06 September 2015, I had the pleasure of attending the first Pacific Asia Travel Association Technology Forum, at Bangalore International Exhibition Center, in partnership with phocuswright.com and connectingtravel.com.
PATA is the travel and tourism industry association for the Asia Pacific region, now headed by artificial intelligence investor Mario Hardy.
Phocuswright is the global nexus for technology in travel and tourism.
Connecting Travel is a new professional social network initiative for the travel and tourism industry by Travel Weekly.
(Both Phocuswright and Travel Weekly are now owned by Northstar Travel Media.)
The opening speaker was the prominent investor and philanthropist Mohandas Pai, in his role as chairman of the Karnataka Tourism Vision Group. Pai, who is heavily invested in tripfactory.com, provided a 360 degree overview of the skyrocketing digital economy in India, as well as its impacts on travel and tourism, both domestically and internationally.
One of the most interesting things he mentioned was the Aadhaar, or Unique Identification Authority of India, basically the world's largest national identification number project, set to biometrically empower millions of people without conventional paper trail or fixed abode.
Tony D'Astolfo, managing director of Phocuswright, introduced this new "Phocuswright Fast Track", by calling it an event within an event.
Phocuswright offers recent research on the Indian travel market, and not only maintains a dedicated team in India, but also is planning a full Phocuswright India travel technology conference 21-22 April 2016 near New Delhi, in Gurgaon.
Chetan Kapoor, Phocuswright research analyst for Asia Pacific, put the spotlight on Indian holidays and package travelers, highlighting the evolution of the Indian traveler, and how their shopping and booking habits are transforming traditional holidays and packages.
In the first executive roundtable, titled "Beyond Air - The Next Phase of India's Online Travel Story", Chetan Kapoor presented three of India's new travel and tourism heavyweights:
In terms of traffic, Tripadvisor is consistently within the top 3 travel sites in India, listing more than 30,000 Indian accommodations, with the largest number of reviews. HolidayIQ is a Bangalore-based travel information and review portal, with over 3 million members, listing 2,000 tourism destinations, and more than 50,000 accommodations, in India alone. Cleartrip is one of the top online travel agents in India, attracting more than $70 million in funding.
In the second executive roundtable, titled "Travel Innovation Summit Alumni Spotlight", Tony D'Astolfo introduced three of India's most innovative entrepreneurs to discuss how they are transforming the travel industry, at home and abroad:
Intuitive travel planner Mygola has recently been acquired by MakeMyTrip, one of India’s leading travel companies. TableGrabber, India's first real-time online restaurant reservation system, has recently launched RezGuru, a middle-layer software for restaurants. TripHobo, a travel itinerary-planning portal, recently announced a partnership with Zomato, a leading restaurant discovery platform made in India.
For the executive interview, Tony D’Astolfo did a one-on-one with Ritesh Agarwal, 21 year old founder and CEO of OYO Rooms, India's largest branded network of hotels. Not only is he one of India's youngest CEOs, but also India's most successful college drop-out. Agarwal was the first Indian to receive a $100,000 fellowship grant from Peter Thiel, which he invested in developing OYO Rooms. And mostly recently, he has raised $100 million from Japan’s SoftBank for OYO Rooms. Legend has it that Agarwal started OYO Rooms, which stands for "On Your Own", because his relatives would not let him control the TV remote when he was a child in India. On a personal note, I can say for sure that I am staying in better places in India, and paying less, now than I was a year ago, due to the phenomenal concept that is OYO Rooms.
Following lunch, Connecting Travel organized the "Technology Trends Defining Business Strategy" session, moderated by Tony Tenicela, IBM executive and global leader managing business development. This session focused on how global market players are redefining business models to adapt to the accelerated pace of communication, marketing, and loyalty initiatives. Social media, and virtual networks, figure prominently in creating vertical platforms that are aggregating professionals, consumers, advisers and investors into communities.
Helena Egan - Director of Industry Relations, tripadvisor.com
-
-
-
-
- Daniela Wagner - International Partnerships, connectingtravel.com
Helena Egan, director of industry relations at TripAdvisor, is primarily concerned with building relationships with destination marketing organisations, as well as educating the industry on the benefits user-generated content. Kenny Picken, CEO of Traveltek, a leading provider of travel technology solutions, shared valuable insights of how Traveltek empowers industry stakeholders, rather than by-passing them. Philip Napleton, VP at Open Destinations, providing software for tour operators and wholesalers, emerged as the voice of the younger generation, with his insight into social media and mobile applications. Rika Jean-Francois, head of corporate social responsibility for Internationale Tourismus-Boerse Messe Berlin, was the only person to emphasize the potential of travel technology in developing sustainable tourism. Mike Kistner, CEO of RezNext, a real-time hotel distribution technology company, provided perspectives of the seasoned travel technology professional. Daniela Wagner, Connecting Travel at Travel Weekly, spoke of how their new social network platform can benefit travel professionals.
References:
Note, YourStory is the largest platform for news, reports and analysis on India's booming startup ecosystem.
GaiaPassage.com is subtitled "Marcus L Endicott's favorite tips for green travel around the world". I'm calling it a deep green, eco-centric travel guide to the whole Earth. My Gaia Passage project will be a handwritten ecotourism guide to the entire world, based on the circa 250x ccTLD. The general idea is to write a "white paper" for every country in the world, on environmental and cultural conditions, issues, and who is doing what about them, as well as examining both how they affect tourism and how tourism affects those issues. Anyone could write a lot about something, but the idea here is to provide "snapshots", or "bite sized" summaries, of only the best information and contacts. The name "Gaia Passage" originally came from my pre-Internet (mid-1980s) travel tips newsletter. The site is a work in progress; so far, I've completed the entire Western Hemisphere:
GaiaPassage.com is handwritten, but based on automated research and automated outline. Primary research is based on data mining 20 years of Green Travel archives. Secondary research is based on multiple years of Meta Guide Twitter bots archives. Significance is based on primary sources in the form of root website domains, and/or secondary sources in the form of Wikipedia entries. In other words, if there is not a root website domain name or a Wikipedia entry then it is unlikely to be included. (However, almost anything may be included in Wikipedia - if properly referenced.)
I have noticed that many websites of smaller concerns are going down, offline, apparently due to the economic downturn. However, social media such as Twitter and Facebook do present affordable alternatives to owning a root domain website, and I will take these into consideration when appropriate. (In other words, when something is really cool.) I have also noticed a lot of people using Weebly to make free websites. (Note, GaiaPassage.com currently uses the free Google Sites platform.)
In the early evolution of a website, especially large projects, it's important to first have the "containers" in place as "placeholders", which is no small task in itself. With circa 250x countries and territorial entities, that's a whole year's fulltime work for one man, revising one country per working day. This would mean initial completion by December 2013. Eventually, GaiaPassage.com entries may morph into socialbots, or conversational assistants, containing not only all the knowledge about sustainable tourism gleaned from past Green Travel archives, but also current knowledge resulting from the Meta Guide Twitter bots.
In my previous blog, 250 Conversational Twitter Bots for Travel & Tourism, I detailed my 250x Meta Guide Twitter bots, one for every country and territory in the Internet ccTLD. Basically, I've spent the past five years working on artificial intelligence and conversational agents - and tweeting about it all the while (links below). I had been using Twitter extensively as a framework; however, Twitter has become increasingly protectionistic, most dramatically illustrated by the high profile 2012 Twitter-LinkedIn divorce. The Twitter API has become a moving target, which is just too costly for me to keep playing catch up. In short, I find the "Facebook complex" of Twitter management immensely annoying, and concluded to stop contributing original content; so, my New Year's resolution was to stop tweeting manually at least for all of 2013. Further, my excellent dialog system API, VerbotsOnline.com, went out of business in 2012. Any other good dialog system API I found to replace it turned out to be much too expensive. As a result, all my conversational agents are shut down, at least for 2013. My hope is that the sector will shake out and/or advance during the year, and better or at least more affordable conversational tools will become available next year.
Over the past 10 years or so I’ve been gradually developing a taxonomy, or classification system, for “green travel”, or more accurately green or sustainable tourism, an extension of my work with globetrotting and backpacker tourism. In other words, what are the key concepts involved in responsible tourism? A two dimensional taxonomy becomes an ontology when applied in three dimensions, as relationships among the concepts emerge. Taxonomies and ontologies are useful in artificial intelligence applications, such as bots.
I’ve spent much of the past decade tinkering with and tweaking the http://meta-guide.com which emerged from the old green-travel.com site. Today this would be called a “mashup”. Lately, I seem to have hit on a particularly useful algorithm, and have in effect taught the meta-guide to tell me everything in the popular press about “green travel” happening in our world today, in a more useful format, country by country… for nearly every “country” on Earth…. In particular, it returns the latest information about climate change and global warming in relation to tourism, in addition to ecotourism and sustainable tourism developments, etc.
I recommend trying the random country feature and let me know what you think, either in the green-travel group at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/green-travel or directly to me!
Marcus Endicott http://mendicott.com
