So, inevitably, I was certainly happy to see a large number of presenters at this year’s Travel Innovation Summit at the PhoCusWright conference talk about having their APIs available to third parties.

In my experience though, most of these APIs will see very little in terms of large scale integration.

You don’t have to look much further than the Programmable Web directory to find that there are, already in the market, close to a hundred APIs tagged as travel.

There are also about 490 mashups (sites that integrate one or more APIs) that are considered travel-related.

I would argue that many of the innovations presented at the Innovation Summit, especially the social trip planning ones fall under the heading of mashups, combining travel apis from Expedia, Hotwire, or Orbitz along with the Facebook OpenGraph, Google Maps, or other non-travel related APIs.

Some innovations, like FlexTrip, are meta-aggregators of APIs, combining many different feeds primarily from tour and excursions providers like Viator, Urban Adventures, TourCMS, Rezgo, and others, normalizing the content in a local database and then displaying the content in a unified homogenous manner.

In the case of FlexTrip, it is even providing an API to its own aggregated content which, when you think about it, is one big pipe that is fed by many smaller pipes.

One of the big complaints with travel APIs, however, is that they are complex and cumbersome to use.

Many of the larger, more powerful APIs require commercial agreements and most, if not all, have documentation and support that is hidden behind corporate portals.

In essence, the big gatekeepers of data make it tough to use their data.

One example of how simplifying an API can increase adoption is to look no further that Google Maps. Out of all the mashups listed on the ProgrammableWeb directory, the most prevalent API used is the Google Maps API with 2,309 mashups.

The next most popular API is Twitter with about 653 mashups.

So, why is the Google Maps API so popular? Because the API is incredibly simple to use, easy to access, fast, well documented, and supported by a large community of users.

In a more vertically specific example, we saw, at the THack Boston earlier this year, Amadeus (which has listed its APIs on Programmable Web) release a mini-API for hotel search that was very simple, light weight, fast, and easy to access.

For that event, it was the most used API, not because it was the most powerful or provided the most data, but because it was easy to implement.

At the end of the day, there are more great ideas and clever developers to implement them than there are APIs to support them.

Many of the most successful travel innovations have been built on APIs.  You need not look further than Kayak or the more recent Hipmunk to see that tapping into data and adding a layer that makes it easier for consumers to manipulate that data can be a successful model.

But these success stories are few and far between when you consider the number of potential success stories that are out there.

To all those innovators out there, including the existing legacy travel technology providers, I say the following:

Take a close look at the data that your company has locked away and think to yourself whether or not there may be some value in making some of that data available through an API.

You may even find that others are willing to pay for access to that data if it is compelling enough.  In addition to making your data accessible, look to organizations like OpenTravel to provide messaging structure and support.

Who knows, some clever developer out there may do something amazing with your data that you had never considered before.

Those discoveries and sparks of genius can only happen if you’re willing to support it by opening up and simplifying access to your content.

NB: Image via Rumpleteaser on Flickr.

Tnooz has covered its fair share of trip planning sites on the TLabs Showcase over the past 18 months and here, at the latest Travel Innovation Summit from PhoCusWright, there is a string of similar sites again.

Now, it is worth pointing out out that almost all of the trip planning sites, especially those that have integrated the sharing elements at the heart of social media, are good.

Really good.

By good, this means the designs are more often than not first-rate, the overall user experience is infinitely better than many of the online travel agencies and supplier sites on the web, and – hey! – everyone loves social media.

Right?

Well, many, many people do indeed love social media (Facebook will probably hit one billion profiles some time over the next 18 months, for starters), so there is obviously potential to tap into the enthusiasm that at least a tenth of the world’s population seemingly now have for sharing the minutae of their lives on the web.

And the apparent opportunity from integrating something as inspiration and aspirational as travel into social media, and subsequently forming content-heavy, trip planning sites, has not escaped the attenton of investors.

In the past two weeks alone, Gogobot has attracted $15 million and newbie Trippy landed $1.75 million.

But, as a succession of startups at the TIS event have found, when facing the quartet of cynics in the so-called critics circle (including Tnooz CEO Gene Quinn), there are huge questions over where these sites go after their initial launch phase.

There are a number of issues in play:

1. Scale

How do such businesses grow beyond their initial fanbases? Is it all about marketing? Can they – in the case of the Silicon Valley darlings – rely on the buzz of the tech community to spread the word to gain traction? Do they actually need massive traction to fulfil their objectives?

2. Investment

Where should these companies channel the often vast sums of money they are receiving? Marketing? Product development? What should be the priority to give backers a return on investment? Nobody seems to have answered this question yet.

3. Differentiation

Simple. How do these trip planners REALLY set themselves apart from one another. For all the user experience and cracking design, functionality is often too similar.

4. Facebook

The elephant in the room, obviously. While so many social media-led trip planners rely on Facebook for the social graph, integation through Facebook Connect, etc, will the omnipresent social network – as it evolves – become the place where people do their trip planning? Why bother with all those others?

Both are among the presenters Nov. 15 at the Hollywood, Fla., event, as they vie for bragging rights in the massive, yet notoriously fractured car-service market, and try to scale their operations around the US and abroad.

In his TIS presentation, Limos.com CEO T.J. Clark said GroundLink is not a “marketplace” and this limits its value to customers.

The two companies have different models.

GroundLink owns 350 cars in New York City and contracts with affiliates throughout the US and in several major cities around the world, including Paris and Rome.

When you search GroundLink for a ride from the Westin Diplomat hotel in Hollywood, Florida, to Miami Airport on Nov. 23, you see set pricing based on the car type.

In contrast, when you conduct a similar search on Limos.com, which doesn’t own any of its own cars, you can shop around and compare prices from various car services like this:

After Clark’s presentation, Rod Cuthbert, who served on a critics’ panel, said he tried the GroundLink app and liked it, so what would compel him to start using Limos.com instead?

Clark replied that travel consumers have shown that they enjoy shopping for competitive pricing and that the Limos.com marketplace approach would be a differentiator and lead to plenty of “switchers.”

In an interview this morning, prior to the Limos.com presentation, Daniel Leon, GroundLink’s general manager of mobile, said that Limos.com doesn’t stand behind its service and forces customers to deal with disparate car-service companies if they run into customer service problems.

One of GroundLink’s key advantages is that is software tightly integrates with affiliates’ dispatch systems so GroundLink can drop potential car-service jobs into affiliates’ systems when they have cars available, leading to fewer “service failures.”

GroundLink and Limos.com have had their clashes before over their rival mobile apps.

They won’t agree on which company should be the top dog anytime soon.

What they do agree on is that the car-service market is gargantuan and wide open as numerous players go online and get mobile.

The Brighter, Bolder, Better competition was unveiled today and created to give anyone or organisation around the industry the opportunity to form and develop projects to be judged by a Blue Ribbon panel of experts.

The winning entry will get Euro 20,000 to help develop the project further. Runners-up will get access to a further pool of Euro 10,000.

Judges selected for the panel to decide the overall winner so far include Andrew Tessler (Oxford Economics) and Mujteba Naqvi (Bonvoy). The competition website will allow visitors to view and vote on the various entries.

Amadeus VP of marketing and distribution, Ian Wheeler, says:

“We’ve created Brighter, Bolder, Better ideas for travel because we genuinely want to listen to what the industry feels can be improved about the travel experience, from beginning to end.

“At Amadeus we always recognise true innovation and will support the winning idea with 20,000 EUR of our own money in order to help make it become a reality. Indeed, we are 100% committed to working towards a Brighter, Bolder, Better travel industry more generally and we look forward to the results of the competition being made public mid next year.”

Further details are to be announced in the New Year.

NB: Tnooz is a media partner for the Brighter, Bolder, Better project, using the TLabs section of the site and other initiatives to be announced in the coming months.

But, in the meantime, just for fun, I came up with my own list of awards. Some of them will not necessarily result in the popping of corks by the companies mentioned.

The “Most Rapid Fire Live Demo Award”

Mujteba Naqvi can talk as fast as a Westin Kierland Hotel valet guy can drive a golf cart (I saw a woman hit by one on Monday – fortunately she wasn’t badly hurt), but his hands on the keyboard for running a live demo were moving even faster than his mouth.

At least the internet connection was fast enough to keep up with him. The Bonvoy message of “plan, book and split” to illustrate their all-within-Facebook group planning and booking tool was a different angle on the common theme of itinerary planning that many other presenters were talking about.

If there was a most enthusiastic presenter award, Mujteba Naqvi would probably tie with Adam Goldstein from Hipmunk for that as well.

The “Best Sales Pitch Award”

I don’t know if he will get a look in for the official innovation trophy, but if any one of the presenters is likely to leave Scottsdale with the most new leads, I’m guessing it will be Frank Grasso from e-channel search.

In the critics circle afterwards Frank was taken to task for not putting his impressive ROI claims at the front of his presentation, but somehow I doubt he’s too concerned.

The “VC Groupthink Award”

Groupthink amongst venture capitalists is not a new concept, but this award from the Phocuswright conference goes to Sophie Forest from Brightspark Ventures – she wasn’t even one of entrants in the Travel Innovation Summit, but now it is judge the judges time.

Forest sat on the Critics Circle and was impressed with Gogobot on the basis that they had raised some serious money from high profile names in Silicon Valley. The people in the audience I was sitting between were both somewhat less impressed.

On my left was a woman who runs an established competing site, and she was telling me that Gogobot are doing some, err, creative social mailing by contacting all of her users suggesting they open accounts with Gogobot.

At dinner last night one of my guests told me he had received as many as four similar dubious invitations from Gogobot. But with founder and CEO Travis Katz pushing his MySpace credentials, maybe this is not too surprising.

As online personalization expert Greg Linden wrote back in 2006: MySpace “had a database of 100 million email addresses” which they hit to announce their launch.

The “You Don’t Need to be a Travel Industry Insider to Have A Good Idea Award”

One of the criticisms of Gogobot from people sitting around me was that they knew social, but didn’t know travel.

Just to prove that this is not always a limitation, you need look no further than Adam Goldstein from Hipmunk. Almost everyone I spoke to was impressed with this company, although when I was talking to Adam after over a beer at the Tnooz Appy Hour he did mention my previous article on Tnooz about Hipmunk – with his tongue firmly planted in his cheek he mentioned that a printout of that article was being used as a dart board in the office!

The “You Really Know Your Target Market Award”

About half way though the presentation from Peter Sullivan of Vacation Relation I was losing interest, doubting whether people planning a vacation really wanted to meet unknowns via a social network prior to arrival.

And then he mentioned that Vacation Relation was working with a company called Studentcity which is apparently one of the largest companies in the Spring Break market. And then he started talking about working with DMOs like Las Vegas and Atlantic City and talking about potentially working worth MTV.

It reminds me of WAYN moving into the travel dating scene – there is so much money in online dating, so if anyone can merge that concept with the single traveler party scene then I am sure there is money to be made somewhere.

The “I Was Expecting Nothing But Left With Something Award”

This award is a tie between two players in the hotel space: OffandAway and Tripalertz. Maybe I was expecting nothing because I don’t follow the online hotel scene that closely, but OffandAway’s model of paying $1 to put a 10 cent incremental bid on a luxury hotel suite is something I would never have thought of – but in a strange way it might have legs.

If I pay my own money it is closer to gambling, but if the bidding dollars were offered as a part of some promotional tie in then I could see it becoming very addictive.

Tripalertz are aiming to be the Groupon of the hotel business. By bringing a group buying dynamic that does not require travel on the same dates as your friends to online hotel booking is something that really deserves to succeed.

The “I Was Obviously Expecting Too Much Award”

Or maybe I should call this the I was expecting something and left with nothing award. This one is a tie between Everbread and Vayant. As I said to the airline executive sitting next to me during the Everbread session, “everyone wants a piece of online shopping.”

Based on some of the press I’d been reading in recent months, I was expecting one or both to be the hot new thing that might make the incumbents look passé.

But just as the Simon Cowell of the Critics Circle, Rod Cuthbert of Viator criticized Amadeus for talking down to an educated audience of travel professionals, I felt that neither Everbread nor Vayant really let me see under the hood to understand what was so innovative about their approach to online shopping.

Success is going to need a lot more than just split ticket recommendations. Vayant illustrating this by combining a business class international fare connecting with a European LCC just seems like a totally unrealistic option to me.

What happens with a disruption or a schedule change?

[NB: Disclosure - both Everbread and Vayant are competing with shopping products from my employer, Amadeus]

The “It’s Not Me, It’s You Award”

Also known as the “I Just Don’t Get It and Neither Does Anyone Else I Asked” award. Maybe I’m being a little harsh, so I made the effort to go up the stand of Corporate O and talked to the staff to find out exactly what their product is and does.

Now I get it – it is kind of like the original Yahoo hierarchical search engine of 15 years ago, but with pictures instead of text. Apparently these guys only got accepted into the Travel Innovation Summit on the week prior to the conference and they were not even listed in the official program, so they were starting with a major handicap.

In the horse race that is who will win the official trophy from Phocuswright, I’m calling Corporate O as just one race away from the glue factory.

The Collings Critics Circle

So there you have it – for what it is worth, that was the good the bad and the ugly from the Innovation of the Phocuswright conference.

I didn’t cover the companies presenting social media metrics, analysis and semantic search tools, nor the companies based on frequent flier points (Usingmiles and Mileblaster) nor each one of many companies trying to gain a foothold in the travel inspiration and trip planning space.

That said, there is no doubt that sitting through so many pitches in one day really gets the creative juices flowing.

Despite some of the harsh comments above, it does takes a lot of nerve to get up and present your innovative ideas to a critical audience like the one at Phocuswright so I’ve got a lot of respect for all the presenters that gave it a go.

There is no doubt that those such as myself who sat through the Travel Innovation Summit walked away richer from the experience.

The runners-up were TrustYou, CruiseLabs and GroundLink

Last night I tweeted my top four picks. Two of them made the final four. My picks were all transportation search companies. I chose air search companies Everbread and Vayant, metasearch innovator Hipmunk and online rail company SilverRail.

The two runners up I chose were trip planner Gogobot and social media monitoring company Revinate (competitor to finalist TrustYou).

It is true to say that I came to the conference with some pre-conceived notions on these companies.

I believe that while mobile and social media are the areas of innovation that have captured the bulk of the buzz and media attention this year, it is in transportation search and results that can have the most immediate impact in sales and conversion.

As a reminder, innovation is not just an idea or a beta or something that is cool to look at.

True innovation is a creative idea put into action – successfully executed – that has impact on changing a market. Online transportation search (air, rail, car) looks in 2010 much like it looked in the early days of online travel.

There are a lot more filters and options presented to consumers but the list approach with predictable combinations of fares from one type of transportation has remained.

The four innovators I picked have been trying to rewrite those rules and have taken steps to put the new rules into action.

In the case of Everbread and Vayant, they have products the claim to (I need to see more of them before I can “definitely do”) provide search results with routing, carrier and fare combinations that are not available in tradditional search.

If true and they develop traction, this could profoundly change not only consumer behaviour but also airline yield and route management. See my story from yesterday on Everbread. Clearly “the crowd” will need more convincing.

Hipmunk has generated more buzz that any other three month old start up I have come across (Tnooz piece here).

During its presentation, CEO and co-founder Adam Goldstein showed screen after screen of airline search results from top tier OTAs where less than a third of the screen was devoted to the search results.

In Hipmunk they have devoted more than 90% of the screen to search results indexed by “agony” (internal algorithm for measuring how painful a flight will be) rather than price or time. It looks good. Really good. If Hipmunk gains traction their look and feel will influence product developers across the online travel world.

Finally to SilverRail. CEO Aaron Gowell felt the need to prove to a mainly US audience the importance of and potential for online rail. He won that part of the case easily.

Jim Hornthal (of Preview and Triporati fame) pointed out a number of the challenges in selling rail online (story from yesterday here).  But if anyone can get it right it looks like Aaron and the team can.

If they do, and can do to rail what online distribution has done for air, it will be one of the most profound innovations in the sale of transportation.

I spoke with him just after the announcement of the finalists and (unsurprisingly) he was very happy with the announcement and busy doing some refinements and tweaks to his pitch.

In the end, it does not matter what I think, as democracy has a funny way of producing results that no one expects (as recent election results in Australia and the UK prove).

While I may be hot for transportation search, the attendees of PhoCusWright also have a lot of time for mobile innovation bringing mobile search company Goby and mobile app developer Kony into the top four.

Later today and tomorrow, all seven will pitch – this time to a panel of judges.

For more background check out my posts from yesterday on Revinate and TrustYou, Everbread and SilverRail.

A reasonably worthy winner, some are saying, and an unusual one given that many believe innovation comes primarily from smaller companies who have to throw their efforts into creating something new in order to challenge the status quo.

Affinity Shopper is a classic skunkworks project from within one of the largest travel technology firms on the planet, so kudos to Amadeus for attempting to create something it, and some others, say is a game-changer.

The next stage for Amadeus will be to see how quickly such a fundamentally different way of searching for air fares is embraced – or not – by visitors to airline websites.

Abandoning From-To-Date type search in favour of less tangible details such as Price Range, Interests and Regions is an obvious approach to take.

And with Lufthansa on-board as its first customer and two other unnamed airlines apparently going live by the end of the year, Amadeus will find out pretty quickly if this change is welcome.

It could, of course, ask Air New Zealand.

The flag carrier from the southern hemisphere has created its own similar service – a product which has a number of similar tools to Affinity Shopper.

There is also QFly from the Netherlands.

Some while other sites may consider themselves to be the pioneers, Affinity Shopper has developed something which has the best bits from both services and, most importantly, added the activity-based elements into the pot.

It is what we might call, a meaningful mashup.

Although I have written about a couple of innovations that I really like, there is one innovation that seemed to get very little attention during the #tcamp and post-summit discussion is SpeedRFP.

In a nutshell, here is why I like what SpeedRFP has done.

The “DUH” factor. During their presentation, SpeedRFP was the only presentation that I watched that caused me to wonder why this hadn’t already been done.

It seemed like such a common sense solution for an overly complex and tedious task.

I discovered afterwards that no one has created a shared RFP platform that allows the planner to manage and control their RFPs across multiple hotels and simplifies the process of submitting an RFP directly to a hotel.

The innovation is not technology dependent.

By this I mean that it is less of a technology innovation and more of a business automation innovation.

SpeedRFP is just using some very simple and well executed technologies to optimize and simplify the meetings and planning segment.

Looking at the technology and the administration, it is a fairly straightforward and rudimentary structure.

That is not a bad thing but rather a confirmation that this is not about WizBang gadgets or new fangled widgets, but good old fashioned process automation.

By applying some smarts to an online form, SpeedRFP hopes to save hours of time and increase transparency for both planners and hotels.

SpeedRFP is serving a very specific market need that is well defined and barriers to entry for the solution should be relatively low.

Again, this tells me that when SpeedRFP starts aggressively marketing their solution, there will be a lot of hands slapping foreheads.

The only resistance I can see might be some resistance from hotels who don’t want to make it easy for planners to submit RFPs to their competitors.

If SpeedRFP can show that planners are actively using their tool and are more likely to submit an RFP if the hotel uses the tool, then this may reduce the resistance to adoption.

From my discussions with SpeedRFP, this resistance doesn’t seem to be an issue and they expect to have over a thousand hotels using the platform within the next four months. In my experience, the timing may be ambitious, but the opportunity is certainly strong.

The greatest challenge that SpeedRFP faces is that now that they have launched, there is a low barrier to entry for potential competitors.

Although they have a patent pending for the specific technology, my experience has been that there are many ways to skin a cat in any industry, especially when it comes to using technology as an enabler.

If they are able to move quickly to secure a critical mass of hotels and planners, then SpeedRFP could be a real game changer for a segment of the industry that is mired in complicated manual processes.

The PhoCusWright Travel Innovation Summit is over.

Of the 33 presenters, four will be chosen to go through to the Center Stage presentation and compete for the winner’s trophy.

Here is my pick for the top four (and four more I wanted to pick but did not hear enough to know).

Dapper:

My EveryYou concept is all about the ability to target recommendations not just to the individual but each version of the individual (ie business traveller Tim, family traveller Tim, buddy traveller Tim).

I have focused in my posts on the data analysis and management side.  Dapper is a system that can take a website and in moments generate dynamic deal and content widgets.

Allows a booking site to take their thousands of individual pages and generate practically unlimited number of dynamic deal and promotional options.

If you combine this with data analysis of consumer behaviour then you have the founding pieces of EveryYou;

Tourabout:

A startup on the other side of Sydney Harbour from my home so of course they make my top four.

Boxing kangaroo loyalties aside, Tourabout have built a GDS-like product for tour operator and destination product and combined it with social media and search technologies.

Gives consumer access to a product set that was previously hidden on the brochure wall of a hotel, trapped in the mind of local tour agents and hidden within blog posts.

Consumers can now search, book and share  tour operator product and gain from the expertise of destination services provider;

X+1:

Another site that gets my vote because of its tie to targeted content and recommendations (EveryYou again).

Allows content and deals to be auto generated from existing pages and targeted at individual consumers.

Like my comments for Dapper – I love the layout but will need to know about the data analysis side; and

Traveltainment:

Product from Amadeus that changes dynamic packaging search.

Old school dynamic packaging is matching discounted net air and hotel/car inventory into a single price.

Consumer gets savings, suppliers keeps individual prices hidden to protect transparent priced products.

Traveltainment does packaging but has changed the search process to allow consumers to search based on experience and desires rather than just destination.

The addition of multi-dimensional search parameters outside of date and destination is an overdue innovation in package search.

Nevertheless…

I wanted to believe in the following but something stopped me. These are products that I would have put in my top four but something held me back

Localyte:

It claims 40,000 individual contributors – self appointed local experts – providing content and direct response answers to questions on what to do in a location.

Mentioned 700,000 reviews and 20 million words per month.

An amazing amount of content and we were further gob-smacked by this presentation as none of us in the blogger pit had heard of these guys.

But I am held back from voting for them because I have concerns about the accreditation of the local and how to be sure they are not a rep of a particular travel product and therefore biased;

EveryTrail:

Everyone is telling me that this was amazing presentation. Unfortunately I missed it. Shame on me but that is why I can’t vote for them.

iPerception:

I am a data nut. I joined the online travel industry because of a love of finding and accessing data about customers that could be used to be a better marketer, seller and expert.

iPerception showed us an amazing looking dashboard for analysing consumer shopping and booking behaviour.

Combining attitudinal research with behavioural data. Unfortunately the presentation spent too much time introducing the idea and only moments showing the interface.

Half way through the presentation I tweeted “I want to like this because I love data – but am not getting it”. Three mins later but with only 1 minute to go I tweeted “ok – now almost getting it. Data that shows me customers did not book as saw a price change. That I get”.

A better presentation with more showing the data could have resulted in iPerceptions getting my vote; and

Translations.com:

Showed an automated translation product.  At the end of the presentation they were able – within seconds – to translate a randomly selected web page and translate it into Chinese.

Unfortunately translation is all about accuracy and context.

It is impossible to like Translations.com just on speed of translation. Without seeing accuracy in the product I can’t vote for it.

Edward Hasbrouck made the great point that it would have been better to take a Chinese site and insta-translate it into English with a comparison to Google translate.

The actual finalists will be announced later today.

NB: Full Tnooz summary of all presenters here.

Thirty-four ten-minute presentations from early stage start-ups to skunkworks in large travel organisations were made over the course of the day.

Two yet-to-launch, Alpha, companies were also invited to showcase their products.

The overall winner will be announced on Thursday 19 November 2009. Here is a short review and analysis of each participant.

10BestSolutions

“10Best’s knowledge about the travel and hospitality industry is reflected in VinePulse, an industry-unique social media reputation monitoring and response tool. VinePulse offers a user-friendly, flexible, comprehensive dashboard that allows all the stakeholders – from corporate managers, to regional managers, down to individual property managers – to listen and interact.”

Analysis: A very slick and easy-to-use interface to track mentions of brands in social media and elsewhere on the web. I suspect the tools it has aggregated are being used anyway by marketing departments in large organisations – but it could certainly be a valuable service for smaller companies,  but only if they are willing to part with money to buy the service. No mention of the business model.

AboutAnywhere

“AboutAnywhere is an OTA that charges hotels a 10% margin, which is then reinvested to provide consumers with tangible benefits through strategic partnerships with major consumer brands. Hotels control their positions within their destination through an auction-based PPC tool. AboutAnywhere republishes hotel Twitter feeds, allowing hotel tweets to reach a wider audience, and allowing consumers to use this information to choose a hotel.”

Analysis: No innovative technology here to speak of – just some interesting and bold pricing plans which the founders hope will put pressure on OTAs. Plans for integration of flights and package holidays.

Other Tnooz analysis.

Amadeus IT Group

“Affinity Shopper is an innovative solution for travellers searching for airfares on airline websites. With Affinity Shopper technology, the traveller no longer needs to conform to the traditional from-to-search concept, turning the traditional search page on its head.” Further information from Tnooz.

Analysis: Is this a potential game-changer in air fare search? Affinity Shopper is certainly a fundamentally different way of putting some intuitive search tools in the hands of users. The map might be tricky for visitors to get the hang off – if only familiar with traditional airline website search – but the overall user experience is extremely good and the filtering tools and integration into the booking platform is seemless.

CarTrawler

“CarTrawler has built an application for all map-enabled smartphones that allows consumers to find the closest and cheapest car-rental offerings by using their GPS-enables cellphones to locate car rental depots on the location-sensitive map. Users can book a car using the phone with only one touch, or can use one touch to call the appropriate reservation desk.”

Analysis: “Trying to make car hire sexy” – very neat app which draws in availability, price, location of car rental providers. Allows call-feed and mobile booking facility. One of the best elements of the app? Extremely low bandwidth to stream the data. Only available on new Nokia Ovi system, although existing platforms in the pipeline.

CheapLimoRates

“CheapLimoRates is a comparison shopping and booking engine website for the limousine industry. CheapLimorates enables customers to search, book, request quotes, and manage personal/corporate accounts. What makes the company unique is that it is the first comparison shopping and booking engine website in the $10 billion limo industry.”

Analysis: Limos are sexy to some, but how do you make a site which is essentially a metasearch engine for flashy cars sexy? With difficulty if this is anything to go by. Some strong imagery a few pages in plus decent content and product range, but missing something.

ConnectMe 360 – ALPHA

“Twavl is a directory of local Twitter profiles for hotels, restaurants and other travel destinations. Tawvl helps local businesses learn how to use Twitter to attract new business by using maps, videos, reviews, menus and other rich media to provide virtual tours and gain the trust of an increasingly discerning audience.”

Analysis: Confusing web service which makes use of Twitter to find product information. Sorry…

Dapper

“Travel advertisers have a constantly changing inventory, and Dapper Ads allow them to connect their travel offers in real-time to their display ad campaigns. Dapper Ads’ intent engine uses a combination of real-time bidding and geo, behavioural, semantic and contextual cues to decide exactly which impressions to buy, and then which offer from your website inventory to show in the ad creative, each time the ad loads.”

Analysis: A clever piece of kit which effectively makes an advertiser’s content more interesting on websites. The back-end system is very neat – allowing the advertiser to cherry pick which offers they want included in a flash-based ad through a combination of drag-and-drop and click-select. The service also taps into the contextual arena by allowing the advertiser to specify which keywords are most likely to be associated with the content, meaning the ad can be placed in a relevant position.

Decizium

“The YourTour engine creates complete trip proposals (attractions, accommodation and routing) based on individual user preferences in a matter of seconds to deliver what would normally take hours or even days of online travel planning.”

Analysis: Pretty good user experience and some interesting tools but not sure where it stands out amongst the trip planning crowd.

Other Tnooz analysis.

Exalead

“Exalead provides next-generation smart search technology to travel sites to improve the relevance and trust of travel search and booking experiences. Typical travel customers spend hours in multiple sessions on multiple websites to book travel reservations. Exalead shortens this process by combining travel planning, search and deals into a single process that refines their interests in seconds and concludes their transaction in minutes.”

Analysis: Unfortunately not as inspiring as the perhaps the creators would hope for in a market already heavily served by content sites, travel planning providers and deals publishers.

Expedia Media Solutions

“StorePoint Expandables take expandable rich media and marry it with micro-site content to deliver rich, highly relevant content that immerses travel consumers in an engaging micro-site experience captured within the expanded creative panel. StorePoint micro-site design brings valuable information to the customer at an earlier stage in the research and/or transactional funnel without having to navigate away from the page.”

Analysis: Interesting and creative use of display advertising where clients can integrate product lines, content and video. However, it is an ad-led product and probably an initiative most ad creative agencies are either doing already or in the product pipeline.

Gliider

“Gliider is a research tool that lets the user find and gather travel info from any site on the web, then shows deals specific to that trip. It is the only travel tool that permits the user to grab content from any site on the web with a simple and intuitive drag-and-drop feature. Gliider is the only travel tool with Ask Around – a way to get travel advice from people that are known and trusted via Facebook.”

Analysis: Del.icio.us for travel with some nice bells and whistles on it, Gliider is a rather tidy browser plug-in that which could be handy for the procrastinating travel planners. The drag-and-drop feature looks very simple and easy-to-use and there is clearly some pretty good software behind it. Wonder how Google Wave will impact on the service, potentially? Probably missing a trick by not having a mobile service to transfer content to.

EveryTrail

“EveryTrail for iPhone and Android lets users search, download, navigate and share trips while on the go, creating an unprecedented deep travel experience. Its trip database of over 200,000 trips from over 140 countries, all created by a 100,000-strong member community, ensures that wherever in the world the user is, plenty of nearby trips can be found and followed by using a smartphone.”

Analysis: Quite brilliant mobile app which has got not only some extremely clever features but traffic AND engagement. The interface where users can plot their journeys directly into the system using geolocation software on the handset is clever, the ability to share the trip with users on the main site and Facebook et al is relevant, and the overall user experience with the brand is excellent. 1,000 uploads a day is extraordinary and regular visitor numbers around 250,000 mark.

Goby

“Goby is a new type of search engine for exploring new things to do in your free time, from taking a unique vacation to creating a weekend adventure. Originally developed as an MIT research project, Goby utilises advanced, deep web search technology to provide users access to information about a vast array of leisure activities, events, dining and lodging options sourced from databases across the web.”

Analysis: Superb user experience. Goby is a pure content-driven site with some extremely intuitive tools to create an different way of searching for travel and leisure-time products. As mentioned here, Goby opens up some useful opportunities for niche product providers, but the research and data-mining needed to include them all might be a heavy drain on resources.

GuestCentric

“GuestCentric’s SaaS platform allows independent hotels to develop long-standing relationships with guests, improve online revenues and lower expenses associated with online distribution, through the use of web 2.0 technologies. For reasonable prices, Guestcentric provides easy-to-use tools, that up until now, were only available to hotels with big budgets and large teams. With GuestCentric, independent hoteliers are able to control the distribution and customer-relationship power that the internet provided and can easily provide the professional online experience that guests demand.”

Analysis: Twitter-centric tool which could be extremely handy for hotels. It’s a clever system and allows for some nifty pre-trip CRM and marketing. Question marks over how the service deals with high volume.

iPerceptions

“The unique integration of Voice of Cusotmer survey data with corresponding behavioural/clickstream data, delivered through an advanced interactive dashboard. The most innovative version of this integration is made possible by matching relevant session-level Google Analytics raw data with matching individual VoC survey responses, as opposed to the commonly available aggregated data.”

Analysis: Complicated – by definition – but detailed and potentially valuable tool to give website owners the ability to track, monitor and deal with variances in traffic and user behaviour. Whether or not website owners are willing to abandon their existing monitoring tools remains to be seen.

Language Weaver

“Language Weaver is launching a web-based application to provide trusted, automated translation for the travel industry. This product will deliver translations out of the box at a quality level that meets the requirements of travel companies that are focused on hospitality, booking and publishing. This will enable companies to launch sites, services and information simultaneously and cost-effectively across many languages.”

Analysis: Another intuitive web-based language system which clearly does an important and valuable job as travel sites expand into new regions and need to localise their content. The Language Weaver tool also includes a system to ensure links and link-related issues are included.

Localyte

“Localyte is a growing community of over 40,000 local experts who actively help travellers at their destinations. It is the world’s first living, breathing travel guides and is available on the web, through mobile devices and now – for the first time – through third party websites. Travellers use Localyte in their planning to gain the insider knowledge that only locals have.”

Analysis: Great use of locals (and astonishing number) to help travellers plan trips and give tips and advice. Excellent to see there is a good incentive scheme to reward the local helpers and traffic-usage is good. Integrating into a mobile app is obvious but hugely relevant for on-site engagement, plus the white label version clearly gives the company scale.

Milestone Internet Marketing

“EBuzz Connect is a online social media management system for hotels, restaurants and businesses to monitor and manage their online reputation and social media channels from an integrated single interface. The system enables hotels to respond to reviews and comments from the tool whenever the channels offer capabilities for hotels to respond. In addition to social media channels, eBuzz Connect also monitors online travel agency channels such as Expedia and Travelocity.”

Analysis: Probably the best of the social media monitoring tools on show. A very well designed dashboard which includes every area of social media coverage such as TripAdvisor, Facebook, blogs, forums, Twitter et al. The tools also allows specific keyword analysis and the ability to weight the importance of coverage on individual sites. Not a game-changer by any means, but a useful service.

Mondial Interactive

“Travel Insurance 2.0 is the first offering of a revolutionary ancillary revenue platform that maximises travel insurance revenue per traveller for Mondial’s partners. Travel Insurance 2.0 uses web services, innovative merchandising techniques and advanced statistical algorithms to promote continual advancement in travel insurance sales per traveller. Through real-time information transfer from our partner, we perform segmentation analyses and then create the optimal mix of product, content, graphics and choice architecture to drive ancillary revenue from the sale of travel insurance.”

Analysis: Doesn’t appear to much more than a contextual travel insurance advertising platform. However, ancillary services are king and if third parties are able to sell a few more travel insurance packages bolted onto an existing product then Mondial will have achieved something.

Planetism – ALPHA

“The world’s first travel website to empower uses to research and book vacation options based upon their budget , rather than a particular destination, Planetism will forever change the way people shop for vacations. Planetism will provide users multiple vacation options (air and hotel), all tailored specifically to the user’s budget. Dynamic GUI will invite action on the part of the user, simplify management of results, and allow for expedient purchase.”

Analysis: Yet another trip planning and search site claiming a seismic shift in the way people search for travel.

SpeedRFP

“SpeedRFP is the first and only online request for proposal tool that is completely portable. When planning an event, meeting or incentive trip, SpeedRFP lets you take your RFPs along anywhere on the web and submit an RFP on any site that accepts SpeedRFP, in as little as three clicks. The site allows users to submit an RFP to any hotel in the world, whether or not that hotel’s website in SpeedRFP-enabled.”

Analysis: Leftfield, in terms of its position against the other firms playing the game here today, but undoubtedly a worthy entrant with some clever software crunching the gears behind the scenes. Has already secured some major partnerships with hotel chains and there is strong adoption and growth.

Tourabout

“Tourabout has created a real-time Social GDS for vacation operators, destination activity companies and DMOs. A range of interlinked social, media and product technologies merge commerce and community to enable organisations to directly engage travellers earlier in the planning process in ways that demonstrate expertise, build social equity and increase bookings.” More information from Tnooz.

Analysis: Any product that connects and allows engagement between niche operators and users is going to be broadly welcome given that the barriers to entry on other content sites for companies are high. There is a question over whether the site will be able to attract users when they can reach out directly to providers, but alternatively if its THE place to go to find such information and interact with such activity providers then it has big potential.

Translations.com

“Translations.com provides clients with an unparalleled group of resources to deliver high-quality translations for any type of content. Its innovative GlobalLink OneLink application gives organisations the ability to launch multilingual websites with zero internal IT or project management requirements, and provides an automated solution for keeping multilingual websites in sync with their source language equivalents.”

Analysis: Clever software at the heart of the product and probably useful for smaller page sites. The issue with translating initiatives is that they shouldn’t be something to be taken lightly, or necessarily quickly. So while the technology behind the scenes here is no doubt good and intuitive, speed is perhaps not the KPI. Oh, and Google Translations…

Travel Guard

“Travel Guard has developed a comprehensive suite of innovative enhancements to its travel agency technology, ProfitPlus. These enhancements include highlighting to agents the right coverage for travellers at the point-of-sale based upon data heuristics, and providing expert-based email communications pushed out through its proprietary EMS technology, including automated marketing to support partners and encourage client retention.”

Analysis: Interesting tool for agents if it strips out the time consuming efforts of retailers when browsing multiple insurance provider sites or brochures. In addition it has an interesting CRM tool which acts as a communication tool for agents pre and post-booking and allows agencies to have a stronger relationship with the customer, rather than passing them on to the supplier.

Travelport

“Journey Manager represents a traveller-centric online experience, leveraging  social networking and journey collaboration, across all consumer devices. In doing so, Journey Manager provides an end-to-end travel planning and booking platform, throughout the entire travel lifecycle.”

Analysis: Interesting and hugely improved platform for third parties out of the Travelport biz development team which allows users to manage joint search and booking in quite a user-friendly and meaningful way. The interface is ease-to-use and makes use of some innovative tools such as mobile management and other trip concierge services.

Traveltainment

“Traveltainment’s technology serves the next generation of leisure traveller with solutions that more intuitive and dimensional, allowing them to search in the way they think, asking questions such as: ‘Where can I go? what can I do for what I want to spend?’ Traveltainment has created an online leisure-traveller playground where holidaymakers can explore and determine the trip they are interested in, based on their desired travel experience.” More information from Tnooz.

Analysis: Plenty of elements to the overall pie. The Traveltainment system(s) appears to be aimed at multi-million dollar businesses, given the sheer number of different services on offer, such as web interfaces, content tools and Microsoft Surface applications. All rather good though.

Traxo

“Traxo is a centralised and constantly updated travel dashboard that members can use to manage, organise and share their travel plans. Traxo’s ‘set-and-forget’ model automatically aggregates travel information from across the major online travel sites, eliminating the need to enter trips by hand or constantly forward confirmation emails. Traxo allows users to selectively share their past and upcoming trips with the friends they trust and helps promotes travel supplier and agency brands via social networks such as Facebook.”

Analysis: WAYN, Dopplr TripIt and now Traxo! Traxo takes the itinerary management area a tiny step further by allowing users to track their itinerary by integrating their usual booking sites into the system. The system tracks changes to an itinerary and integrates quite nicely into Facebook and a user’s other social networks.

TripCase

“TripCase is a consumer, post-booking mobile application platform that can automatically import PNR information into a trip container providing easy, one-click access to trip details, keeping the traveller organised throughout a trip. Manual upload is also available if the PNR information cannot be accessed or if the consumer wishes to add in more details. TripCase provides consumers with details on hotel, rental car and airline providers.” More information from Tnooz.

Analysis: Entering a growing market which already has TripIt and Worldmate. Some decent functionality, however, with a very nice app dashboard. Clearly having the mighty Sabre behind it helps in terms of potential reach. Will be forever innovating against the other app providers to include more bells and whistles. Which isn’t a bad thing.

TripWare

“TripWare’s product line allows business travellers to plan, book, and manage travel directly in business calendars. TripWare’s algorithms calculate loyalty, behaviour and future travel needs.”

Analysis: Despite the intuitive and easy-to-use interface, it appears Tripware is only useful for Microsoft Outlook users. And only those in corporates who do not use TMCs to organise their own flights, hotel and other travel requirements, which is admittedly still a large market. Nevertheless, some of the predictive tools are extremely well integrated and could be very practical.

Vanguard ID Systems

“100% accurate web to print on-demand luggage tips with uploadable graphics allows customers to immediately identify their luggage from across the room. The customer’s keystrokes literally make the product using an advanced cloud-based manufacturing process. Luggagetag.com provides a lifetime guarantee.”

Analysis: Fun. Nice Christmas gift, perhaps? Quirky ancillary service for suppliers and OTAs? The tag printing service is nice, but the meat on the bones of the Vanguard system is the RFID hardware, allowing users to track their luggage by buying an easy-to-use USB tag to place in their kit.

Voyage.tv

Voyage.tv is a new media channel focused on experiential travel discovery. It is distributed online at voyage.tv and in nearly 30 million US homes via free cable TV video on-demand. Its affluent urban audience is engaged through original video on select luxury properties and in-destination lifestyle interests – such as spa and gourmet – all professionally produced in vivid high definition. Rich editorial content complements the video, linking consumers’ aspirational viewing behaviour with a world-class booking engine.”

Analysis: Okay, it’s a TV channel, streaming system and a video content provider. There is some interesting features such as click-thru tools to party websites.

Voyij

“Born out of frustration of searching for a travel deal (sales, promotions, discounts), the Voyij founders saw an opportunity to bring innovation to this underserved, yet significant category of travel. Unlike virtually every other travel site, Voyij does not require your destination or dates of travel. Rather, Voyij prefers customers provide only their home airports and let Voyij find everything on sale, relevant to them.”

Analysis: Travelzoo with a few bells, whistles and all-important automation, Voyij is starting to push the boundary of deals publishing with a vastly different user interface to other sites in the same space. Integrating Twitter streaming into the service adds the all-important social media element to the mix and the development of affiliate channels indicates growth potential.

x+1

“x+1 makes online media and marketing more effective by identifying highly valuable customers and prospects and serving up relevant content on ad units, sites and landing pages. x+1 products enable online marketers to reach their target audience anywhere on the web. Site+1 is an audience management solution that automatically assembles data about customers and chooses the statistically optimal messaging to show each visitor in order to drive more profitable site visits.”

Analysis: Another intuitive B2B advertising platform, x+1 is using some clever dashboard tools to slice and dice existing ad inventory which can then be targeted into third party websites. The contextual management system is reasonably intuitive. Kudos to presenter Jason Shulman for getting through the presentation after the tech nightmare during his first attempt

ZipSetGo

“ZipSetGo is a content-rich, online, community-based travel website that offers information about the hottest and most luxurious travel destinations. ZipSetGo aggregates extensive amounts of credible content, organised in a usable format that employs social media to create a community of informed travel professionals. To ignite interest and create an emotional connection, the site provides visitors with the ability to see the world through the eyes of the go-girls.”

Analysis: The concept of the Go-Girls is bizarre. Phase 1 of the project is basic, arguably more of a blog of content and downloadable documents. Apparently phase two and three (booking) is where the interesting stuff starts.