Revelations from Google, and New Hotel Trends among the Highlights Of Skift Forum Europe
Skift, the world’s largest travel news, trends and analysis company, held its first ever Forum Europe in London’s Tobacco Dock.
Bannigan Communications made sure the right journalists were on hand to report the ambitious news that was revealed at the event.
The panel of speakers revealed a range of innovations and insights, including:
Google Experiments with Dynamic Packaging in UK and Germany:
Oliver Heckmann, a Google vice president of engineering who heads the search engine’s travel product, revealed that the new product is still in testing. Heckmann stressed that it’s not just about selling holiday packages.
“It’s a differentiated experience,” said Heckmann. “It is a search tool that lets you buy the individual components separately or together. Consumers are not only shown bundled options.”
It is not the first time a major metasearch platform has attempted to sell packages, per se. Kayak.com/packages, and one of Kayak’s acquisitions (Sidestep), tried it first.
But Google claimed it is the first time a major metasearch platform has attempted dynamic packaging. Rather than display packages put together by operators and wholesalers, it displays air and hotel combinations pulled together in an automated process. Vendors such as Lufthansa Vacations agree to sell the combined products within a restricted database of hotel and flight availability.
Europe is an Excellent Testbed for the Future of Travel:
Defying conventional wisdom in the US, a leading venture capitalist and the founders of two venture-backed companies – Trainline and GetYourGuide – believe that Europe is an excellent place to build travel companies that can scale globally.
Founding partner at PROfounders Capital, Sean Seton-Rogers, said: “Europe is an incredible testbed for innovation in travel.”Bottom of Form
Seton-Rogers explained why: He said that there is so much demand – seven out of 10 of the most-visited destinations being European cities. On top of that, the cultural and national complexity of Europe, due to its geographic compression – for example, the need for translation into multiple languages – forces entrepreneurs to solve problems in the design of their businesses that give them competitive advantages when it’s time to scale up globally.
Examples show that Europe is a great place to found a travel start-up, despite not having the hype of Silicon Valley. Seton-Rogers pointed to his firm’s successful exit last year from Onefinestay, (in a sale to AccorHotels) and other partners who have seen successful exits for European-based travel companies such as Booking.com and LastMinute.com.
Clare Gilmartin, CEO of ticketing platform Trainline, cited her own firm as an example. Trainline is now expanding to Eastern Europe and Asian markets, with Gilmartin stating that the stringent demands of developing a booking business in Europe’s complex market serve it well as it enters foreign markets.
However, GetYourGuide‘s co-founder and COO Tao Tao told the Skift Forum Europe audience that one deficit in Europe is in venture capital. “Building a consumer marketplace is expensive,” he says. “We have had to raise $95 million.” So, when GetYourGuide needed capital, it had to look beyond Europe. For later-stage rounds, it had to solicit funds from investors on the East Coast of the US.
Hoteliers to Select the ‘Right Kind of Guest’
Design Hotels CEO Claus Sendlinger asserted that the next big innovation in hospitality isn’t necessarily tied to design, but is more about developing curated communities.
Speaking on stage at Skift Forum Europe, the seasoned hotel expert, who founded Design Hotels in 1993, said that hospitality is “a slow-moving business” but “hotels have always been a reflection and reaction to the changes in society.”
And while design has been, for many years, a distinguishing hotel trend, a change is afoot, according to Sendlinger, “There’s a change in socio-geographic behaviour now. It’s not about choosing a yellow or blue or red chair. I think it’s much more… Everyone is doing that now… but it needs curation.”
In terms of curation, Sendlinger talked of attracting the right guests to the right hotel. “The most innovative hoteliers we are talking to, for them it’s not about who they are distributing through. They’re thinking about: ‘How do I get the right guests into my hotel?’.”
During the forum, which assembled a raft of C-suite speakers from across all sectors of the global travel industry, CEO of Norwegian Air Shuttle, Bjorn Kjos, stated his desire to offer $66 transatlantic flights, InterContinental Hotels Group CEO Richard Solomons put forth his aim to expand in the mid-market sector, reaching new audiences, while CMO of TUI Group, Erik Friemuth, said there was still a need to have physical stores in some markets, where travellers can plan their trips in person.
Skift Forum events have established a world-wide reputation as the ‘TED of travel’ since it held its inaugural conference in New York in 2014. The full-day event in London, with over 400 travel executives and entrepreneurs present, featured the CEOs of Kayak, Skyscanner, Design Hotels, as well as executives from game-changing global brands such as Google, TUI and Trivago.
Event sponsors include Sojern, UrLife, Mileslife, VisitJordan, ContentSquare, Travelsify and London & Partners, to name a few.
To see the full range of news and trends from the event, visit Skift.com/sfe17 .
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About Skift
Skift is the largest industry intelligence and marketing platform in travel, providing news, information, data and services to all sectors of the world’s largest industry. Skift identifies and synthesises existing and emerging trends in its daily coverage of the global travel industry and through its Skift Research Reports. Skift produces Skift Global Forum annually in NYC to bring together the most influential professionals in the travel industry to discuss the future of travel and, this year, launched its first ever European event, Skift Forum Europe, on 4 April 2017.
