The 2009 Travolution Summit

I am very much forward to attending tomorrows Travolution's summit in which the main players of the industry get together to discuss the future and recent happenings within the online travel sphere. This is a first for me as I will be part of the blogger delegation a new feature for this years show, but as you can see my blogging is not exactly prolific, so this will be good practice :)
This UK event will be the 2nd of Travolution's involvement with the highly revered PhoCusWright group, and with a guest of speakers from banks, airlines, GDS companies to new/recent start-ups it should provide a fascinating journey of the current health and expectations of an industry which despite the current financial climate, continues to adjust and improve to needs of the millions of travellers who will more that half this year will book their holiday/trip online, compared to only a third just a couple of years ago.
The challenge now for the industry is to provide this in a more user friendly cohesive and combined way thus enabling the future of travel and its natural partner mobile, to provide new possibilities for deciding, planning, booking, going, doing and sharing the travel experience. For me, tomorrow will be an experience, and one which I can only do my best to share with you... whoever you are :)

Blog Fog

Blogging has been with us since the early noughties and the Blog which this text is based on became the pioneer for a somewhat easy to use, and deployable to your needs journal and sharing of knowledge, following that dozens of companies such as Typepad etc etc came and some went.
The subject of this particular blog thought, has got me more as someone who reads quite a few and appreciates some well thought out and considered content from them, some blogs may only be run by infrequent posters like me, others are updated every hour some minute by minute via tweets etc. But the content and the source of content has now become a major issue amongst some of the higher echelons of the Blogosphere (i.e ones with high readership), with some starting to become merely bottom feeders of press releases and other PR sources, thus making the transparency of a blog start to become less clear and in some cases murky, and most certainly less original!
Case in point, the millions of readers of the famous Techcrunch whose news stories interested and in their comment sphere making me sometimes laugh and pause for thought, written by some in the know, others who want to know, and others who well...
Anyway, to get to that crescendo of subject matter; is this, the recent spat with Kayak and AA is now well discussed and lawsuits and astonishment's flying (so to speak) back and forth; but the thing for me is the source of this information: when the news broke on July 23rd, according the Erick Schonfeld writer of that article AA Ditches Kayak stating that a CEO of a competing travel site had spilt the beans but did not and has not disclosed who that person was, some readers in the comments mentioned Mobissimo others Travelzoo; but for the company Kayak it didn't have a chance to engage with the source and had to publicly make a rushed statement on the actions by AA.
Of course, sometimes business is business, the competing Travel site may or not had much to gain from letting wind, but who had to gain was Techcrunch on the initial exclusivity of the article for reasons not explained..
Its now turns out that it was Kayak itself who terminated the relationship with AA, and the source of info to TC could have come from AA itself or via a PR company on their behalf.
In either case the Blog is now growing up, but with that for some whose avid readers who trust the content and its writers, and for the companies whose need to be seen could make or break them, it is now time also for accountability and good governance, those big buzz words which are often and have been used around the corporate and government worlds.
These online times are changing however for blogs. Travolution made the brave step of not spending the time editing press releases and uploading them raw with a visible statement of what they are, they intend to focus on journalism and the traditions and often values which they should represent, bloggers are not often writers and just have a passion for what they are interested in, the majority of blogs are like mine sometimes read by a few and postings infrequent but as long as we can strive to discover the truth in our interests and subjects, long may they continue.
Naturally. that change I mentioned is now coming in the form of aggregators such a Friendfeed who many a blog are simply changing their designs to match the stream and connectivity of like minded individuals but gives them more exposure, the other hand is that comments/conversation which for some are the life blood of many a blog and in some cases better than some of the articles themselves are shifting away from the blog and from the location of the article itself, which may or not be bad thing, unless your blog relies on ad revenue..
So, evolution like anything is on the cards, but whatever the blog will look like in the future, the trust in the information being provided and how that can be well considered thought proving analysis etc can only bring about a new age of collective intelligence for which it is starting to emerge and in some cases becoming well established, albeit sometimes with a few teething problems..

Bobby Trazzler??

A few thoughts. Where in the world are we going??.. that is when we travel, and what do we do when we get there?
One company is having a go at this called Trazzler.com and with some very good pedigree in respect to management, founded by two Adam's; one being Adam Rugel and the other Adam Weller who both started 71miles.com.
Recently; they formed Trazzler with backing from Evan Williams and Biz Stone of "Revenue?? Yeah we thought about that" Twitter fame, so it should be quite interesting what these guys come up with.
I think they have a lot of work to do in integrating the booking engine etc but the UI is quite clean albeit it doesn't leave much room for other stuff due to the text size etc.
However it looks like they have some seasoned travel writers on board; but the UGC side of things seems rather lacking, but in summary; the management team does seem have a passion for travel experiences, and I guess their strategy is for filtering/editing through professional content.
But the problem with that is that it could lead to a monolithic site which cuts of the air supply for inspiring choices which in the end ultimately creates that special and unique travel adventure. One last thing what does Trazzler mean?
I do wish them luck in what is a very crowded space, albeit one with lots of noise and confusion.
Maybe they should just make it a widget.. now widgets..don't get me started!!;-D

Air Free60°

My recent post about the current state of the airline industry left me wondering what the actual future holds for air travel.
With airlines contributing to over 5% or more of annual C02 emission and by 2025 possibly >10%; some forward thinking organisations are already considering alternatives to flying (no teleports are not quite their yet!!).
The Delft University CleanEra project based in the Netherlands called is looking ahead to the way cutting emissions in Co2 and Nitris Oxide by 50% beyond 2025, with a surprising and inspiring solution. (See above) .

The idea of circular based aircraft is certainly the stuff of 1950s science fiction and in some ways it makes perfect sense, with potentially perfect aerodynamics and with great views and space to walk round would possibly give a whole new flying experience.
The current generation of airlines are fundamentally based on technologies and airplane design from the early jets in the late 1940’s and all require runways in order for lift-off, and with this potential design vertical take-off could be possible , thus all the current problems and news with a need for another Heathrow runway etc could be looked at in the future as somewhat quaint. (Not sure if that’s the right word to use) .

So maybe the skies of the 2050s will hum silently with small and medium flying saucers taking us to above and beyond!

Fly me a river

A recent press release by the IATA showed that the world airlines maybe looking at the bottom of a barrel (ok not their exact words) with oil prices now being much in fashion and steadily climbing north to $150 add that with Alexei Miller, Gazprom's chief executive bigging it up to $250 per barrel by the end of 2009; its now panic on streets of Barcelona and maybe soon London and Birmingham what with this proposed tanker strike on Friday.
As we spare a thought for the price of petrol/gas at the pumps, spare a little change for the airlines (they may need it!) with overall aviation jet fuel prices up 93% over the last year, industry losses could soon reach -$8bn. The first IATA press release expected a $2.3bn loss for 2008 when oil stood at $86bl, but now with every dollar increase adding another $1.6bn to costs and measure it with today’s price at $141 this would add another $66bn to costs (oil is nearly 40% of expenditure, 2007 costs added up to $136bn this year if prices raise further will tip it to nearly $240bn!

According to Giovanni Bisgnani IATA Director General & CEO these are ‘uncharted territories’ for the $3.5 trillion industry which employs 32m people worldwide.
“Unless fuel prices rapidly retreat, it stands to reason that additional carrier bankruptcies cannot be ruled out," – A recent JP Morgan Securities report stressed. With mergers and consolidation now becoming no brainers for cost saving synergies it looks like the low costs/boutique carriers and also some of the major airlines now going over to the shelf picking up the book on bankruptcy and filing itself under Chapter 11, many more than in 1991 and some in post 9-11.
Will there be another Northern Rock but with airlines this summer? renationalisation maybe could be back on the cards, reduced schedules, and penny pinching extras like AA’s $15 baggage handling charge, Air New Zealand's recent $4 per per passenger, and not to mention the overall rise in price of tickets generated by lack of availability overall, may mean that travel industry is at place where fear, uncertainty, and doubt could be the order of the day.
A study into the working capital of all the major airlines would be the greatest indicator of their vulnerability and cash liquidity who will fall first? (any takers for such research??) and in light of Mesa and Silverjet's recent woes these could be the tip of the oncoming iceberg. This analogy would melt if it wasn’t for the apparent ability to hedge the oil price increases; but I was completely blown away by that only a small percentage of Airlines use these financial derivative instruments to protect themselves against future fluctuations .
Southwest seem to be more forward thinking and have tied most of their prices until 2012 at $63 per barrel. The airlines industry’s stance is that 'risk management was not one of their core competencies' stating that jet fuel is not on any organised futures exchange, although Southwest added “we have found that financial derivative instruments in other commodities, such as crude oil, and refined products such as heating oil and unleaded gasoline, can be useful in decreasing exposure to jet fuel price volatility," So even if the airlines did start to pick up their phones and make a call to their new/now very happy commodity brokers the current spot prices will most certainly put them on one!
So it looks like, what it looks like, cash crush or cash crunch, either way the skies could soon get a bit quieter over the next few years. Lets ponder the near future, according to Tony Hayward CEO of BP that there are known oil reserves of 1.24tn barrels enough to meet current production levels and demand until 2049..
I’m off for my hols for a couple of weeks and no I won’t be flying! Going to experience the delights of Somerset and like a lot of travellers this year, 'staying local!

Apple:Core issues

As all eyes turn to the new iphone 2, its worth considering the year 1985 for Apple, when windows started its road to full desktop dominance(market share) (GUI experience is another story), and how we should consider how sometimes that history does have a tendency to go full circle and show itself albeit in a different guise.
Fast forward 2018; and what will be the mobile o/s which dominates? Will Androids open standard win out over the propriety route which Apple seems to going?




This great mid-nineties documentary by Robert X Cringely - Triumph of the Nerds: How the PC changed the World, does seem echo what seems to be currently happening in the mobile space albeit circa 2009 , and how all this will effect online travel will of course be monumental.
I will be looking at the current apps which exist for travel on Android/Apple iphone in my next post.
In the meantime I remember seeing some of this video many years ago, which for me at the time was truly inspiring, and how the future of telephony combined with computers could create a truly mobile experience, maybe the sounds of 2018 will have echoes of this..

Faircop guv for Farecast!

One of the main things bout this new movement of openness and transparency is sometimes the lack of it.
I am not saying that blogs should be a rant and rave about why people don't do that and this but what I really like is when people and in this industry share what they have learn't and how some seeds of wisdom can set root for others to garner some insight to things.
Case in point was the recent travel blog started by Mike Fridgen from Farecast a company purchased for an estimated $100m by Microsoft.
I was really enjoying his blog and I made an appointment with a disappointment, when I read his last entry after a month of selling the company for this quite potentially cool meta-search engine. Maybe he will have time to post some tidbits another time...

Taking a break

Obviously my posts are less and less frequent. It's time to take a, more extended, break from the blog. Thanks for stopping by and all the best in your travel start-up endeavours.