The PhoCusWright Travel Innovation summit provides an unparalleled opportunity for companies to showcase their latest and most prized works of development wizardry to an audience of influential travel industry leaders.
photo credit: antitezoChaos Calls is the PhocusWright Conference theme as Travel Innovation Summit presenters take aim at the well established industry players.
Handicapping this event is a difficult challenge – There is no daily racing form, and aside from Goby participating, and Amadeus winning last year, there is little in the way of past performance comparisons.
Embracing the spirit of the PhoCusWright Conference’s Chaos-Calling theme, it was difficult resisting the temptation to launch a full parimutuel betting operation (although no one can deny that it would add an interesting new dimension to the competition.) Instead, I reached out to the learned experts also attending the conference including the press, bloggers and the innovators themselves to capture their predictions.
With several companies have been in stealth mode, operating limited beta programs and in some cases, using the stage of the Innovation Summit as their launch platform, in no way should these predictions be considered scientifically derived.
The best description of this projection would probably be aggregated guessing – in many cases, with no basis of experience with a majority of the products being presented. In other words, if you are reading this, keep your money in your pockets.
The group was asked to predict finish order of the top seven companies, ultimately encompassing the three runners-up, three finalists and the Best of Show winner. There were 22 total responses.
To simplify the voting process, votes were taken without consideration to the categories of each participant, so the respondents were voting based on their prediction of innovation, not who would win in the various categories.
The following 32 companies are competing for the Travel Innovation Summit’s coveted “Best of Show” award: continue reading →
Tagged as: innovation, marketing, mobile, search, technology, travel, Web 2.0
