Social Scanning, Fuzzy Shopping and More Travel Innovations

**Update: The four finalists are noted below in bold purple text.**

The Phocuswright Travel Innovation Summit showcased 34 firms yesterday. Each has an interesting new angle on some aspect of the travel business. For me, the firms in the social scanning and fuzzy shopping categories were the most intriguing.  See this post for my take on the implications for travel procurement. Continue reading

Top 5 Posts – Last 40 Days

Here are the five most popular posts on this blog from the last 40 days:

  1. Trippy – Tomorrow’s Biz Trip Planning Tool? (Trippy is a mash-up of Google Wave, Google Maps and Lonely Planet content)
  2. Travel 101 (a 4-minute video introduction to the travel category, and four posts covering Travel Data 101)
  3. Travel Procurement’s Fighting Words (started by a slam against using procurement principles in the travel category)
  4. Future Innovations in Airline Distribution – Condensed (a summary of problems and  innovations needed in the airline distribution channel)
  5. Why Travel Disses Procurement (explains the friction found between travel and procurement staffs and what to do about it)

I’m surprised that two of these posts don’t relate directly to travel procurement (“Trippy…” and “Future Innovations…”).  You’re saying it’s OK to cast a wider net in terms of topics.  Cool.  I’ll continue to bring in this type of content from time to time.  What else would you like to see here?

“Future Innovations in Airline Distribution” Condensed

Here are the highlights from my recent presentation at CASMA titled  “Future Innovations in Airline Distribution”.   The original deck has about 50 slides, but because it was designed for a live 60-minute speech, it’s hard to get the meaning of many of the slides (nearly all pictures) by themselves.  So here’s the 3-minute version:

Channels have limits.

Channels Have LimitsDistribution channels are essential to commerce, but they have limits.  The Panama Canal has to build wider locks to accommodate the newest and largest cargo ships.  This is a metaphor for the GDS distribution channel, as it cannot handle the “wider” content that airlines want to distribute today.

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The Future of Airline Distribution

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Update: Here’s a more current post that gives you the 3-minute condensed version of this presentation, including the most popular slides.

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Here’s what I presented today at the CASMA conference: Continue reading