These next four Travel Innovation Summit participants include: a site to help travelers keep in touch no matter where they are in the world, a software platform for vacation rentals, a site offering deals and better margins to travel agents and a site offering free websites to businesses.

ekit Home Page

ekit was created to help travelers keep in touch and is self described as “a global provider of integrated communications and Internet services.” It provides a suite of travel communication services including mobile phones, SIM cards, global calling cards, Internet calling, voicemail, text messaging and email solutions. These services are accessible worldwide from more than 152 countries. I wish I needed to stay in touch with friends from 152 countries.  I like the concept of making it easy for the world traveler to stay in touch with friends and business associates, no matter where their globetrotting takes them. ekit is lead by John Diamond, formerly with the Boston Consulting group.

Escapia Diagram

Founded by President and CEO, Bill Furlong, who was previously COO at Mpire and VP of Sales at Cranium,  EscapiaONE is software platform for the vacation rental management industry. It automates vacation rental management including offering a web site for the properties and assistance with online marketing.  It claims to make managing booking easier and makes it easy to reach millions of online consumers at the click of a mouse.  With Escapia, a vacation rental manager can  have a website, track reservations, manage accounting and send owner statements.

Farepool Deals

Farepool.com is “a 24×7 online service from QuadLabs offering travel agents access to the best deals from specialist suppliers across the world. Farepool.com helps travel agents pick the most profitable fares and earn better margins. With Farepool.com, an agent can make instant reservations of deep discounted rates, apply comprehensive markups, track their bookings and manage their customers,all from a single user-friendly interface.” The site is simple in a good way and easy to navigate.  It may be worthwhile for travel agents.

Fogglight Home Page

Fogglight, a division of Home & Abroad, Inc. was co-founded by Mark Schroeder, who was previously the CEO and co-founder of  Digital Creators and e-vitro. With Fogglight, “a business can create and customize their own travel website with industry-leading trip planning tool” for free.  They seem to be succeeding with major brands like major brands like Starwood, Marriott, Hawaiian Airlines, AirTran, Affinion Group, and Travelport using their application. It is definitely a good starting point for a business who needs content, a web site and support.

The next eight Travel Innovation Summit participants will be reviewed tomorrow.

Travel Innovation Summit

This is the first in a series of posts reviewing the travel sites selected to participate in PhocusWright’s 2008 Travel Innovation Summit in Hollywood, CA next week. These first four entries show the variety of sites selected and offer information about adventure travel, personalized travel itineraries, CRM and hotel deals.

Detailed travel itineraries

AdventureLink was formed in 2006, and now “offers 30,000 trips from more than 1,500 tour operators covering 164 countries.” They offer tour operators the largest possible online distribution via conventional travel agency, online travel agency and web affiliate channels. They “make it easy for travel agents to search, compare and book trips anywhere in the world and with the widest selection of operators at the very best prices.”  The site is easy to navigate, inspires a desire to explore the world and their site and the trip selection is fantastic.

In the “See Our Trips” tab they offer 55,000 trips from VAX/Vacation Access including far flung destinations such as Antartica, Botswana, Burma & New Zealand.  I like the roll-over on specific trips that offers more detailed itineraries.  The site makes me want to pack my bags and book a tour.

New Zealand Planning Page

Cadabra offers online travelers “the tools to interactively build complex personalised multi-destinational itineraries.”  Their itinerary wizard allows visitors to specify the type of trip they want including the number of travel days, the type of accommodation, places they know they want to visit, and the experience and the types of activities that they are interested in.  Currently, the site offers only New Zealand and Cook Island information but promises other destinations soon.  Overall, the New Zealand information is comprehensive, but the site definitely has a ‘beta’ sensibility. I am looking forward to seeing more.

Full Circle Managment

Clairvoyix offers data mining to the travel industry and promises to take customer-relationship marketing to the next level by providing “actionable business intelligence.”  They offer data hygiene and enhancement, data management, targeted strategy, design and execution and campaign ROI.  Their homepage headline offers clients they can “effortlessly identify your best guests with Clairvoyix.”  As a marketing professional, I wonder about that because I have never found anything about data effortless.  Never. As a result, I will be watching this demo closely to see if it lives up to its promise.

Dealbase hotel deals

Dealbase offers more hotel deals than anyone else- as of today, 9492.  That is a lot of deals.  But the site is comprehensive and unbiased because they list any deal regardless of the source, is consistent in its presentations, and their touted feature, “the Deal Analyzer”allows a traveler to understand how much they are saving.  The site is by no means beautiful but its straightforward design is easy to use and the deals easy to find.  A good resource in this new economic climate for the value conscious consumer.

Hope you enjoyed this brief tour.  The next four sites will be reviewed this afternoon.

PhocusWright 2008, The Perfect Storm

UpTake was selected to participate in the Travel Innovation Summit (TIS) at the PhocusWright Conference 2008 in Hollywood next week.  We were invited to give a 5 minute presentation on Monday, November 17 along with 32 other rising stars in the online travel industry. The six winners of TIS will present their product on Center Stage on Thursday, November 20, 2008 to the conference attendees, many of them leaders in the travel industry.

The selection process is a cross between the People’s Choice Awards and the Emmys, “the influential audience of professionals focused on travel judges the innovators real-time, sending six finalists to Center Stage.”  The expert audience votes, not just a panel of travel experts.  Since I have not attended before, I am curious about the process.  Will the audience choose the best product, the most dynamic speaker or a mix of both?  How do the conference managers handle audience burn-out after either the 20th, 25th or 29th travel companies make similar presentation? More on that during the conference itself….

During the next few days, I will review each of the Travel Innovation Summit participants and give a brief description of who they are, the benefits they bring to the average traveler and any fresh, interesting features and benefits they offer.  I will also offer updates during the conference presentations.

This week is all about PhocusWright.