered a huge licensing agreement where SAP would use our aggregation engine tech to directly populate their expense reports with the data we had collected for the traveller. This led us to enhance our itinerary management and data aggregation tech. We came up with technology that automatically detects travel data as it passes through email inboxes and corporate email servers. To complete the transition from B2C into B2B, we proceeded to raise venture capital investment and set up a formal sales team. Traxo provides the data that power the innovations that have become today’s buzzwords, like artificial intelligence and machine learning. However, our own products and processes don’t use any of them at this time. That said, I think that big data is still relevant in the travel industry today. Without data, there would be no way to introduce and improve on services and products that travellers need. Data is the foundational element that teaches these technologies to conform to a certain structure in order for them to be useful in the first place. But I do have some caveats. It’s always been difficult to consolidate data because it’s stored in thousands of systems in different formats. Booking data is particularly fragmented, especially with the rise of metasearch and GDS. And now with the introduction of NDC, the distribution cost charge, and the strengthening power of supplier loyalty programmes, it's bound to get even more challenging to gather all this travel data together. I'm personally interested in cryptocurrency (I like bitcoin), blockchain and their synergy and applications. But they still have a lot of nascent potentials, and their application to the travel industry still needs to be developed. Regarding AR and VR, if done correctly, they should stimulate the occurrence of real travel, but I don't believe they will ever substitute it. The joy of travel relies on being physically present; AR and VR only allow you to see it, but how do you sense it? How do you hear, smell, touch and taste a place you’ve never been in? I once read that a person's 10 fondest memories include marriage and the birth of a child in the top two spots; all the rest are related to travel. Traxo has had a great 2 years. In 2016, TripAdvisor became a Traxo investor when we closed our US$5.2 million Series B funding round. Last year, we managed to raise US$725,510 in new equity funds. We also launched Traxo FILTER, a game-changer for companies flying blind when it comes to capturing and aggregating travel data, in 2017. It’s a compelling product because it helps track reservations and itineraries made by corporate travellers outside of OTAs and TMCs in real-time, without requiring employees to remember to take any action. Our plans for 2018 include becoming fully profitable later this year. This year, business is projected to grow beyond 500% year-on-year. With the proceeds from our last round and some recent add-on investments, we’re looking to ramp up our sales and marketing efforts to a global level. This is because our selling and marketing are currently centred here in the US where we are based, even if our product is available worldwide. We’re looking towards Europe and Asia, which we feel also have fragmented data but for reasons different from the US. Both regions have more independent hotels and smaller chains than we do, and they also have different attitudes towards booking and loyalty. Our team just finished a business trip to Europe last week, so our focus in the coming weeks would be to build our Europe-based data centre. We have also started working on our accreditation for GDPR compliance. We’ll make our way towards Asia in 2019. To start-up founders and young travel entrepreneurs – I’m sorry, I know this is a complete reversal of position, but please: no more trip-planning start-ups! We've seen dozens of them in the last 10 years all mushroom and then land in the graveyard. If anything, start-ups should focus on other technologies, like traveller identification. Some innovations that particularly excite me are chat- and voice-activated applications and platforms like Amazon Alexa, Apple Siri and Google Home. In our 10-year journey, I’ve learned that the process of creating a company is extremely rewarding. When you are able to consolidate compelling products, an amazing team, and strong investors and advisors together, it makes all the stress and hard work worth it. That said, I’ve discovered that it is a marathon, not a sprint. You have to play the long game and learn how to manage the psychological and emotional parts. You need to develop ways to modulate the highs and lows of the process because they are always on the extremes – very high or very low, nothing in-between – especially during the early years. * This is part of a series called the Crush List, featuring the hottest startups in travel tech. Watch this space for more startups that are killing it this 2018!
6 essential apps to take on your next big adventure
When going on off-the-grid adventures, bringing the right apps with you is just as essential as having the right gear. They will help you navigate your way through unfamiliar territories, and prove that getting lost is just as fun. And so, move over Instagram. Here are some the best offline apps out there to take on your next big adventure. Offline Survival Manual Free on Android Let’s face it. Going on extreme adventures comes with risks, and you can’t assume that everything will go as planned all the time. Offline Survival Manual is well, an offline survival manual! It works offline and it will come in handy in emergency situations. This app will teach you how to make a fire, build a shelter, find food, prevent injuries, and other useful content. You can even use it to impress your adventure buddies. This app will bring out the Bear Grylls in you. Cairn Free on iOS Cairn is an app that will help you get home safely from your outdoor adventure. If you don’t return from your trip as scheduled, Cairn will alert your loved ones on where you were last tracked. With this app, you can share your plans, download offline maps, see stats on your route, record your hiking trail, and find spots with cell coverage. This is perfect if you’re planning to go on trails that aren’t visited too often. An essential for outdoor safety - Cairn was recently named as one of the 10 best apps for the outdoors by Backpacker Magazine. Flyover Country Free on iOS and Android Flyover Country is the perfect app for frequent flyers. The app tracks your flight with GPS and lets you discover information about your path on the earth below. Its offline geological maps reveal locations of fossils, core samples, and georeferenced Wikipedia articles, which are visible from where you are. Download this when you’re in the mood for geeking out on the lay of the land. This app is funded by the National Science Foundation for geoscience and data discovery. Sky Guide AR USD 2.99 on iOS It’s a star. It’s a plane. No, it’s a satellite! Take your stargazing to the next level with Sky Guide AR. This app will make you fall in love with the stars, and it has never been more beautiful and easy to use. Just hold it to the sky and it will help you map out constellations, planets, satellites, and maybe UFOs. Who knows? With Sky Guide AR, you don’t have to be a constellation wizard to know what’s out there. Take this with you and see the sky in a different light. Hiking Project Free on iOS and Android Hike your way with this app and you’ll get access to more than 74,000 miles of trail and the best routes near you. It’s basically a comprehensive guide and a database of the best hikes in your area. It gives you a thorough printed map, a full GPS route info, elevation profiles, interactive features, photos and more. Download the trails on the Hiking Project app and you can view you’re them even when you’re offline. Moonlight Free on iOS Going camping? Moonlight is the perfect app to bring along because it’s designed to make your trip easier by creating trip-planning checklists that you can share with your travel companions. It’s the ultimate camping toolkit and it caters to campers everywhere. The app provides information about campsites, recent campers that were on the site, as well as a list of recipes that you could cook by the campfire. Moonlight is a free app and it's also available for use offline.
TrustYou boasts multiple guest feedback solutions in one login
Germany-based SaaS startup TrustYou ushers in the new year with a new all-in-one guest feedback platform, which features a singular login account and a streamlined user interface. Hospitality companies now have more ways to market their hotels and connect with travellers through each stage of the guest journey, from trip-planning all the way to post-stay reviews. Once inside the platform, hoteliers can see a sidebar menu listing its four main modules: Analytics, Survey, Messaging and Marketing. The Messaging module has a live chat functionality that can be added to any hotel website. Live chat requests from the website will pop up in the inbox section where all other guest messages sent through email, SMS or Facebook also appear. TrustYou has also found that Facebook is one of the top websites used for hotel searches. Hence, the platform comes with a marketing widget so hotels can showcase all their review content on the social network. "The best and most personalised experience for travellers" This is one of many existing review widgets found in the Marketing module. Hoteliers can use this to display ratings and reviews on their website and across the internet to increase direct bookings. “This brings us one step closer to the ultimate goal of providing the best and most personalised experience for travellers, while offering hotels a one-stop-shop solution,” said Benjamin Jost, founder and CEO. Furthermore, the platform helps hoteliers stay at the top of their game through customisable surveys and reports. It's also integrated with Siri and Alexa, and is available as a mobile app. TrustYou was founded by Jost and Jakob Riegger in 2008 to generate data intelligence from hotel reviews. Its clients include Accor Hotels, Movenpick, Shangri-La, Frasers Hospitality, Six Senses, and Pan Pacific Hotels and Resorts.
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