First Impressions from the Travel Innovation Summit

Today figures to be a very long but very interesting day. The Travel Innovation Summit gives more than 30 companies 13 minutes each to pitch their wares. Many of these focus on cost reduction, making life easier, or connecting the world, and certainly some seem more promising than others. So as we roll into our first break, let’s talk about some which have started the day off.

Roundtrip Systems
These guys are trying to work on both cost reduction and making life easier with their TravelDesk product. The idea is to enable people to make their corporate travel arrangements all through an email client. This makes life easier by allowing users to avoid a browser, something that’s particularly helpful for people who use a mobile device. It also theoretically reduces cost by eliminating the need for human involvement in the booking process. That certainly is debatable since problems always arise, and you will always need people to troubleshoot, but at large organizations this could potentially reduce the need for the number of people, assuming the application works as well as they say it does.

Farepool.com
Farepool was designed to be a way to link travel agencies and smaller travel suppliers. I actually can see something like this finding a good niche. It makes sense for smaller travel suppliers because they can broaden their exposure and their ability to sell across all agents that participate on the site. For travel agents, especially newer or smaller ones, it gets them access to better deals than they may have access to on their own.

DealBase.com
At first glance, you’d think this is yet another site to disseminate deals to the public and you’d be right. The difference is that they’re trying to give you more filtering and comparison options so that the consumer can try to figure out what is actually a deal and what isn’t. For travel suppliers, this is yet another reminder that it’s much harder to put targeted deals out there these days when sites like this allow anyone to publicize a deal by entering it themselves. It’s great for the public (I’ve been saved by sites like this before), but it makes it very challenging to create truly segmented deals.

Home & Abroad
These guys focused on their Fogglight product which effectively allows any travel-related site to create its own travel planning function with its own look and feel. The example they used was a small boutique hotel in Colorado that could create a site with its own look and feel to show off what to do in the area and link it with flights and attraction tickets as well. This makes sense for just about any travel e-commerce site because it takes a couple minutes to set up and it’s completely free. How do they make money? Well, they get a revenue share on any bookings generated. For the small amount of time and effort required to set this up, it makes sense to do it if you can generate even one or two related bookings on the site.

TravelMuse.com
TravelMuse is one of several startups that is trying to help people book travel in a non-traditional way. What do I mean by that? Well, people usually figure out where they want to go and then punch it into a website to get the lowest fares, cheapest hotels, etc. These guys allow you to put in how much you want to spend and what type of activities you want so that they can use their recommendation engine to give you options. If this concept does have legs, than travel companies will want to consider how they can best take advantage of the engines. Making sure that they have certain activity types will become more important so that they can ensure they show up in the recommendation set.

TripIt
This is the only one of the companies this morning that has put together a product that I actually use myself (so far). TripIt is a place to keep track of your travel plans and share them with your network of friends. I’ve found it helpful to be able to keep track of who I might be near when I travel. For businesses, it can help to set up meetings between people that may be near each other even though they never would have known it otherwise. There are bigger applications for this sort of product, but I need to dive in further before I can comment further.

tripJane
Facebook. That’s pretty much the concept here. TripJane is an application that allows you to book travel within Facebook and discuss travel plans with your Facebook friends. Personally, I don’t see much use for an application like this, because people have no problem going to book elsewhere right now. Unless there’s a true benefit to the social network integration (which I just don’t really see), then it’s hard to make an application really work. That’s good advice for any company looking to build out applications on social networks.