by RobertKCole on October 26, 2010
I was honored to present the closing keynote for the Wisconsin Hotel & Lodging Association 2010 Annual Conference and Tradeshow held October 25-26 in Green Bay.
While I frequently joke about Wisconsin representing the center of the travel universe, there is more to it than most would give credit. Several members of the Wisconsin Hotel & Lodging Association are definitely doing a lot of things right.
Meeting attendees included representatives of the innovative The Iron Horse Hotel, voted hotel of the year by the Boutique & Lifestyle Lodging Association, mega-indoor waterpark operator Kalahari Resorts and the uniquely diversified Marcus Hotels & Resorts. All three Wisconsin-based groups are raising the bar in very different ways for quality, guest-centric, hotel and travel experiences.
The presentation was titled “Future Lodging Trends and Emerging Technologies.”
The full versions of the three videos that were embedded in the presentation are included below: continue reading →
Tagged as: future, hotel, innovation, lodging, marketing, mobile, personas, security, technology, travel, travel search, Web 2.0, Web 3.0
by RobertKCole on September 9, 2010
The United States Government is the world’s largest purchaser of travel, with an estimated $20 Billion annual spend.
The Society of Government Travel Professionals is comprised of a diverse group of government employees, travel management companies and travel suppliers. I was honored to have an opportunity to share some thoughts on the factors I see influencing the future of both government and civilian travel. The talk was titled “Future Trends and Leading Technologies.”
There were also edited versions of four videos embedded in the presentation – the full versions of each are included below: continue reading →
Tagged as: government, innovation, insight, mobile, personas, security, technology, travel, travel search, Web 3.0
by RobertKCole on May 6, 2010
Search is radically changing to become more contextual, relevant and focused on producing the right answer for the user. The shift from a web of documents to a web of data is evolving. The impact can be seen on search engine results pages across many product categories, which foreshadows the future of travel search.
photo credit: [le]dooSearch engines are providing travelers with an increasingly dense forest of options
Moderating the “The Impact of Structured Data on Travel Search” panel discussion at the Open Travel Alliance 2010 Advisory Forum in Seattle last week provided an opportunity to highlight some of the dramatic steps forward in the area of travel search. Unfortunately, in the process, there were also some unintentionally ugly results discovered as the industry and the major search engines struggle to cope with the geometrically expanding range of unstructured data.
The topic was exceptionally timely given the breaking news regarding Google’s rumored acquisition of ITA Software and Facebook’s launch of its Open Graph protocol (that leverages RDFa data sets.) Even Apple Computer’s leaked iTravel patent filing incorporates search functionality for flights, hotels, rental cars, cruises, trains and buses. These three applications create new paradigms for travel search – all relying on access to the “Deep Web” – the source information that serves as the foundation for today’s web pages. continue reading →
Tagged as: innovation, open travel, search, semantic search, technology, travel, Web 3.0
by RobertKCole on July 2, 2009
Speaking in Anaheim at last week’s Hospitality Financial & Technology Professionals annual HITEC conference, I was joined by friend and twice former colleague Mike Robinson, head of product architecture for InterContinental Hotels Group. Our topic? The impact of Web 2.0 technologies on the hotel industry. Given that Web 2.0 is now nearing its fifth birthday, we decided to vary a bit from the program and add in our view of what Web 3.0 might look like.
Expecting a technically diverse audience with backgrounds ranging from technology vendors to hotel operations and marketing personnel, the basic objective of the presentation was to give the group a primer on how key web technology has advanced, the benefits provided and an overview of some emerging technologies that serve as the foundation for Web 3.0. Not to get too academic, we also wanted to to provide some examples of practical applications of these technologies and how the organizations deploying them are differentiating themselves from their competitors.
Amazing Advancements in Web Technologies - Now if we can only get the hospitality industry to use them...
One somewhat startling observation – when I was surveying a number of leading industry figures for recommendations of web sites where hospitality companies were
effectively utilizing Web 2.0 technologies, the most frequent response was something close to “none come immediately to mind…” This is a rather painful statement to hear repeatedly, particularly within an industry that claims to be constantly seeking creative methods to showcase product benefits and more effectively engage with its customer base. The good news is that there is ample room for improvement – as organizations update, there are opportunities for strategy to be reassessed and new tools to be deployed. continue reading →
Tagged as: HFTP, HITEC, hospitality, hotel, technology, travel, Web 2.0, Web 3.0
