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Increasingly sophisticated technology is set to revolutionise the way we travel. Donald Strachan highlights the best of what is to come.

Your Reality, Augmented

Imagine if your phone could use GPS information and a compass to lead you to the nearest restaurant or cash machine. In fact, it already can: welcome to “augmented reality”, or AR, a technology that overlays digital information on a real-world view, typically using your mobile phone’s camera and screen.

“Point your phone at a building and see its history or look at a painting and see the Grove Dictionary article on it. In 2010, this revolution in travel information is just beginning,” says James Governor, an industry analyst with Redmonk.

Mobile phone AR apps Layar (www.layar.eu) and Wikitude World Browser (www.wikitude.org) are already out there, serving up travel information from the likes of Spotted by Locals (www.spottedbylocals.com), Yelp! (www.yelp.co.uk) and social game Noticings (www.noticin.gs)

Lastminute.com was among the first travel companies to experiment with the technology. “We think AR will take a significant chunk of the market in time,” says Marko Balabanovic at Lastminute.com. “What we’ve seen so far are the primitive beginnings, and there will be massive improvements over the next two years. Our goal, with apps such as Nru and Snaffle, is to enable “n-commerce”, where “n” stands for “nearby” – showing customers great things to do nearby, right now, with real-time availability, and a great selection of deals.”

By the end of this year, expect to see traditional travel publishers pushing their content through to us, hotel chains superimposing their latest offers over your real-time street view, and perhaps travellers using AR as a social space to share experiences and advice with other visitors.

The Android-iPhone Shoot-out

This year will be the year we do a lot more miles on our mobiles. For travellers, it’s all about the applications, or “apps”, easy-to-use mini-programs that run on your phone handset. An app can find you on a map, point you to local restaurant reviews, remember where you parked your car, or even replace your guidebook. More than three billion have gone out of the doors in just 18 months from Apple’s App Store, many free to download. “As long as roaming costs can be limited, a mobile is ideal for destination information, for booking hotels and for companies providing services to travellers already in the destination,” says Alex Bainbridge at TourCMS.

Apple won’t have it all its own way this year. We’ll hear a lot more from Google’s Android mobile operating system, which is available free for phone hardware manufacturers to install. Several new handsets from Sony Ericsson, Motorola, HTC, Samsung and Google itself (the Nexus One) are Android-powered. The Android Market, the equivalent of the iPhone’s App Store, opened with 50 apps in October 2008; there are now more than 15,000, including phrase books and guides from Lonely Planet. It’s also possible that Microsoft’s new mobile phone software, Windows Phone 7 series, will make a big splash when it’s released towards the end of this year.

“Our hope is that the next big application – the future YouTube or Facebook – will be built for mobiles,” says Stephany van Willigenburg at Google Travel.

External Source – For the complete article click here
Source: Telegraph

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Airlines are falling all over themselves to develop new merchandising options to increase ancillary revenue. After all, this high-yield revenue offers a life savings mechanism to keep airlines afloat in tough economic periods. While the trend is still unbundling, airlines are taking different views on how they go about it, with the legacies on the one hand taking items that were once part of the ticket – such as American’s latest USD8 charge for a blanket – and charging for them.

It was with some shock that airlines and their analysts realized the extent of unbundling revenues – first estimated at USD400 million annually for baggage fees and now estimated to top USD58 billion by the end of 2010. Ancillary revenues: Airlines to earn USD58 billion in 2010; CAPA to review Asia Pacific prospects

Re-bundling could prove quite profitable, indeed, once the airlines are done re-inventing their fees and fares. The question remains however, how far can they go. Last year, European CEOs suggested the percentage of a ticket price that can be made up by fees has a long way to go before it reaches a ceiling, with some suggesting it could go as high as 50%.

Meanwhile, BTC, ISG and its members are working on an industry position paper on the subject which is set for an April release. It resulted from a meeting last week in London in which BTC and the Institute of Travel & Meetings UK & Ireland (ITM) have finalized details of their inaugural Industry Solutions Group (ISG) with 20 some ISG members, including corporate travel buyers, travel management companies, technology providers, association executives, airlines and other distribution participants.

“We have seen how airlines have adapted unbundling in the U.S. and its new variations are moving across to the UK and Europe pretty swiftly,” said BTC Chair Kevin Mitchell. “Unbundling in itself is not an issue, but the method by which it is implemented, and the potential pitfalls to business travel buyers and intermediaries, are considerable unless there’s a thoughtful industry-level plan.”

ITM CEO Paul Tilstone said, “Every time a new unbundled product is released into the market the GDSs, TMCs, billing systems, and therefore subsequently, the buyers strain to deal with how the sale, data and payment are processed. Clearly with everyone focused on solving these issues every time they arise it undermines the managed program and takes us all away from concentrating on more strategic issues.”

Mitchell outlined the five phases on unbundling with phase one including baggage fees and per-seat assignments. Phase two is what is offered by the likes of JetBlue and Southwest, who prefer to add services and charge for them, rather than charge for services that were once a part of the fare. These include in-flight Wi-Fi and Even More Legroom.

Phase three, he said, includes partnering with third parties such as baggage handling from hotel to TSA to airline to home destination while Phase 4 would entail the rebundling he discussed. Based on customer research and market segmentation, something the airlines are using with increasing frequency as part of the latest marketing strategies, airlines would package desirable services and offer them, for a price to passengers who value them.

The final phase would be the development of door-to-door innovations offering products and services, largely from third parties, are packaged to “enhance a traveler’s security, safety, convenience and productivity from the moment it is decided a trip will be taken until the traveler returns home.”

Read the whole article on centerforaviation.com …

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I’d like to advance a hypothesis: Despite all the excitement surrounding social media, the Internet isn’t connecting us as much as we think it is. It’s largely home to weak, artificial connections, what I call thin relationships.

During the subprime bubble, banks and brokers sold one another bad debt — debt that couldn’t be made good on. Today, “social” media is trading in low-quality connections — linkages that are unlikely to yield meaningful, lasting relationships.

Call it relationship inflation. Nominally, you have a lot more relationships — but in reality, few, if any, are actually valuable. Just as currency inflation debases money, so social inflation debases relationships. The very word “relationship” is being cheapened. It used to mean someone you could count on. Today, it means someone you can swap bits with.

Thin relationships are the illusion of real relationships. Real relationships are patterns of mutual investment. I invest in you, you invest in me. Parents, kids, spouses — all are multiple digit investments, of time, money, knowledge, and attention. The “relationships” at the heart of the social bubble aren’t real because they’re not marked by mutual investment . At most, they’re marked by a tiny chunk of information or attention here or there.

Here’s what lends support to my hypothesis.

Trust. If we take social media at face value, the number of friends in the world has gone up a hundredfold. But have we seen an accompanying rise in trust? I’d argue no. Now, perhaps it will take time for gains to be visibly felt. But social networks have already been around for half a decade, and society seems to be little better off.

External Source – For the complete article click here. Source – Harvard Business Review

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IN-DEPTH: Interview with Andrea Keipert, product manager – Mobile Services, Lufthansa (via m-travel.com)

One of the intriguing aspects about the utility of mobile phones in the airline industry is the varied approach towards the same.

Is mobile primarily about delivering service at the point of need in a customer’s journey? Would selected selling opportunities come later? In fact, for quite a few in the industry, displaying offers via mobile would be useful but it is still better to focus on click to call to pop customers to call centres rather than forcing them through several stages of mobile booking funnels.

However, a company like Lufthansa is experiencing a different trend.

“Lufthansa introduced mobile booking options three years ago. We see a high level of acceptance from our users. M-commerce plays a key role in our mobile strategy,” says Andrea Keipert, product manager – Mobile Services, Lufthansa told EyeforTravel’s Ritesh Gupta.

Role

Malaysia Airlines recently introduced the world’s first kiosks to sell airline tickets using the Apple iPad. Apple recently sold its three millionth iPad, just 80 days after its introduction in the US. It shows that there is an opportunity for the airlines to capitalise on technology and gadgets for additional sales channels and driving customer loyalty.

The rise of smartphones with browsers which can both display desktop sites and make it easy for users to interact with them has been significant and the industry expects mobile usage to continue to increase as the browsers get better. A company like Google believes that customers will increasingly demand an end-to-end engagement across a range of platforms, and to be able to research, consume and share travel information on whichever device they find most useful at a particular stage of their decision-making process.

So what can one expect from mobile as a channel for travel planning and booking going forward?

“We see an incredible development in the use of our mobile services. Not only the classic near-flight-services like check-in and flight status, but we can see more and more customers using mobile for the whole travel chain including planning and booking process,” said Keipert, who is scheduled to speak at the forthcoming two-day Online Marketing and Social Media Strategies for Travel Summit Europe 2010 (5-6, October) to be held in Prague.

However, some do not believe that gadgets or distribution technology make that much difference in terms of total travel spend worldwide.

However, a business’ performance can be impacted by changes in technology. A simple example is the decline of the brick and mortar travel agencies after the web developed. Now, does that mean if a business does not have a native iPad application, it’s doomed to fail? Doubtful. And on the other hand, if a business spends too much time on the latest/greatest gadget, it could seriously mis-direct resources. It is an interesting dilemma: How much attention / money should one spend on emerging technology? Unfortunately, there are no obvious answers and mistakes can be grievous down the road due to path-dependent development, says priceline’s executive vice president – corporate development, Glenn D. Fogel.

Issues

For long, the industry has indicated that there are two issues that need to change: There need to be more standards over the whole industry so that development is easier and faster, and the network providers need to reduce the data rates especially for roaming but also the flat rates in their home markets as the customers are afraid of unknown cost for the usage of mobile services.

Assessing the situation today, Keipert says the first challenge – standards – and keeping to the standards have become even worse compared to last year.

“For example, Samsung has added a new operating System “Bada” to the already diverse market. Android is used in many different ways which makes it even more complex all the time. The market seems to be further away from standards than ever. This is still the biggest challenge for the mobile development, especially in combination with the demand for apps,” pointed out Keipert.

The second challenge – the costs of flatrates and roaming are improving . Not only in Germany but in many other markets the competition has lowered the prices so that many people do not need to fear the use of mobile Internet or data transfer anymore.

Data-roaming limit

Talking of roaming, the European Union recently finalised new roaming rules, putting a cap on mobile roaming charges.

The decision, valid from 1 July, has been taken in order to ensure that consumers do not end up worrying about accidentally running up huge bills when they connect to the Internet using mobile networks via a phone or computer when abroad in the EU.

Travellers’ data-roaming limit will be automatically set at €50 excluding VAT (unless they have chosen another limit – higher or lower).

Operators will have to send users a warning when they reach 80 percent of their data-roaming bill limit. The operator will have to cut off the mobile Internet connection once the limit has been reached, unless the customer has indicated they want to continue data roaming that particular month. In addition, maximum wholesale prices for data roaming will fall from €1 to 80 cents per MegaByte. The maximum price for making a roaming call will be cut to 39 cents per minute (excluding VAT), instead of the current 43 cents, while receiving a call will cost a maximum of 15 cents per minute (excluding VAT), instead of 19 cents. The cost of making and receiving calls when abroad in the EU will now be 73 percent cheaper than in 2005, when the EU first started to tackle excessive roaming charges.

From the airlines’ perspective, Keipert says this is a big step ahead “as it gives our customers more reliability on their mobile costs if they are using the service abroad”.

Online Marketing and Social Media Strategies for Travel Summit Europe 2010

Andrea Keipert is scheduled to speak at the forthcoming two-day Online Marketing and Social Media Strategies for Travel Summit Europe 2010 (5-6, October) to be held in Prague.

For more information, click here

Or contact:

Gina Baillie
VP Global Marketing & Events
EyeforTravel
London, UK: +44 (0)207 375 7197
gina@eyefortravel.com

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Source: www.trendwatching.com. One of the world’s leading trend firms, trendwatching.com sends out its free, monthly Trend Briefings to more than 160,000 subscribers worldwide.

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