Some semi-random tidbits from the second day of the Oct. 13-15, 2010, conference:

After describing the airline’s recently launched Frequent Flyer iPhone app, John Lonergan, general manager of direct sales for Qantas, said the airline no longer thinks in terms of multiple channels, but considers it all one channel with multiple touch-points. This helps reduce internal turf battles between various divisions over revenue targets etc., he said.

Thus, the airline trains call center agents about the website so the customer experience is as seamless as possible, Lonergan said.

And, to assist customers, Qantas recently implemented a click-to-call feature on the website for site visitors who would rather speak with a customer service representative.

“A few years ago, we would have never done that because we wanted to keep things separate,” Lonergan said.

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Numerous airline speakers and other panelists spoke of the need to get involved in various ways in social media.

In a breakout session on ancillary services and “the multichannel approach,” Krista Pappas, Bing’s global travel industry director, noted that Bing got 40,000 trials of the search engine from one tweet by American Idol host Ryan Seacrest about Bing.

“It’s important to test these new mediums, but also to have measurements in place,” Pappas said.

Pappas also talked about the expanded partnership between Bing and Facebook in which Facebook friends’ “likes” will be incorporated into Bing’s search results.

Pappas noted that the “lines are blurring” between search and social media, and this could have important implications for travel because you know which friend to turn to for a restaurant recommendation in San Francisco and which person in your social media network to consult for advice on a Caribbean hotel.

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In a breakout session on “The Dawn of a New Era: the Online Travel Agency Scene,” PhocusWright President and CEO Philip Wolf talked about the current “chaos,” which is characterized by disparate devices and platforms, the need to optimize beyond search, and the challenge to provide user experiences that go beyond reading and also incorporate tapping, hearing and seeing.

Wolf warned there will be no “new normal,” given the current market chaos.

“You can’t have chaos and normal,” he said.

And, Wolf had a 2011 prediction — tablet wars.

“Next year will be un — you know what I mean — believable for tablets,” Wolf said.

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Glenn Wallace, vice president of technology strategy for Expedia Inc., didn’t appear to be breaking any new ground when he described the value that Expedia provides to airlines in what the breakout session characterized as this “new era” for OTAs.

Wallace said Expedia provides an efficient global marketing platform for airlines, with its email and search engine marketing on behalf of airlines in global points of sale.

Wallace added that Expedia helps airlines spread the costs around as Expedia absorbs the costs of so many lookers who are searching for flights and not booking.

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In virtually every session at the Amadeus conference, Amadeus provided input about how its solutions and approach could help airlines and other sectors face their challenges.

In the OTA session, for instance, Philippe Chereque, executive vice president commercial at Amadeus, described how an Amadeus suite of tools can help OTAs manage the chaos by helping them optimize their advertising.

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The Amadeus conference is, after all, an Amadeus conference, with a heavy presence of Amadeus employees from around the world who are hoping to deepen ties with airline representatives in attendance.

Sometimes the commercial pitches seemed a bit overdone, however, as when Jean-Paul Hamon, Amadeus’ executive vice president of development, in a session about “how the Amadeus development organization is supporting innovation today,” mentioned several times how Amadeus will work on customer needs, will work closely with customers and will “do things with you.”

Innovation, Hamon said, won’t come top-down from Amadeus, but “those solutions have to be invented with you.”

On the newsy side, Hamon noted that Amadeus is 90% finished in its initiative to transition off legacy systems and to “open systems,” with the process expected to be 100% complete by 2012.

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In an interesting presentation, given the fact that it was made at an GDS/airline IT conference, Guylaine Lavoie, Air Canada’s director of marketing innovations, outlined how the airline fought commoditization and brought “tangible benefits” to the airline and its customers when it introduced branded fares and unbundled products in 2006.

At the time, Air Canada triggered the wrath of Sabre, Galileo and Amadeus, when it withdrew its Tango fares from the GDSs over display and user experience issues.

In the interim, Air Canada has learned that 42% of customers will “buy up” when they could have purchased a lower fare, Lavoie said.

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One of the highlights of the conference’s second day, Oct. 14, was a keynote speech by Tom Kelley, general manager of IDEO, on “Fostering creativity for continuous improvement.”

Kelley argued that focusing on “the human factor” in the customer experience is where the greatest opportunities lie for airlines.

Kelley said airlines and other companies seeking to innovate should act as “anthropologists” when they evaluate their own products and processes.

In other words, Kelley said, companies should step back and analyze the customer experience as if they were outsiders and viewing the experience for the first time.

Doing so is key for innovation, Kelley said.

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Disclaimers: Amadeus paid for this writer’s flight and hotel for the conference.

Philip Wolf is a Tnooz board member, and Dennis Schaal works with PhoCusWright as a research analyst.

The very recent growth of location-based services like foursquare and Gowalla, Google’s potential acquisition of ITA Software, and the introduction of Facebook’s social graph, with its universal website sign-in functionality and Like buttons, has the potential to shake up the travel business and the wider Web in really big ways.

How much? It’s anyone’s guess.

That was the theme of a PhoCusWright Town Hall at the Travdex trade show in Atlanta late yesterday afternoon as CEO Philip Wolf pointed to the disruption and led a discussion about the potential fallout.

Which will have a greater impact, he asked, a Google acquisition of ITA Software or Facebook’s social graph?

The views were mixed as Travdex attendees and analysts, sipping various libations in the exhibition hall at the Cobb Galleria Centre, chimed in with their opinions.

Wolf said Google’s acquisition of ITA Software could be “needle-moving” if it leads to “the best little app” for air search and Google “makes it open to the world.”

PhoCusWright analyst Norm Rose argued that both Facebook’s social graph — because its ripples will be felt way beyond the travel industry — and Google-ITA, which he says would bring travel metasearch into Google’s core search functionality, will both be big.

But, Rose argued that Google-ITA may be more impactful because there is so much push-back against Facebook out of privacy concerns.

Several Travdex attendees waded in with their views, with one arguing that Facebook’s impact would be larger than Google-ITA because of Facebook’s 400 million or so users, and another participant speculated that it would take Google a year to integrate ITA anyway.

As the town hall rolled on, Wolf came down on the side of the Facebook social graph having greater kapow than a Google-ITA mashup.

He said the impact of the Facebook social graph, with millions of consumers using its univeral log-in feature, could be “humongatory.”

With consumers signing-on across the Web with their Facebook screen names, bringing their personal information along with them, and with your social-network friends being able to rate hotels with the Like button, these kind of changes could be far-reaching, he argued.

“You don’t think that’s big?” Wolf said, referring to the universal log-in.

Rezgo CEO Stephen Joyce concurred, noting that the personal-data aggregation inherent in the social graph will bring game-changing delivery of pay-per click product advertising for travel and other businesses.

“This could be personalization on steroids,” Wolf agreed.

In fact, Wolf contended that the advent of the social graph’s universal log-in and the platform fragmentation inherent with the potpouri of mobile devices, are among factors leading to a conclusion that the “golden era of the Web is officially over.”

Well, that was fast.

Oh, the disruption.

And, the speed of change.

Wolf pointed to travel companies’ challenges these days when they have to optimize their offerings for the PC, disparate mobile platforms, including the iPad, as well as for YouTube and Flickr.

And etc. etc. etc.

There was much talk and debate at the Travdex town hall about the implications of other hot trends and and seemingly mind-numbing developments. Among them:

• Priceline’s overtaking Expedia in market cap.

• Online travel agencies on a growth path amidst the hotel industry’s worst year, and whether consumers would return to supplier-direct channels once travel rebounds?

• The explosive growth of foursquare and Gowalla “out of nowhere.”

• Apple’s acquisition of Siri and what that would do for Apple’s iTravel strategy.

• The impact of ancillary services and merchandising and the nature of the changes it would engender.

Amidst the discussion, an occasional smartphone would ring, a text message would ping, an iPad or two emerged out of their cases, and one attendee said he would never go back to booking his travel via fax.

Faxes were big in a seemingly less-chaotic time.

But, today faxes are so yesterday.

I recently spent a morning wandering around the Spice Market in Istanbul and I think I lost my sense of smell just from the sheer assault on the olfactory system.

I then spent the next morning in the Grand Bazaar where again, I experienced a breakdown of the senses and quickly became disoriented (ie lost) and confused (ie lost) from all the choice of merchandise, combined chatter of the merchants and shoppers and always, someone trying to get your attention to sell you something.

It’s a bit like the internet really. You go in there with a vague sense of purpose and you end up distracted, diverted, confused and even flummoxed.

And just when you thought you had it all kind of figured out, another new alley opens up, full of promise – merchandise that looks about the same but wait, isn’t that the colour you want and maybe, just maybe, you could get it cheaper?

PhoCusWright chief executive Philip Wolf calls it “the new chaos” – the proliferation and fragmentation of device, channel and platform.

You thought you had search figured out? Uncheck that. You thought you understood social networks. Uncheck that. You still struggling to figure out what content people will pay for? Check that. You confused over the number of devices that are coming out? Continue to be.

“With the universe of content exploding, SEO strategy just got worse,” says Wolf. “There’s a lot of tension about content. More publishers are putting content under paid benefits and behind firewalls.

“The strains on search will become more complicated, we can’t even predict what will happen.”

At the bloggers gathering organised by PhoCusWright at ITB Berlin, it was also interesting to see what social networks bloggers were using and for what.

The majority were using Twitter for curating editorial content, most found Facebook better for business than Twitter and the power of LinkedIn ads for recruitment purposes was mentioned.

The iPad, it was agreed, would put a stop to newspaper deliveries at home. It would also create lots of different content applications – “snackable, chargeable, brandable – just like potato chips,” said Wolf.

When asked what was Lonely Planet’s thinking about potato chips, sorry, content, CEO Matthew Goldberg says: “I’m a believer that not all content should be paid for – only differentiated and useful content. Travel is a good place to charge.”

When Goldberg took over, following BBC’s acquisition of Lonely Planet, revenues were split 75% from the core business and 25% from emerging channels. Its three-year plan is to achieve a 65/35 split while increasing the core.

And just as you think print is dead, Lonely Planet is launching a new magazine in the UK and soon, India. “I don’t think print is dead. You just have to rethink what business you are in. We are not in pulp and trees,” says Goldberg.

The same goes for the mobile platform. “The key question to ask is what business you are in. The rest is just about platforms and what platforms travellers prefer.”

I think this is a good question to ask in this time of the “new chaos”. What business are you in, what purpose do you serve and what do you want to achieve?

Otherwise, you could end up in a place like the Grand Bazaar and end up with carpets and silks that you don’t need.