travel tech insights

Today’s travel industry is becoming increasingly mobile. Not only are more and more travel companies embracing the idea of mobile apps or platforms, but travelers are now more than ever before researching, booking, and reviewing travel and tourism options on-the-go. This movement has essentially pushed the entire travel booking experience into a real-time mode where travel companies and customers are communicating and engaging in the moment rather than during the span of several hours or days.

For tour operators, whose ability to leverage growth and productivity depends largely on real-time visibility and access to products and services, embracing mobile technology is a key avenue to create lasting, profitable relationships with customers. Because so many tours and activities in today’s travel landscape are booked on-the-fly — for example, a customer might learn of a winery tour during a breakfast and want to book a spot on the tour for later that afternoon — tour operators who incorporate mobile technology will be able to capitalize on this new brand of customer who seeks quick accommodation and rapid responsiveness from travel companies.

A recent report from the travel industry advocacy group EyeforTravel asked 183 respondents across all omareas of the global travel industry landscape about what facet of the travel industry keeps them up most nights. It’s an interesting question, especially given how volatile and variant-rich today’s travel industry can be taken into account the sheer volume of suppliers and network partners. Even so, the overwhelming response to this question was the need to stay ahead of technology and keep pace with the development of new digital platforms or methods of doing business. And this is especially true for mobile bookings and ability of today’s traveler to source, research, and complete bookings on devices no bigger than the palm of their hand.

In fact, EyeforTravel’s May 2016 survey and resulting report identified a number of interesting statistics regarding the continued development of mobile technology that can be applied to travel agents, tour operators, product and service providers, and even consumers.

With the first month of 2017 nearly behind us, there have been numerous articles about the trends, storylines, and narratives likely to emerge in the travel industry during the next year; in fact, we’ve recently published a handful of entries along similar lines in order to discover where the travel industry is headed and why 2016 was such a critical year across nearly all touch points of the travel landscape. While these forecasts and predictions are interesting in terms of plotting what 2017 might look like, they offer very little in terms practical changes to the industry in specific or targeted areas.

While the idea of booking travel accommodations is most certainly a broad topic, travel bookings are poised to undergo some significant shifts in the coming year, both through the adoption of intelligent search and booking engines, but also in terms of how travel companies position themselves between suppliers and customers in the booking process. In addition, other elements such as the continued growth of mobile technology, emergence of new markets, and further fragmentation of the travel market all add up to some fundamental changes in the way customers complete bookings and travel companies facilitate them.

Travel agencies and mobile apps. These two concepts might seem to represent two very different time periods in the travel industry. The old and the new. The traditional and the state-of-the-art. Yet, today’s travel agencies would be well-advised to not only understand the value mobile travel apps can provide, but also embrace and adopt them as part of their operational platform.

Rather than being suspect of mobile apps as an alternative to the traditional travel agent, agencies should view mobile apps as an important tool to reach today’s younger traveler where they spend most of their time - online and connected to their smartphones. As travel agencies have to work harder to remain competitive in a global, connected marketplace, mobile apps provide agencies a direct line to travelers by cutting through much of the noise other travel companies can’t avoid by failing to adopt a mobile app strategy.

For the last few years, mobile payments have been predicted to be the next big thing in the travel  industry. Analysts and industry insiders have long speculated the disruption mobile payment technology will have on the way travelers shop and complete online bookings, as well as the way travel companies and OTAs use mobile technology to reach as many customers as possible. But recent advancements in mobile technology, specifically in affordability and availability, are making it possible for mobile payments to actually take hold sooner rather than later in today's travel industry.