The PhoCusWright Conference Travel Innovation Summit takes place in Orlando on Nov 17, 2009. In Part I, we took a look at the first ten travel innovators. This is the second part of an introduction to the 30 odd companies taking part in this year’s Travel Innovation Summit. 

Goby

Goby (www.goby.com/) – Boston, MA based Goby (pronounced Go-be) is a search engine that helps people find fun new ways to spend their free time. Goby creates an information model that provides semantic organization and lends structure to unstructured data. It can search, sort, filter, map, and contextualize heterogeneous web data.

GuestCentric

GuestCentric (www.guestcentric.com/) – Stamford, CT based GuestCentric Systems provides an integrated platform for hoteliers that includes website design, a dynamic booking engine, reservations platform and internet hotel marketing. It gives you your own branded specialty store on the Internet where you have full control over the content, inventory and pricing.

iPerceptions

iPerceptions (www.iperceptions.com/) – New York, NY based iPerceptions offers solutions which allow companies to collect feedback from actual customers in self initiated, real situations. Their webValidator Continuous Listening Solution and the iPerceptions Satisfaction Index (iPSI) help you get inside the hearts and minds of your visitors to discover the issues that matter most to them.

Language Weaver

Language Weaver (www.languageweaver.com/) – Los Angeles, CA based Language Weaver offers solutions and products for automated language translation. Their translation solutions are designed for organizations that need to translate large volumes of information into one or more languages, at high speed and high accuracy.

LuggageTag

Luggage Tag (www.luggagetag.com) – West Chester, PA based LuggageTag.com offers a design tool for you to personalize designs for luggage tags, which the company will then manufacture and ship to you.

Milestone Internet

Milestone Internet Marketing (www.milestoneinternet.com/) – Santa Clara, CA based Milestone Internet provides online hospitality marketing and consulting services, with complete soup-to-nuts solution for hotels, resorts, and hospitality industry for enhancing internet presence.

Mondial Assistance

Mondial Assistance (www.mondialusa.com/) – Paris, France based Mondial Assistance offers specialty insurance and assistance services. Their US offerings – based out of Richmond, VA – include Access America travel insurance and Event Ticket Protector insurance. Mondial also offers worldwide medical assistance and concierge services.

Tourabout

Tourabout (www.tourabout.com/) – Sydney, Australia based Tourabout offers a travel platform called ‘The Social GDS’ where community and commerce are merged in a marketplace and organisations connect and engage directly with travellers. It exists in the Facebook and mobile environments and is integrated with Twitter.

Translations

Translations.com (www.translations.com/) – New York, NY based Translations.com offers website localization, software localization, GMS (Globalization Management System) software products, and enterprise-level, professional translation services.

TravelGuard

Travel Guard (www.travelguard.com/) – Stevens Point, WI based Travel Guard is a travel insurance plan provider, specializing in providing travel insurance, assistance and emergency travel service plans which are distributed through virtually every distribution channel in the travel industry.

The rest of the PhoCusWright Conference Travel Innovators are introduced in Part I & Part III.

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The PhoCusWright Conference takes place Nov 17-19 in Orlando, and the highlight on Day 1 – Tuesday, Nov 17, 2009, is the Travel Innovation Summit. Attendees are expected to rate all 30 innovators in real-time, based on their demonstrations.

Over the next few days, we’ll introduce to you all 30 travel innovators. In this post, we take a look at the first 10 companies.

10Best Solutions

10Best Solutions (www.10bestsolutions.com/) – Greenville, SC based 10Best Solutions  provides search engine optimization, content management, content creation and design/development services to an impressive roster of clients including major hotel chains, cruise lines, airlines and travel sites. 10Best Solutions is a division of 10Best, Inc.

AboutAnywhere

AboutAnywhere (www.aboutanywhere.com/) – Miami, FL based AboutAnywhere.com offers a direct-to-consumer travel website, with a low-cost online travel agency business model with major innovations in e-marketing services and improved functionality for both hotel partners and consumers.

Amadeus

Amadeus (www.amadeus.com/) – Madrid, Spain based Amadeus IT Group SA is the leading Global Distribution System (GDS) and the biggest processor of travel bookings in the world. From global network airlines to low cost carriers, from multinational travel agencies to independent hotels, Amadeus provides IT solutions to everyone in the tourism and travel industry.

CarTrawler

 CarTrawler (www.cartrawler.com/) – Dublin, Ireland based global car rental distribution company CarTrawler offers large selection of car rentals from over 500 car rental suppliers in 135 countries in 15,000 city and airport locations. 

CheapLimoRates

CheapLimoRates  (www.cheaplimorates.com/) – Phoenix, AZ based CheapLimoRates.com claims to be the first comparison shopping and booking engine website for the limousine industry, and matches millions of consumers with nearly 10,000 limousine companies who offer discounted rates to book their unused vehicle inventory.  

Twavl

Twavl (www.connectme360.com/) – Twavl is a city-specific community service based on twitter which offers answers and provides insider tips in the form of tweets. Twavl is run by Connectme 360 – a Denver, CO based answer logistics company which helps employees of travel and hospitality companies locate the perfect response to customers’ queries in less than a minute. 

Dapper

Dapper (www.dapper.net/) – San Francisco (and New York) based Dapper provides technical solutions for quickly creating widgets, Google gadgets, and Facebook apps — leading to its flagship product, Dapper Dynamic Ads, which pull live product and inventory from your site, bringing the right offer to the right consumer at the right time.  

Exalead

Exalead (www.exalead.com/) – Paris, France based Exalead is a global software provider in the enterprise and Web search markets, and the maker of CloudView, one of the top platforms for search-based applications (SBAs), which uses advanced semantic technologies to bring structure, meaning and accessibility to previously unused or under-utilized data. 

Expedia Media Solutions

Expedia Media Solutions (www.advertising.expedia.com/) – Bellevue, WA based Expedia Media Solutions is the world’s largest travel lifestyle media company, which leverages the nearly 30 million customers that visit the Expedia, Inc. network of sites every month. 

Gliider

Gliider (www.gliider.com/) – Based in Brooklyn, NY, Gliider offers a browser plugin and travel tool which helps you to collect travel information from around the web in one place by simply highlighting and dragging and dropping the part you like.

The rest of the PhoCusWright Conference Travel Innovators are introduced in Part II & Part III.

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The Travel Promotion Act (S. 1023 & H.R. 2935), having been passed by both the US Senate and the House, is on the verge of being enacted into law, awaiting the formalities of one more vote and the President’s signature. So now would be a good time to look into the nuts and bolts of how it is going to work.

US Capitol

Most of you already know what it is going to do – “establish a non-profit corporation to communicate United States entry policies and otherwise promote leisure, business, and scholarly travel to the United States.”  The corporation’s activities will be funded by a matching program featuring up to $100 million in private sector contributions.

Makes you wonder whether the travel industry – which is just getting up off the mat after having taken a thrashing from the recession, is capable and motivated enough to raise $100 million.

The second question arises from the language in the bill which says that the private sector cannot contribute more than 80% of it’s share of the matching funds in the form of goods and services.

This means that for every $1 raised in cash, the travel industry needs to contribute upto $4 in kind – this could be in the form of free travel services offered to the executives and officials of the Travel Promotion Corporation, and free promotion/advertising for the corporation and its website, among other things.   

The success of the enterprise now depends on how well the corporation’s officials carry out their duties. If they raise, say, only $20 million from the private sector, then they’ll get another $20m from the matching fund, the total comes to $40m – which would be a damp squid, to say the least, considering the hype and the amount of money the corporation will be spending on itself.

The contributions are voluntary, to start with. But if it doesn’t work, the corporation has the power - after a referendum – to “impose an annual assessment on members of the US travel and tourism industry represented on the Board in proportion to their share of the aggregate international travel and tourism revenue of the industry.”

And this is where it gets really interesting. While members explicitly represented on the board include hotels, restaurants, travel distribution, passenger rail , the shocker is that the airline industry – even though it is represented on the board, has been specifically granted an exemption from an assessment. 

U.S. Travel Assoc. Senior VP Geoff Freeman told Travel Weekly that the airlines lobbied Congress separately without consultation with U.S. Travel and got themselves exempted form having to pay anything into the Travel Promotion Fund.

It should be no surprise, therefore, if the airlines also refuse to volunteer to pay cash or make contributions in kind.

Car rentals and tour companies are not specifically mentioned in the bill, so they could, in theory – opt out of having to pay their share. To make things worse, it is the Corporation which gets to decide who owes how much of the share. This is all a recipe for tearing the travel industry apart – if it comes to a situation where members are forced to pay.

Bottomline is that the travel industry needs to pony up the dough and make it easy for the Travel Corporation to fund its activities. If that doesn’t happen, there’s a whole can of worms down the road which will make things really difficult for any future efforts to promote the US as a tourist destination.

Photo by cliff1066

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The Association of Corporate Travel Executives (ACTE) recently surveyed the travel managers of 109 international companies, and the results of this survey indicate that the business travel plans of a majority of these companies have not been impacted by the H1N1 flu (swine flu) virus.

Swine flu

In the survey, 91% of those surveyed said that H1N1 is not stopping them from scheduling meetings and conferences. And and even more impressive 96% said that their business travelers were not asking to postpone or cancel scheduled trips during the flu season.

The study was released by ACTE at a conference in Prague. The change in attitude towards swine flu by business travelers is remarkable, given that back in May 2009, a similar ACTE survey had found that 37% of companies worldwide were either canceling meetings or restricting travelers from attending them.

While the new data from the latest ACTE survey suggests that business travel is now immune to the swine flu, don’t shake on it yet. ACTE Executive Director Susan Gurley said that a random polling of ACTE members has revealed it would be easier to drop the traditional handshake, for the duration of the health crisis — should one develop — as opposed to sneezing or coughing into a sleeve.

But travel as a whole hasn’t yet reached a point where swine flu isn’t a factor.  The October 2009 travelhorizons survey – a joint effort by Ypartnership and the U.S. Travel Association, suggests that major outbreaks could have a big impact on a destination’s leisure travel. 

One third of the respondents planning to travel in the next 6 months said they would most likely change travel plans if their destination reported an outbreak of swine flu in the interim. Of those who said they would alter travel plans, 45% said they would postpone the trip and 31% said they would cancel it altogether.

To top it off, President Obama last week declared the H1N1 swine flu a national emergency, which – while considered a prudent safety measure, nevertheless has had the effect of focusing national and international attention on the fact that 46 out of 50 states now have widespread cases of the swine flu virus.

More details about the ACTE surveys related to swine flu can be found on their website – www.acte.org/

And here’s a few tips from the U.S. Travel Assoc. you might want to go through, if you’re a travel company or organization dealing with issues related to H1N1.

Photo by The Artifex