Travel Trends 2014: Technology as the Driving Force

According to ITB Berlin World Travel Trend Report, the global travel and tourism industry has witnessed a 4% growth in international trips in the year 2013. The report further states that emerging tourism hot-spots like China and Russia have successfully retained top positions to attract globetrotters; alongside, the Asian and European countries have performed well in the category of emerging tourist destinations. Considering the growth ratio of 2013, experts are speculating that the industry will get a 4 to 5 per cent growth in the coming years in the outbound travel.

Travel and tourism industry has emerged as one of the most lucrative fields over the past years. According to the President and CEO of World Travel & Tourism Council, David Scowsill, the USD 6 trillion industry has shown dramatic investment and economic growth contributing 9.1% of the GDP, which is larger than the automotive industry at 8% GDP and smaller than the banking sector at 11%. Speculating the future of global travel market, experts have suggested possible travel trends, which are ready to buzz the global market in the year 2014.

Mobile Accessories

Smartphone is already a buzz-word in the travel scenario; travelers are now more dependent on the small, easy-to-carry digital devices that contribute towards easing the entire travel experience. Thus, the focus of most technology providers is to invent devices that serves diverse category of users including honeymooners, business professionals, students to leisure travelers.

Relax Visa Programs

To make travel a hassle-free process, many countries have initiated to relax entry requirements. Russia is one of the first countries who is working towards making visa free travel to the EU. Countries like US is also reforming their visa policies so that more and more visitors can come and explore the country. According to experts, it is another step by the travel industry that would contribute towards globalizing the business in the truest sense.

Anywhere Internet

Travel business depends on several verticals and one of them is the amenities or the additional services. Internet is perceived by the experts as one of the most important services that tops the amenity list. With the popularity of portable web-connected devices, people’s demand for an on-the-go internet connection has also increased. Thus, hotel industry is replacing it’s in-room Wi-Fi connections with portable, pocket-size Wi-Fi hotspots that allow the users to conveniently carry it anywhere to access internet. For its multi-device connectivity, speed and portability, its speculated to add up to the guests’ hotel experience in the near future.

Embracing Mobile Ways

The internet increased its dominance as a booking channel and experienced a 10% rise in booking in the past year. Alongside, a growth in mobile bookings has also been noticed and this gave a clear indication that it will continue to grow in the coming year also. Thus, travel providers are now focusing on creating mobile platforms for consumers to easily search and book their travel deals using their mobile devices.

Technology to Supersede

Hotel industry is striving to get hold of the bigger market by introducing technology driven facilities. To achieve this, hotels are working on smart phone check-ins so that the process becomes more lucid. Also, front desks being replaced by kiosks with avatars. However, the primary challenge is to implement these technologies in the third world countries where people are yet to accept this technological shift.

The industry experts are predicting a great shift-through in the year 2014, mainly driven by modern technology. However, the industry needs to address some of the key challenges like stimulating jobs and investment, and eliminating barriers such as visa restrictions, taxation and outmoded infrastructure system.

Travel Business: How Technology can Contribute

Travel is no doubt one of the most lucrative business areas to explore today, but it’s high potentiality is creating more competition for the market players. The existing as well as emerging travel suppliers are now engaged to explore ways that contribute towards making the travel experience better, convenient and of course, affordable. Harnessing the potential of technological developments is sensed by many as an answer to beat the competition and get better business gains. Understanding how technology can benefit you is the real challenge before the travel providers. To help you develop a better understanding, we have illuminated some of the factors in brief; let’s have a glimpse of these factors:

Targeting the Consumer

The first rule of business, and of course of marketing, is to identify your customers and then understanding their needs. Like other industries, the same rule applies to travel industry too. Internet has empowered travelers to get information and book their travel deals with just few clicks. So now, it is important for travel professionals to identify existing and potential customers across all channels; also, they need to ensure that they are offering most relevant, attractive and easy to book offers across such channels. Understanding this simple fact can help professionals retain existing clients and pull new customer segments.

Embracing Mobility

To be precise, no one today have the time to sit down on their desktop computers and search for hours to find the best holiday deal or navigate through thousands of fight fares to get the cheapest fare. Thus, mobile devices are the best medium to promote travel deals as most travelers prefer searching for and booking the deals using their mobile devices. So now, it’s high time to adopt strategies and technologies that can run on these devices. Software Applications are just the beginning; the industry needs to explore the mobile technology from it’s core to get it’s benefit in the long run.

Understand Geographical Differences

Tourism is a global industry and thus it’s reach is also vast. Serving people from diverse geographical regions requires the service providers to understand what technology they can adopt and what they can’t. Every country is different and so does their market. Countries like USA, UK are hyper-competitive in matters of technology; on the other hand, the third world countries are legging behind by 5 or 10 years. So, developing travel technologies according to the market requirements is the call of the time.

Loyalty Concerns

Today’s travelers are more ‘prosumers’ than ‘consumers’. They think of loyalty in a different perspective. A more transparent dealing from the service provider’s side contribute towards gaining the loyalty of customers more than a complimentary bottle of wine or a free trip can do. Internet technology can, however, help travel dealers to gain this by cutting out the intermediaries from the equation. With lucid communication, quick response and active engagement, you can sure of raising the business bar and ensuring better loyalty towards your customers.

Fortify your Presence

A solid online presence do a better job than your highly paid sales professionals can do. The success of your travel business depends a lot on your search engine ranking and how user-friendly your website is. Offering the convenience to your consumers to make their bookings fast and easy is a better way to increase retention rate as well as to draw more customers to your business.

However, at the end note, we must recognize the fact that the consumers are ultimately human beings. Thus, creating relevant, compelling content across all channels is important when it comes to keep existing customers and attract new ones. You also need to develop an in-depth understanding of what your customers want at the point of research, purchase, pre-trip, during trip and post-trip.

Internet Booking Engine: Four Factors to Consider

Whether you are an activity supplier, an airline consolidator, a travel agent or running a hotel business, the success or failure of your business depends much on your web presence. With the increased dependency of today’s consumers on the internet, it becomes almost inevitable for you to have a strong presence in the online world. However, a good, user-friendly website depends on several verticals and one of the most important of them is no doubt an internet booking engine. It is the particular gateway that helps your consumers easily search for their perfect travel deal and on the other hand, increases your looker to booker ration exponentially.

Talking about an all-featured online reservation system, we must consider some features that must be there in your software. Like websites, online booking system also depends on four prime factors: Design, Content, Usability and Functionality. Let us briefly discuss all these four factors below:

Design:- Most travel and vacation providers today deal in multiple products like flights, hotels, car rentals, cruises and holiday packages. Thus, it becomes quite difficult for the visitors to search for packages and deals in such websites. To make the process simple, it is a good idea to integrate all the different services in one reservation system. For example, the visitors should search for their preferred hotel or flight deals without switching to different pages. Also, the software should have a good visual presentation, as no user would like to search for their perfect holiday deals on a dull looking software.

Content:- Second comes the content factor; in case of online booking software, content includes what information your visitor may look for while searching a hotel room, a flight deal or a vacation package. Thus, you must first decide about the content and then integrate those well with the software. This enhances the user-friendliness of the system; also, try to combine featured deals and social media links with your system so that these can get better visibility to your user. If you are into hotel business, put the pictures of the rooms in the hotel booking engine so that your visitor can get a proper idea how their room would look like.

Usability:- Being one of the most important marketing and distribution channels, your website booking engine must have a high degree of usability with a better user interface. A good reservation software makes the interaction easy and less mistaking guidance to the users. The best way to ensure high degree of usability is to evaluate the needs of the users and design the actual provided function.

Functionality:- An enhanced functionality turns your internet booking engine into a complete merchandising, easy-to-use tool that allows you to manage your bookings and GDS on a single platform. Also, if your service appeals to global customers, it is important to have a booking software that can be displayed in other languages and also accommodate different currencies. However, while adding different functionalities, remember not to over flood the system with too many features. This may negatively impact your website and the may visitors switch to other sites very easily.

Along with all the mentioned features, you must take care of the user’s online security. Security is of paramount importance when it comes to take payments online. Using payments gateways like PayPal ensures best security to your customer’s transaction details. Ascertaining optimum online protection also creates loyalty and enhances your brand image in the market.

Selecting the Right Technology Platform

The travel market is continuously getting competitive with new organizations entering the market. Thus, travel service providers are in search of new avenues to capture consumer markets for better revenue returns. Travel technology is however perceived by many a novel way through which companies can not only expand their business, but simplify the tasks and also better serve the consumers. There are travel technology companies that are adding more value in this quickly changing travel industry. To be at par with the competition, it is important to develop good business model along with choosing the right technology.

To expand, optimize and manage the business, it is important to consider a few factors about the technology that you have selected for your business. Below we have mentioned some of the features that make a technology fit for your business:

Cloud Technology

Switching to a cloud based technology is the best way to automate the entire process and reduce operational cost to a great extent. Instead if purchasing or setting up service infrastructure, the travel providers can take this service from their technology providers. As the technology providers maintain and update the software according to the latest developments, the travel operators also stay updated with the most recent market trends.

Valuable, User-Friendly Sales Channel

No matter whether you are a travel agency owner, running a hotel or dealing in rented cars, you must rely on a few sales channels like internet booking engine, B2B dashboard and call center etc. These help expand your business by reaching new consumer markets. However, while selecting any of these sales channels, the service providers must consider making these user-friendly; customers would never like a booking engine which is complex and full of features that the use might not understand well.

Easily Accessible and Flexible Technology

“One shoe doesn’t fit all”! This proverb is exactly true in terms of technology too. No two organizations have the same needs and thus what technology works for a particular company might not work the same way for the other. Moreover, to fit the changing consumer requirements, it’s important to deploy technology which is flexible enough to match the standards.

Consolidate the Business

Online booking is a crucial part of any hotel, airline or consolidator business. Thus it is important to consolidate the business with a central booking handling interface. A good travel management system should have strong back office tool that can be easily integrated with the booking engine and third-party tools. Additionally, it also needs to have additional features to manage other components and attributes of the business. With the help of a customer relationship management service, you can easily maintain customer details and minimize the manual hassles.

Backend Support

In travel business, the most stressful work is to manage the back office. From maintaining customer details to answering customer’s quarries, everything has to be streamlined in order to make the organization function smoothly. Technology can be of great savor to minimize back office management hassle. There are tools that address the requirements of customers and business associates by bringing them all important information to their fingertip.

Security is Paramount

To safeguard company data as well as the details of the customers is one of the most important things that companies should consider first. A secure payment gateway on the online sales channels ensures total protection to your customer’s monetary details along with creating a bond of trust between the two parties.

Technology has made our lives easy than ever before. On the contrary, a wrong selection might have an adverse impact on your business. Thus, it is always suggested to do an in-depth research before choosing a technology service provider for your travel business.

The Future of Global Travel Industry and the Role of Technology

Whether its war, pestilence, record debts or high oil prices, nothing can actually extinguish human desire to travel to lands far or near, to explore the unexplored and experience the exotic, to look a distant customer in the eye or stretch near a sempiternal shoreline with a Ruskin Bond book in hand. With man’s desire increases the challenges for the travel industry, but past few years’ observation certainly proves the industry’s agility and creativity to survive such challenges and come up with services, technology, business model and new working culture that proved fruitful to cope up with the situation.

Technology solutions including communication technologies, distribution systems, sensing and identification technologies etc. are perceived by many as the driving force to advance the growth of travel industry in the coming years. From big business houses to small-scale organizations, everyone is considering modern technological developments to help them deliver a more efficient, seamless and engaging experience at all stages of consumer’s journey.

Speculating on the future of travel, marketers believe that trends like globalization of business, growth in global migration, globalization of travel and tourism and rising affluence are some of the prime reasons that will transform the travel industry in the coming time. According to the experts, the future is already here. From planning the travel to sharing the travel experience, technology has its impactful presence in every phase of a person’s travel experience. In the present scenario, social media networks are becoming popular as the potent channels to market travel products and services. In next 5 years, around 76% of globetrotters are expected to book their travel as suggested over the social sites by the people on their network.

In the mid part of 20th century, technological innovations like booking engines showed a rapid growth in air travel market. The popularity of this technology soon made it popular among other divisions of the industry including hotels, travel agencies, cruise liners etc. Today, it’s hard to find a hotel that doesn’t have a website and an online hotel booking engine. It not only makes the entire booking procedure easier for the consumers, but makes it extremely convenient for the hotels to track the customer records and manage the entire reservation system.

Surveys show that cloud computing is gradually becoming popular in the travel, tourism and hospitality industry too. Cloud computing lets the company’s technology infrastructure up and running round the clock. Cloud computing reduces capital expenditures and the need to replicate hardware environment at each location.

The consumerization of technology is changing the way travelers interact, obtain information and purchase travel needs. Surveys show that from March 2012 to March 2013, there has been noticed a 54% increase in the number of Facebook mobile users; this increase has also resulted in a surge of people preferring to opt for travel services and products recommended by their friends over social networking sites. Travel service providers are now becoming more active on social network to reach their potent consumer section.

It’s been also observed that people prefer to search, evaluate and book travel services using their mobile devices. Mobile applications are thus a good way to serve consumer section with a value-added service. Mobile applications make it easy for the consumer to search and book travel deals while on the go. Moreover, mobile applications are greatly replacing hotel concierge services.

A discussion about future travel trends would be incomplete without mentioning about mobile devices and portable internet services. From business travelers to leisure seekers, and from honeymooners to adventure explorers, everyone wants to stay connected 24*7. To meet the growing needs of the travelers, hotels are including WiFi services. But an in-property WiFi wouldn’t be sufficient to serve the travelers, who seek internet everywhere they go; thus, in the coming years WiFi portable hotspots are speculated to replace traditional hotel WiFi services.

By the end of 2016, it is expected that 60% of global travel operations would depend on travel technology that not only meets the requirements of the travelers, but lets the service providers minimize the management hassle and maximize their profit margin.

Data Management: Some Important Factors to Understand First

For any organization, whether big, medium or small, much of the business success depends of how efficiently they manage the data. Data management is a broad concept that comprises of several aspects related to handling the data as a valuable resource. In travel industry, the system encompasses a number of aspects including fare management, baggage rules, ancillary product and revenue management and data mining etc. Without a proper operational system, the old saying “the devil is in the details” often turns out to be true in travel industry.
Many businesses outsource the data management operations to other organizations without considering a few factors first. The following are some of the most important aspects related to efficient data management. If you are also thinking to outsource your process, first consider reading the following:

Fare Filing: In travel industry, fare filing is one of the most important processes. For any airline, consolidator, travel company and hotel, the distribution of the fare content is the lifeblood for the business. While half of the process’ success depends on devising the best fares, the other half depends on error free management of the fares and distributing it to the potential consumers. These two steps determine how efficiently the organization will get the market share. Circulating special negotiated fares with accuracy can help attract a greater portion of the existing market. The efficiency of the process also helps organizations avoid revenue leakage.

Baggage Rules: In order to achieve greater revenue margin, airlines have started slashing free baggage allowance. In order to make the process simple, many airlines file the baggage rule/policy directly in ATPCO. Also, the airlines and consolidators can distribute their policies to GDSs, OTAs, departure control and reservation systems, and to other pricing engines. A minor mistake in filing the accurate baggage rule may lead to a huge loss of business and loosing the customer’s trust on the services offered.

Ancillary Revenue: Ancillary revenue is the profit that a service provider earns by offering additional services to the consumers. The profit margin of any travel service provider depends largely on this revenue stream. Airlines, hotels and similar service providers generate ancillary revenue from sources including à la carte features, commission-based products, frequent flier activities and advertising messages sold in or on aircraft. Being one of the most important revenue sources, it is crucial to properly display ancillary products and services to the prospective consumers. Filing the fare with entire ancillary product line is a good idea to attract consumers.

Data Mining: While managing the data is crucial for any business to run smoothly, not every datum is important from the business point of view. It is thus become extremely important to filter the data so that the most useful information can be devices. Data mining is a kind of computer generated data filtration process where experts analyze the existing data from different prospective and finally summarize it to useful information. The fundamental properties of data mining are – automatic discovery of patterns, prediction of likely outcomes, creation of actionable information and focus on large data sets and database. The more accurate your data mining is, the more the chances of business revenue returns.

Though many organization promise to offer an efficient data management solution, it is almost impossible to develop analytical tools for data handling without having a proper knowledge of the organization’s structure and its market.

Travel Tech Trends: Changing the Global Tourism Scenario

Just half-a-decade ago, travel trend watchers used to write articles on how travel technology would change the travel and tourism industry by 2020. Today, after around five years, we can see new technology trends revolutionizing the entire tourism business, helping tour operators, airlines, hospitality business owners and ground transportation providers to expand their business and reach the global market. Many of the advancements are here already and new ones are coming faster than travel marketers have ever thought of. According to the Wall Street Journal’s Middle Seat columnist Scott McCartney, today to find a review of the newly launched travel app is like changing smoke detector batteries.

Apart from the travel service providers, the consumers are also taking advantage of the new technology evolution. For savvy travelers, technology is a stuff of everyday life. After the industry came out of its birth shell of leisure tourism, several new fields started entering the business, creating complications in the operational process. In such a situation, technology is the only way that helps simplify the process. Let’s take a quick look at some of the technology developments that revolutionized the travel industry operations:

Smart Phones: The tidal wave of smart phones with a bundle of features brings about a radical change in the way travelers connect, communicate and collaborate. Researches show that by the end of 2012, the number of travelers carrying smartphones increased to 75% from 50% at the end of 2011. Easily available wireless internet networks made it possible for the globetrotters to search, book and make changes in their travel itinerary on the go with the help of the smart phones and other mobile gadgets.

Travel Apps: In “The Washington Post” journalist Andrea Sachs wrote that these days it’s easy to find companies that don’t have a travel app than the ones that do. Today, mobile applications are transformational platforms and essential tools for the travelers. From the business point of view, these applications help organizations reach their target group and cater them a better service. From comparing itineraries, booking the tour to making changes and cancelling it, travelers can do all these on the go with travel apps. The better the application is, the more it attracts consumers to the business.

Internet Booking Engines: Online reservation systems or internet booking engines brought a real change in the entire operation of hospitality, airlines, travel agency and ground transportation business. Though the aviation industry is the first to introduce this software, today almost every hotel, airline, Rental Company and travel agent uses this reservation tool for maintaining customer data, simplifying booking process, promoting the services and also to minimize the manual errors.

Digital Maps and Guide Apps: Gone are the days when people afraid to visit an unknown place. Today, with the help of digital maps and city guides, people can explore any place and discover the remotest corners of earth. Moreover, the translation apps are also of great use for travelers to converse with other during their journey.

With technology, we can say that travelling is no more a voyage to the unknown. Recent development in travel technology has made the experience smoother and easier for the travelers and this trend is likely to continue its meteoric incline.