There are some interesting products and concepts surfacing that will facilitate this shift and open opportunity for new consultancy/sales channels and leverage social selling but INCLUDE the existing sales channels and POS’. I believe that 2011 will bring a surge of innovation to the industry in terms of APPs

I think this is a bigger question – do travellers know the technical differente between Expedia and Kayak? Booking.com and Mr&Mrs Smith?

I can relate to tens of friends explaining Expedia as a “flight search engine, they will look for the best airline tickets for you”. I’ve never been able to explain to non-IT people the difference between Expedia and Kayak. They think both “find the best airline tickets”.

Consequence: if they don’t know, then they can’t care. Which leaves only brand as the real differentiator.

I think recently Expedia tried to position a tagline “where you book matters”, I guess precisely to focus on the brand as THE differentiator – as there is nothing else left to play in the big OTA wars? Are we down to Coke vs Pepsi?

There can be no curation without prior aggregation of some kind.

Today we already see examples of solutions that provide normalization of the broadest content available paired with the means to apply variables to that content to dynamically “curate” based on individual customer, commercial or other criteria. (eg. Travelport Universal API)

Dynamic real time packaging with GDS and or charter/low cost/tour op groups flighs, tour operator hotel, destination services, local car rental company etc. is also a reality (eg. Tourport Leisure solution in Germany/EMEA)

So the technology exists, where are we in terms of identifying the right “meta” information from our customer and using that to curate on the fly the right package, to show the real value for THIS specific customer?

We need to get away from a pure price discussion and into a value discussion. Our industry needs to move from “My trip was cheaper than yours” to “I got JUST what I have always been looking for, and the best part of it was that I could afford it, too”.

More share of wallet, happier repeat customers, healthy industry.

There’s a lot of discussion about this in the media world as well, e.g. http://www.businessinsider.com/content-is-no-longer-king-curation-is-king-2010-6?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+typepad%2Falleyinsider%2Fsilicon_alley_insider+%28Silicon+Alley+Insider%29&utm_content=FaceBook and http://www.steverubel.com/the-next-big-trend-its-all-about-curation. I think both are here to stay, even though some (e.g. Rupert Murdoch) are strongly opposed to them.

Both aggregation and curation are tools to deal with the ever-exploding volumes of information that are being created. But I don’t see the two alternatives as completely mutually exclusive. For example, Goby is both – we aggregate (in the form of a search index), but curate in that we only let certain sites into our index, based on our estimation of the quality & relevance of their content to our mission…..it’s possible to combine the best of both approaches. In different use cases, as you say, one approach may be more effective than the other – but the combination is powerful indeed.

But they are two different strategies to present products to consumers. What is interesting to me is which strategy works better for different products/services.

Here’s a theory: products with little differentiation (such as domestic flights) are better served by aggregation. Let the consumer pick/filter based on what’s important to them. Where as products/services that are more complex and have numerous price points (e.g. cruises, vacation home rentals) are better served by curation by an expert to help reduce the number of options for consumers.

Stephen: You list OTAs as falling into the category. As you know, au contraire. OTAs make judgments, have preferences and are not unbiased. (Neither are offline travel agencies unbiased.)

So it seems there is a helluva light of overlap between curation and aggregation websites. Many difference, too, granted.

Maybe what consumers REALLY need to know is that many aggregation websites have plenty of curator attributes and prejudices.