Travel ancillary services group Collinson Latitude is taking some new toys straight to the consumer market via the development of two different smartphone applications.

The company, normally known for its B2B services with such industry sectors as airlines and insurance providers, has unleashed two iPhone applications this week to iTunes, one covering trip planning and another attempting to make travel more sociable.

The first, Travelplan, claims to be the only app in the marketplace that has timetable information for 750,000 scheduled flights and access to around 15,000 hotels on a directory.

The accommodation information includes details number of rooms, facilities and contact details. Users can select different elements of a trip and bundle into an itinerary.

Collinson is making great play of the offline status of the app, meaning users do not need to tap into a live data stream to access content.

Air data is provided by FlightStats.

The second app, Fly&Share, which Collinson has decided to charge £5.99 ($8), works as a trip update system so that users can notify other people in their social networks and address books when they are using a particular travel service.

The user enters the detail of a service and the app automatically sends messages at various points during a flight, for example, allowing people to learn when an aircraft has taken off or landed.

Asked why the company has developed two separate services instead of combining into a single product, an official says:

“Potentially in the future they will be, but they are two single minded products to serve different needs at different stages of the travel journey.

“There is also the logical disconnect in the middle – Travelplan allows you to identify the trip you want to take, but you haven’t booked anything yet. Fly&Share allows you to share confirmed and current travel.”

Collinson says the two apps are the first in a suite of different B2C travel products, primarily as a testing vehicle to evaluate requirements of consumers.

“What do people want? Will they use it, will they pay for it? We are also testing Apple – what are the boundaries? How much data can we put out on a phone etc, and how we connect to Facebook and Twitter.”

Global web translation provider TransPerfect is heading into the mobile world with the launch of a smartphone app which acts as a translator for 50 languages.

Officially launched for iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad this week, TransImage allows the user to take a picture with their smartphone and the app quickly translates the text into any one of 49 other languages.

As well as pictures taken immediately from the handset, TransImage will also translate other pictures contain on the phone or its browser (helpful for the camera-less iPad presumably).

The launch by TransPerfect comes just four months after Google revealed an upgrade to its Google Goggles product to allow instant translation of text.

Other similar services rolled out this year include a system by Snap2Travel which takes pictures of travel-related products in printed publications and obtain prices from travel agents.

TransPerfect claims the app can translate any text from food menus or street signs, although for more complicated fonts and cultural references the user will have to pay a fee to connect to a “human translator”.

No word as yet on when an Android version of the app will be made available.

A new FareCompare iPhone app, When-to-Fly Airfare Alerts, treats user-requested price drops like breaking news.

This is FareCompare’s first mobile app and co-founder and CEO Rick Seaney says the metasearch firm decided to enter the mobile space once Apple had enabled push-notifications for the iPhone.

The app became available in iTunes this morning.

With push-notifications, users who have used the app to sign up to track price-drops on their favorite flight routes, will get notifications on their iPhones in real-time — regardless of whether or not they have the app open and running.

Mobile phones are real-time devices, Seaney says.

“You can’t carry your desktop in your pocket,” he adds.

Seaney says Apple closely controls how companies use push-notifications on the iPhone to ensure they don’t get “spammy,” adding that he’s unaware of any other travel app that currently uses push notifications.

Users of the FareCompare app can monitor an unlimited number of trips by travel dates, a specific month or they can watch for push-notifications on any price drop for the particular destination, FareCompare says.

Seaney says FareCompare has first-mover advantage with the push-notifications in mobile travel apps as well as with the raw data feeds on fares that it gets from the Airline Tariff Publishing Company.

In fact, Seaney says, FareCompare sometimes has to slow down its price drop notifications to ensure that booking systems have the data, as well.

Fares found in the new FareCompare app can be booked through the app on Orbitz, FareCompare’s main booking partner, but Seaney acknowledges that booking capabilities on mobile apps have a long way to go.

With the new iPhone app, FareCompare now delivers price-drop notifications on the iPhone, email, Twitter and Facebook.

The app also features FareCompare’s When-to-Go Getaway Map, which uses location-based technology to highlight global fares from users’ nearest airports.

FareCompare developed the app, which is compatible with the iPhone, iPod touch and iPad, in conjuction with Mobiata, which has developed its  own mobile apps and solutions for many third parties, including HomeAway and now FareCompare, for example.

Here’s a video about the app.

Mobile network Vodafone has taken delivery of its first travel content and flight search application for smartphones, courtesy of technology firm Mantic Point.

The app is available on a number of devices, including the Apple iPhone, and follows a similar service launched on Vodafone-enabled Blackberry handsets in the US in 2008 through Worldmate.

At its basic level, users can obtain travel, currency and destination information as well as view guides on airports and transfer services.

Flight itineraries can also be included in the system and an alert system through FlightStats is also part of the personalised service.

A flight search system is included in the launch version of the app, but currently only produces results based on Innovata information.

Mantic Point CEO Mike Atherton says the flight search system will be improved shortly, possibly with some kind of metasearch system included.

The Vodafone partnership is the latest in a string on agreements between Mantic Point and various travel companies.

The Leeds, UK-based firm powers the in-flight concierge system on the British Airways London City-New York JFK business class route as well as providing mobile services for Opodo, Manchester and Bristol Airports in the UK and HolidayExtras.

Hardly a week goes by without another nail supposedly being hammered into the coffin of the travel guidebook, especially with the growth of mobile content apps.

But perhaps one answer is to somehow combine the tradition, look and feel of the travel guidebook with some of the cutting edge technology found on a mobile, such as augmented reality.

A very early and skinny prototype from AR software firms Metaio and Junaio, produced here for leading German lifestyle magazine Sueddeutsche Zeitung.

But imagine the possibilities…

A survey of travel consumers has found a third would be less likely to use a mobile travel website or application if the service malfunctioned during use.

The poll of nearly 800 US travellers, conducted by mobile platform firm Kony in conjunction with research firm PhoCusWright, also found that a quarter would would tell others about their bad experience.

A fifth claimed they would find another mobile application to use.

It’s not all bad news for app providers. Some 36% said they would switch to the company’s website as an alternative and 33% would simply ring the provider.

Interestingly, PhoCusWright research director Caroll Rheem says the percentage of users that would tell others about their bad experience increases from 25% to 32% for smartphone owners.

Mobile is clearly becoming an important area, as most studies indicate and as travel companies earmark resources to executing on a mobile strategy.

The study found that a over quarter (26%) had engaged with a travel company via SMS text message and 20% used email on a mobile to do the same.

Using mobile to reach a travel company on a social network is less advanced it appears. Just 11% had done so on their handsets, compared to 35% that engaged with a travel company on a traditional desktop or laptop computer.

Qatar Airways launched a sparkling mobile version of its website this week and raised the question once again over how to prioritise mobile web development.

The Middle Eastern airline created the new service in conjunction with mobile content specialist Mobiqa, allowing passengers to fulfil a range of tools.

Customers can check-in, view flight status, select seats for departure as well as find out information on services and the airline.

As with most mobile websites, a browser is automatically detected so functionality and screen size can be optimised for the user.

Qatar has opted for the service over developing other types of check-in and passenger tools, boasting that the system works “without the need to download an application”.

This leads to an interesting question, and one which many airlines and other travel suppliers and services will no doubt be grappling with as they develop a mobile strategy.

What are the advantages of mobile browser version of a site over a dedicated app?

For some it will be development costs and the prohibitive nature of focusing resources on a product for one or more types of handset, rather than a general mobile web version.

But perhaps the flipside of the argument is whether the additional, not critical content such as guides and other information, which can be viewed without data roaming, is a value-add for customers and should be pushed into an app.

Most of the components are in place for the next generation hotel stay to become a reality.

YourSingapore, tourist board for the South East Asian country, has put together this video clip to illustrate how each element of the hotel experience can be completed using either an iPhone, iPad, superfast broadband connection and more.

NB: Excuse the production values.

Indoor map system provider Point Inside has begun its promised global roll-out of maps for airports outside of North America.

The service was this week extended to some of the busiest airports around the world including London Heathrow, Hong Kong, Madrid, Paris CDG and Amsterdam Schiphol.

The mobile and iPad based apps show facilities such as gate locations, bars, restaurants, shops, toilets, information booths and baggage claim areas.

The system works by pinpointing a user’s location within an airport using what the company calls its SmartFix technology – a way of tracking the device within the facility via existing GPS or wi-fi systems and calibrating the location onto the map.

The company has recognised the difficulty GPS devices often have within buildings, so SmartFix prompts the user to provide his or her own position by selecting a nearby landmark.

The roll-out comes just ten weeks after the service launched in 50 airports across North America. Point Inside originally launched to provide map services for retail centres.

The addition of ten airports outside of North America is the start of a major expansion programme for the business, says Brian Wilson, VP of marketing at Point Inside.

Here is a wonderful idea from the creators of Fotopedia to aggregate high quality images of UNESCO-protected sites around the world on an Apple iPad app.

Fotopedia Heritage is the latest part of a wider project to collect photography from web users under Creative Commons, but this time curated around a single theme -- the 911 heritage sites around the world protected and under the auspices of the United Nations.

The app is actually quite simple -- a continual run through of around 20,000 images of UNESCO sites, each linked to relevant Wikipedia content and maps.

The photography is inevitably stunning and the information included easily means the app is -- probably without even trying -- one of the best travel guides currently available.

And it’s free.

Here is a long but extremely interesting interview with Fotopedia founder Jean-Marie Hullot, a former Apple and NeXT Software senior engineer, conducted by Robert Scoble. Worth a watch…