working together

Welcome to TTI Europe’s leading travel technology initiatives and standards organisation

A word from the chairman

I am sure you will share with me in sorrow that Peter Dennis has had to resign from the Chairmanship of TTI with immediate effect due to ill health. Peter has been a great ambassador for TTI and a fantastically energetic Chairman. With his experience and vision of the travel industry and its technology, he has been instrumental on putting TTI on the world stage with trail-blazing initiatives such as TTIcodes. I will be taking up the role of Chairman from the beginning of November and hope to continue Peter’s work in the same enthusiastic vein. On behalf of TTI and its members, I send Peter all our very best wishes. There has been a lot happening at TTI since the last newsletter in August. One of the most exciting initiatives is our new TTIplaces project. You can read more about this within these pages. The project had been brewing for years with the notion that there is a job to be done, standardising

place names and locations, in a similar way to the standardisation of hotels that has been achieved with TTIcodes. I am very excited about this project and look forward to it being launched very soon. Talking about very soon, World Travel Market is almost upon us (7 - 9 November). We will once again be running the WTM Travel Innovation Summit in Association with TTI. As you can read below, we have a fantastic line-up of speakers, so do please register and come along. As last year, we are also delighted that World Travel Market has kept the TTI Tech Café with our branding. My thanks to the WTM team for this. The café is a great venue for us tech-types to get together over a cup of coffee and, moreover, it is really conveniently located by the Travel Tech Theatre (stand TT390). At our recent quarterly management meeting, we took the decision that we should be more pro-active with our marketing activity with the aim of doubling

or tripling our membership over the next few years. At the time of writing, we have not yet signed off on a specific marketing plan but hope to do this very soon. We have our technology projects and our conferences and forums but, most importantly, we have you, our members. If you have any thoughts or ideas about what TTI could be doing, please do get in touch. I can always be reached by email tim.wright@tti.org With you and all our members in mind, perhaps TTI should adopt a new tag line:

Travel Technology Initiative - where travel and technology people

meet, share and learn

What do you think?

WTM Innovation Summit in Association with TTI

Bringing innovation to market Andy Phillipps, Chairman, Reevoo Innovation in Corporate Travel Regis Pezous, Senior Manager Product Innovation, Carlson Wagonlit Travel

Travel Transformation @ DER Touristik Dirk Tietz, Chief Transformation Officer, DER Touristik Airbnb - the facts Jeroen Oskam, Director Research Centre, Hotelschool The Hague

The quarterly TTI newsletter Issue 64 October 2016

TTI Shareholders:

Tim Wright, Chairman

full details & registration at www.tti.org/forum

Monday 7 November, WTM Global Stage, Excel London, 16:00 to 17:30

Hear about the latest trail-blazing developments in travel

distribution. The Innovation Summit is organised by Travel

Technology Initiative. Industry leading speakers will talk about how

they are innovating to capitalise on the latest digital trends and

techniques. You will have the opportunity to hear them present and

to ask them questions during the speaker panel session.

Topics and Speakers:

STOP PRESS: WTM Networking Tech Drinks will be taking place in the TTI Tech Theatre (stand TT390, accessed via the Tech Show N1 Hall Entrance) after the Summit at 5.30pm.

Digital Travel - State of Play

Conference Report

Helene Hall, the

company’s chief

commercial officer talked

of the role data now plays

in travel in terms of

knowing customers and

targeting them through

the right channel at the

right time.

Data, she said, must be

an integral part of any

strategy especially in an

age where brand

association is weak and consumers go

directly to search engine’s to start travel

planning. But, where should travel companies

start?

Hall advised companies to gather data by

looking at different customer personas to

build up a picture of who you are targeting

and where they are.

The data then needs to be analysed to reveal

gaps and opportunities which travel

companies can then use to devise a content

strategy targeting customers with the right

piece of content in different channels.

Facebook UK and Ireland travel lead

Catherine Fitzgerald then switched the

focus to just one channel - mobile and

more specifically, the three Cs of

mobile - connect, convenience and

content.

Facebook became a mobile first

company some time ago and already

more than 80% of its advertising

revenue comes from mobile. The social

networking giant often talks now of how

mobile is a behaviour, not just a

consumer technology.

Fitzgerald held up many examples

to demonstrate not only how

powerful the mobile channel is but

also how it’s changing medium

consumption habits and driving

consumers to spend more time on

media, not less.

Perhaps that’s not surprising with

the advent and rapid adoption of on-

demand services such as Uber and

Lyft. Fitzgerald pointed to App Annie

figures revealing relatively low app

downloads for hotels versus airlines

with Ryanair top of the list over 52 weeks with

seven million downloads. Then she added in

the figures for online travel agents with

booking.com taking the top slot for the 52

weeks with 32 million downloads. TripAdvisor

comes second with 50 million.

However, the audience really sat up when

Uber was added - 116 million downloads for

the 52 weeks to the beginning of September.

The rise and rise of the disruptors isn’t just

about app downloads. Fitzgerald also shared

a glance at market capitalisation of travel

companies also a good demonstration of how

quickly the

travel

landscape

has

developed in

the past decade.

Back in 2006, Expedia was valued at $7

billion and Ctrip and Priceline at $2 billion

each while more established travel

companies such as Carnival Corporation had

a value of $40 billion. Fast forward to 2016

and it’s Priceline that’s top with a value of $64

billion closely followed by Uber at $63 billion.

So much change makes it difficult to adapt

and new means to engage and communicate

with consumers are coming along all the time.

Fitzgerald said that Facebook founder Mark

Zuckerberg wasn’t that taken with the idea of

messaging when it was first presented to him

a couple of years ago. Now, Facebook

Messenger is a “one billion person a month

app.”

KLM was the first travel company to get

involved but more and more travel companies

are now looking at the channel for customer

engagement with Icelandair launching a

booking bot as part of its Facebook

Messenger service in August of this year.

Travel companies have to keep a sharp

eye on all these developments because

as Fitzgerald concluded in an online world

“everything competes with everything.”

Much of what Amadeus UK and Ireland

head of product and innovation Clare de

Bono shared was also around keeping up

with the rapid pace of change.

(Continued on page 3)

Melt Content led the charge for integrating data in everything we do at TTI’s Autumn conference entitled ‘Digital Travel - State of Play’ last month.

by Linda Fox

The conference was kindly sponsored by:

Julia Lo Bue-Said, Advantage

Instead of three Cs, she talked of three Ms -

Mobile, Merchandise and Monetise. De

Bono’s take on mobile was also around

changing consumer behaviour and the need

for an integrated approach as consumers

swap between channels for different part of

the journey.

As Amadeus analyses how consumers

behave online, it can see what techniques are

working well for partners. For example, one

online travel agency is seeing a three-and-a-

half times better uptake for bundled

ancillaries with flights whereby the price

consumers see includes everything

compared to the pick as you go unbundled

flight option.

The ability to offer content differently is key to

conversion in online travel especially with the

huge amount of shopping around that goes

on. Amadeus has seen one partner monetise

it’s non-converting traffic by allowing others to

advertise their products and services on their

site.

According to de Bono, one OTA expects to

earn $1 million this year by this means which

is significant given the high percentage of non

-converting traffic to websites.

She says Amadeus has a marketing platform

called Travel Audience, which it plans to

launch in the UK next year. The platform

enables travel companies to target consumer

groups with advertising as well as publish and

earn revenue from advertisements for other

companies.

“So much of marketing spend to get users to

websites delivers no return on investment but

by publishing advertisements from others,

revenue could be

generated from

these non-

converting users.

“A/B testing has

shown these ads

have no impact

on sales but they

do generate an

awful lot of

revenue.”

One final

element she

touched on was

the need for

speed. De Bono pointed to figures from

Amazon revealing that a page load slowdown

of one second could lead to lost sales of $1.6

billion while Google estimates it could lose

eight million searches a day for a slowdown

of 0.4 of a second.

And, figures from Ctrip show that for every

one second improvement in response time,

the probability of getting the sale increases by

20%.

Looking to help redress some of the

imbalance between marketing spend, traffic

volumes and conversion for the hotel industry

is newcomer Hotel Bonanza.

Hotels get very hot

under the collar

when it comes to

third party

distribution and the

startup wants to

offer a model with

lower commission

rates for hotels

while fostering

higher loyalty from

consumers.

Co-founder Suzie

Barber shared

some of the

hurdles the

company has so

far faced in getting Hotel Bonanza up and

running with getting hotels signed up proving

one of the biggest challenges.

She shared that many properties required

Hotel Bonanza to participate in an existing

channel manager before agreeing to sign up

and to get those partnerships in place takes

time.

Her session sparked further debate on the

current hotel distribution landscape from

fellow presenter Carl Michel, chairman of

home-rental service, Veeve.

Michel, who is

also executive

chairman of

Generator

Hostels

believes high

commission

rates charged

by some online

travel agencies

are ‘skimming

other people’s

hard work and

profit.”

He added that

lower

commission models could work and that there

were already lower commission channels for

some accommodation distribution such as

Airbnb and HomeAway.

Barber was questioned on how the existing

online travel giants might react to her model

but said enough had been built into its

business plan to give a good fight.

“They have all sorts of properties on board

already and they are not going to drop their

commission rates but if they need to respond

that means we’re doing something right. I’d

like to

be in

that

position where we are annoying them.”

It wasn’t all about the online direct versus

online intermediary battle however with

Advantage Travel Partnership boss Julia Lo

Bue-Said on hand to share how traditional

agents are faring. She said it wasn’t only

more mature travellers that seek out travel

agents but younger travellers, who have done

their research but want someone to “hone it

in for them.”

The final sessions were devoted to where

travel distribution might go from here in the

digital world. Artificial Intelligence was

highlighted by Rob Wortham as one to watch

although he also pointed out some of the

pitfalls in terms of transparency in the

processes machine go through to make a

decision.

Meanwhile, John McQuillan from Travel Tech

Labs talked about the three stages of the

internet describing Gen 1 as informational,

Gen 2 as transactional and now, evolving to

Gen 3 which is about democratised trust and

will involve Blockchain. He pointed to many

large technology companies including

Samsung and IBM already experimenting

with the technology which could lead to big

developments in the areas of identity and

payment.

(Continued from page 2)

Helene Hall, Melt Content and Catherine Fitzgerald, Facebook

Rob Wortham and John McQuillan

Why do I need a Content Marketing Framework?

If you’re moving into content, you’ll encounter a lot of people telling you that you need a lot of things. Writers. Calendars. Strategies. And now a framework. Why are we adding another item to the ever-expanding list? You can relax: we aren’t. You don’t need a framework for its own sake, but because it’s the best way of developing the thing you really need from that list, which is a strategy. Some 70% of marketers say they lack a consistent or integrated content strategy (Altimeter, 2014), and in a landscape where investment in content is increasing all the time, that’s worrying. Strategies don’t just guide the kind of content you create and the subjects you talk about. They help you plan and schedule. They help you take measurement beyond the broad, click-obsessed metrics that many traditional publishers are stuck on. A good strategy sets global KPIs rooted in clear business goals, and adds a comprehensive list of channel-specific metrics that allow you to monitor and tweak activity as your campaign progresses. So don’t think of a framework as another thing to invest in, but as a roadmap to a solid strategy. Okay, but what does a strategy consist of? For many marketers, content strategy feels like a mythical creature. Everyone agrees it’s a big deal, but few people have ever seen it, and nobody’s sure exactly what it looks

like. To help put Melt’s Content Marketing Framework in context, we’ve compiled a list of all the things a strategy should define and document.

Foundation Vision: An overarching vision that will support

your broader business goals. What is your shoot-for-the-stars mission?

Core message: The condensed take away message the audience is left with from every asset, article or interaction.

KPI’s: An overall goal that is broken down into specific channel or asset-related KPI’s. For example, your overall goal might be a cost-effective 15% year-on-year traffic increase. At channel level that might break down to: SEO activity measured by an increase in ranking positions and overall organic traffic; social activity measured by a percentage increase in followers; email activity measured by an increase in click-to-open rate.

Goal-map: Short term, medium and long term goals outlined with their likely timeframe..

Audience

Customer Personas: Profiles for every persona

in your existing and target customer base, including information on demographics, behaviors and motivations.

Keyword Research: An exhaustive list of potential priority and long-tail keywords, breaking them into categories and including search volume and competition information. This helps you refine content themes, prioritise search opportunities and plan PPC campaigns.

Social Medial Analysis: A report on social trends within your niche, including hot topics, typical behaviours and important influencers.

(Continued on page 5)

by Helene Hall, Melt Content

This is an extract from Melt’s Content Marketing Framework User Guide.

Download the full ebook at meltcontent.com/CMF.

SWOT

Competition SWOT: What is working

well for your competitors? What isn’t working? What potential opportunities are they missing?

Internal SWOT: Audit your skills, tools and assets. What could you use or repurpose? What should you bin? What can you do in house and what will you need to outsource?

Implementation

Roadmap / Timeline: A ‘helicopter

view’ of the strategy broken down into stages, and shown against the anticipated timeline.

Handbook: An internal guide that details every step of the strategy, helping other departments, countries or markets adopt it and execute against it.

How the Content Marketing Framework helps The purpose of the framework is to help you get all that information together and turn it into customer-facing content. We treat it as a process with five main elements, each of which has a number of components.

1. Motivation: The starting point. Thrash out a clear sense of the problem you need to solve, and the brand values you need to stick to while solving it.

2. Data & Analysis: Research keyword options and their relative competitiveness; target personas; competitors activity; and brand and product-related activity on social media. Cross-referencing all of that gives a solid list of theme and channel ideas.

3. Strategy & KPIs: Building on the data from phase two, start to map themes onto the customer journey and develop one-liner content ideas. Start looking at distribution partners, and set global and channel-specific KPIs.

4. Content Creation: For each piece of content, finalise format, personnel (including any influencers you want to co-create with) and publishing and distribution plan. Then develop a detailed brief, setting out research requirements, structure, tone of voice and commercial goals. 5. Distribution & Outreach: Activate pre-arranged support from media and influencers, furnishing them

with any assets and guidelines they need. Begin more traditional targeted PR activity, and kick off social posts, monitoring them and boosting them as appropriate. Yes, this can be a long process. But it’s also a modular one, and you can drop or alter many of its components according to your needs and resources. However you implement it, we believe it’s the best route to a good strategy, and to compelling, commercially effective content. Download the full ebook at meltcontent.com/CMF.

(Continued from page 4)

Monetise your website ...

Having a high volume of web traffic is

great. It keeps websites near the top

of a search engines’ organic results

and the figures make a good story to

tell the investors. Today, savvy

agents are using the power of

eyeballs (or traffic) on their website to

drive new revenues in addition to

converting lookers into bookers. They

do this even if it means referring

traffic to another site. This begs the

question, why would you allow

advertising that could take people

away from your own website?

The truth is that only a small

percentage of visitors to your website

are actually ready to make a

purchase and book that trip. Most will

visit several sites before making a

decision to buy. They’ll even visit the

same site across multiple channels,

mobile, tablet and laptop on multiple

occasions. As a result, much of your

marketing spend delivers no

immediate return on investment.

Counter-intuitively perhaps, hosting

referral ads for travel providers such

as airlines, has no detrimental impact

on your own sales figures. On the

contrary, this type of activity can

generate healthy revenues. Today,

the business model is changing and

OTAs are not just earning from the

sales of airline seats and

merchandising as well as hotel beds

and car hire. Monetisation of websites

and their traffic is a key success

factor in growing revenues. It’s

because of this that Amadeus has

invested in Travel Audience.

Optimised for travel companies

Travel Audience is the only Demand

Side Platform in the programmatic

advertising space that has been built

specifically for the travel industry.

On the one side it enables any online

travel company to act as a publisher

and monetise their website through

CPC/CPM revenues. On the other

side it enables agents and providers

to target travellers through the power

of programmatic advertising with the

display of bookable travel offers and

real time pricing personalised to the

traveller.

Travel Audience can also help clients

raise their booking conversion rate

through advertisements that include

real, up-to-date prices. Many

advertisers find it difficult and time-

consuming to constantly update their

advertisements to show an accurate

price and will compensate by

choosing a static starting price such

as “round trip flights to New York from

£499.” However, the true cost of the

flight is often much more – while

these companies will see a high click-

through rate, the conversion rate will

be lower, sometimes as low as 5%.

By connecting to Amadeus’ search

cache, Travel Audience is able to

ensure the advertisement shows the

actual cost of the

flight at any given

time. While there

may be a slightly

lower click-through

rate as a result, the

conversion

rate is

higher

because

people who

click though

are more

willing to pay the actual, advertised

cost.

Travel Audience has an exclusive

publishing network in each country

through which they buy ad space

using real-time bidding technology.

The publishing network is built by

identifying portals that have ”qualified

travel traffic,” when the consumer

browsing the web has high booking

intent. These web portals are added

to the network on which Travel

Audience places advertisements,

ensuring its customers are reaching

specific audiences when they are

more likely to book.

There is growing pressure on travel

companies to reach their customers

in effective, cost-efficient ways.

Highly targeted advertising – when

done well, using data and automated

updating – is one of the more efficient

and innovative strategies for reaching

customers and increasing revenue.

Travel Audience has been growing

steadily in Western Europe over the

past few years, and will launch in the

UK in 2017. If you’re serious about

monetising your high ranking website,

or want to boost sales conversion

rates through highly targeted

advertising, contact Amadeus or

Travel Audience to learn how we can

help. For more information visit

www.travelaudience.com .

… and benefit from programmatic advertising for travel

by Clare de Bono, Amadeus

Social Media Corner

The Rise of Experientialism

There are clear indications coming from retailers that consumers would rather spend their hard-earned cash on a fancy restaurant booking or, indeed, a holiday.

Below we assess the impact experientialism is having on the wider travel and tourism industry, before offering a number of insights into how destinations and brands can tap into the ‘experience trend’ using strategy and social media.

The Rise of Experientialism

Reading this year’s travel trends reports can, at times, make for a sobering existence; travel safety concerns, fewer main holidays and concerns regarding job security all feature. But, taking the bad with the good, a theme we can see running through every one of 2016’s reports is a move toward experientialism.

Nowhere is the evidence more profound than in BDRC Continental’s ‘UK Holiday Trends 2016’, which highlights the growth of the ‘bucket-list’ holiday as one of its top trends for the travel and tourism industry this year.

According to BDRC ‘The average Briton takes a bucket-list holiday once every 3 years, rising to more than once every couple of years amongst 18-34 year olds.’ And this is a trend backed up elsewhere, with ABTA reporting that the number of long-haul customers has witnessed an increase of 350% over the past decade.

Interestingly, experientialism isn’t a trend we’re seeing only in the international market either. And while the domestic

long break is on the decline, ‘natural beauty’ and ‘places of interest’ – experiences, in other words – are the two biggest motivations for choosing a holiday ahead of ‘guaranteed sun’ and ‘rest my mind and body’.

Social Media Strategy

Though it’s unlikely to be your only marketing channel, or even sole digital marketing channel, social media – as we’ve shown here – presents a very real opportunity for destinations and travel brands alike to showcase their offering.

Categorically, social media should form part of – perhaps even the greater part of – the marketing strategy for brand and businesses in the travel and tourism industry. But there’s yet further evidence of a parallel between the rise of experientialism and social media. As ITB’s ‘Travel Trends Report’ points out, ‘more international travellers are… actively posting their holiday experiences on social media, with the percentage now having risen to nearly 50%’.

This type of user generated content (UGC) is invaluable for any business, particularly those in travel and tourism where compelling imagery really is king. And without a doubt, your social media strategy should look to take advantage of it whenever possible.

Sharing Experience

Capitalising on UGC is one of the more complex aspects of any social media strategy, as it isn’t something you can control. Key here is being able to feed the experiences of your patrons back into

the travel planning cycle. The idea being that trips already taken and captured then inspire the ‘next generation’ of holiday-makers.

Some of this will happen naturally, with grateful customers sharing their photos with you and thanking you for the experience. But incentivising the process, or even providing a platform for image sharing can bring a welcome boost. Create albums on Facebook and Pinterest for users to share their photos to, and encourage it organically with regular page updates. This is something Tourism Australia has done to raucous success.

Another approach would be to align your brand with popular hashtags across social media platforms, encouraging users to share their snaps as part of a wider theme. And if you have the resource, you could even work to create a hashtag specifically relating to your business or destination.

Finally, users – particularly fans – love recognition. Don’t be scared to offer recognition to user generated content. For instance, regramming compelling imagery tagged with your hashtag has been shown to be an effective way of generating impressions and increasing followership.

Anthony Rawlins will be giving a seminar on Social Media Advertising at World Travel Market on Wednesday 9 November, 10:30 at the Travel Tech Theatre.

2016 is the year of experientialism. Not that it didn’t exist before, but the balance between a desire for ‘stuff’ and for ‘experiences’ has shifted notably in favour of the latter.

by Anthony Rawlins, Digital Visitor

TTI on Twitter

You can keep up with all the latest news from TTI by following us on Twitter.

Follow @TTI_org

TTI is associated with a number of trade organisations. Here is a round-up of their news

News from our Associations

BETA represents over 120 of Britain’s biggest and best-known youth travel organisations and is

stepping up its efforts to raise the profile of this sector and to further promote the UK as a leisure and study destination for young travellers by commissioning a new study into the volume and value of the sector. The results of which will be shared at an event in late Feb 2017.

We are also cramming our industry calendar full of events for youth travel industry stakeholders with the next in our series of Youth Industry Seminars coming up on 20th October. Our expert panel will be sharing examples of influencer marketing, the growth of video and virtual reality marketing and the importance of customer engagement. Plus the competition is already reaching

fever pitch for this year’s British Youth Travel Awards, with organisations submitting their entries in categories including, Best Marketing, Best Use of Social Media and more. For details of how to get engaged with our growing network, please contact Emma English (eenglish@betauk.com)

Online renewals were successfully completed for all members including a new facility for AITO Agents. The customised

CMS in AITO.com will automatically populate relative areas of the database ready for analysis or reporting requirements.

Meanwhile the AITO Super Widget is getting plenty of pick up by our members wishing to showcase impartial feedback left by their customers on AITO.com. Not only does the feedback validate the members holidays and service levels, customers are also leaving tips and ideas for future travellers making it a valuable holiday research tool.

Some 40 AITO members completed the 40km charity walk to celebrate the associations 40th anniversary along the South Downs Way and Seven Sisters on the 1st October. Conditions were tough with rain, hail, wind and sunshine testing the walkers staying power. Funds raised will go towards AITOs Project PROTECT which monitors the destinations its members work in.

Every year, ABTA commissions an independent market

research company to ask around 2,000 members of the public about their perceptions of ABTA. It’s a useful benchmarking exercise, and this year the research revealed some very positive findings. Overall public recognition of ABTA has increased in the past 12 months to 73% (up by 2% on last year), reaffirming our position as the UK’s most recognised travel trade association. The same percentage of people regard membership of ABTA as essential or important when booking a holiday. The public also have overwhelmingly positive associations

with the ABTA brand, with well over half of all people associating it with expertise, confidence, reassurance, safety, reliability and quality. There is a very high expectation that travel companies are ABTA Members, with 75% of people expecting their holiday company to be a Member. Conversely, the research suggests that not being an ABTA Member is detrimental to a company’s business, with over six in ten people (63%) saying they think less positively of companies that are not ABTA Members. ABTA has reminded its Members that ATOL holders and their agents are required to have written agency agreements in place between them. If the correct agency agreement is not in place, the ATOL holder and the agent

will be in breach of the ATOL Regulations and agents should not be selling the ATOL holder’s services. Agency agreements must contain the Schedule of Terms published by the CAA and must be dated and include the name of the ATOL holder and the agent. The Schedule of Agency Terms can be found by opening up the Official Record Series 3 from the CAA website. In the event of failure of an ATOL holder, an agent is required to provide a copy of its agency agreement to the CAA so that claims from customers that booked through the agent can be processed. If an agent does not have the correct agency agreement in place, the agent will be liable to refund the customer.

We have just run this year’s edition of Showcase Digital in

London, and were pleased to see some TTI members there. Now in its third year, the event combined our trademark B2B appointments with keynote speeches from Amadeus, Airbnb and Bournemouth University and an afternoon session of ‘quick wins’ suggestions from various members of the travel tech sector as to how to deal with challenges that you may be facing. We were delighted that Paul Richer was able to moderate the keynote session, and look forward to another successful event next year. We are looking ahead to our annual European Tourism Summit in the Alps held in Lucerne, Switzerland. This year the spectacular surroundings of the Swiss Transport Museum by Lake Lucerne will host a day of discussion where senior industry figures look at current hot topics. There is

always a technology element in the programme and perhaps nowhere more so this year than in the first session looking at the companies that have challenged the marketplace. All of this comes with the excellent hospitality of Lucerne and Switzerland Tourism and should lead to a day full of exchange of thoughts and ideas, as well as networking. The summit on the 11th October is free to all ETOA members and non-members should enquire via the website. Perhaps our biggest development this year is our winning of the European Commission’s World Bridge Tourism tender. This is a 12 month programme of activities designed to increase the flows of visitors from China to the European Union and will be aligned with a major new development promoted by the European Commission: the 2018 EU-China Tourism Year (ECTY). ETOA will be the principal provider of the series of events, commencing with a launch at London’s

Barbican Centre on Thursday 3rd November 2016. This event is open to non-members, so if you are interested in working with the Chinese market, please contact Rachel Read at rread@etoa.org for more details. As World Travel Market approaches, we will be taking our customary stand in the Global Village. We would love to see some TTI members during the show, so do pop by and see us at stand number GV300. ETOA has also launched in 2016 a series of webinars covering a wide variety of topics affecting the tourism industry. These are 30 minute bites with expert presentations and Q&A and thus far have created some quite lively debates. Keep an eye out for upcoming sessions. We look forward to seeing you soon at an ETOA event somewhere be it in London, Lucerne or further afield in China.

ENTER2017 eTourism Conference: January 24-26, 2017. The Conference offers a worldwide and unique forum for attendees from industry, academia, government, and other organizations involved in ICT and Tourism to actively exchange, share, and challenge state-of-the-art research and industrial case studies...Read more

ENTER2017 eTourism Conference: PhD Workshop. The free event will take place in Rome (IT) on January 23, 2017 and will provide a forum for PhD students undertaking research related to ICT in Travel and Tourism to discuss interactively... Read more ENTER2017 eTourism Conference: Italian Day. The event will take place on January 27, 2017 in Rome. The Italian Day will offer insights on local digital tourism development: Destination

Branding, Reputation Management... Read more IFITT Awards 2017: Call for nominations. IFITT will sponsor a series of awards to be presented at ENTER2017 eTourism conference, which is held in January 24-26, 2017 in Rome, Italy. The application process and deadline vary according to each award... Read more

Progress continues with the OpenTravel Alliance’s 2.0 Object Model Solution, the next generation tool for travel technology messaging. The Golf Project, which includes Facility Search, Golf Course Tee Time Availability, Tee Time Reservation, and Facility Information, should be complete near the end of 2016. The Hotel Project, a more robust project including Availability and Reservation, is moving along as well, and a new project, Ground Transportation, is scheduled to kick off by the end of October!

In the coming months, OpenTravel will release the 2.0 Profile messages, which will include the profile and finance libraries, neither of which have been previously released. OpenTravel members will be able to read, create, update and delete profiles in 2.0, leading to an easier transition with full adoption of the object model solution. OpenTravel presented 2.0 at Hospitality Technology Next Generation’s (HTNG) Insight Summit North America in St. John’s, Newfoundland, August 23-25, offering a technical overview of 2.0 and how the model allows travel partnerships to be more quickly created and easily

maintained. On September 23, OpenTravel presented 2.0 to the Hotel Electronic Distribution Network Association (HEDNA) Board of Directors in Washington, D.C., discussing the necessity of the 2.0 transition for reduced time-to-market and greater development efficiency. OpenTravel is the not-for-profit responsible for the non-proprietary technology that enables interoperability for disparate systems in all segments of the travel industry. For more information on latest happenings, please visit www.opentravel.org, or email info@opentravel.org.

After the momentous events over the summer, which started with the surprise result of the referendum followed by a change of Prime Minister, followed by the Euros and then the Olympics, we are now into Autumn and are fast

approaching our November Conference, which will be held on the 10th. Following the success of the panel discussion, within the main agenda, of the June Conference, we will again follow the same format, but this time the focus will be on Design - and specifically, how can Revenue Management be used to define new products.

This will be coupled with a range of presentations from both industry experts and the experiences of members organisations. The Retail Pricing Section will run in parallel, but will be starting half an hour earlier.

Introducing TTIplaces

Key Principles

TTIplaces will work on a similar business model to

that of TTIcodes.

Ideally there would be a single point of billing.

TTI will seek a partner to build and operate the

product.

There will be a standard product which can, if

feasible be overlaid with a client’s own directory.

It must support multi-lingual versions of places and

place names.

Access to the product will be via a standardised

web service.

Introduction

For the past 12 months TTI has been aware of the

challenges facing many of its members across the

spectrum of travel distribution in searching for the

right product for the right property in the right

location.

This challenge has been magnified through

TTIcodes which illustrate that there is little

consistency in the geography used by suppliers to

group hotels together often leading to consumers /

travellers not being shown properties in the location

of their choice.

It is also evident that many of the supplier’s

geographical structures have been built around a

hierarchical structure with limited ability to link

places together on a many to many basis.

Thus TTIplaces seeks to address two key

challenges:

Challenge 1 is mapping the holidaymaker’s request

e.g. Disneyland, to the geographic search criteria of

the suppliers from whom one is requesting

availability and prices.

Challenge 2 is then mapping the supplier response

to the geographic place that the holidaymaker

asked for in the original request.

Background

TTI held a workshop with representatives of a cross

section of the hospitality industry to discuss the

challenges and opportunities associated with

creating an industry wide solution.

Key points emerging from the meeting were:-

All agreed that it was an issue for all travel

companies with no set standards in place for

defining resorts, places , areas

Even companies that used the same name to define

a place may cover a different geographical area

than others e.g. London

All 3 groups shared a consensus that whilst a

Standards Entity such as TTI can create a standard

view of an area / place / resort etc., the solution

also needs to enable travel companies to create

their own custom views of specific areas.

There was a consensus that it would be an evolving

project starting with a clear step by step plan with

focus on the main tourist destinations.

It was recognised that areas could overlap or form

part of a larger area e.g. Alcudia and Puerto

Pollensa may overlap whilst both are part of a

larger area, Majorca.

Longer term, creating place definitions based on

polygons was seen as a distinctly possible solution,

whilst Day One a solution based upon the radius

from a specific Point of Interest or centre of a

resort / city may suffice as a first step.

The data collected for the 500,000 properties

contained in TTIcodes including over 400,000 with

Geo Codes provides a useful set of base data.

In addition, access to the supplier files from which

the TTIcodes / MultiCodes supplier cross

references are created could provide a benchmark

for the different geographic structures that are

currently used by suppliers

Three Key Project Areas identified for

consideration: Technology covering data including

polygon definitions and types of transactional

services required to support the requirements,

Standards including classification of differing types

of places, naming conventions, multi lingual

alternatives, synonyms etc. and Commercial

Considerations, how such a service would be

funded and who would operate it.

The Opportunity

The opportunity is based on a very simple set of

requirements based on grouping places together in

sets and following a set of basic principles. These

are:

A Place can contain other Places

A Place can be contained in a Place

A Place can be associated with another Place

A Place can have many relationships

For clarity a set of places is simply an area of any

shape (“polygon”).

There will a universal standard set of Places with

Multilingual synonyms.

Clients will subscribe to

to the service in much the

same way they do to

TTIcodes

Subject to feasibility,

Clients can create their own sets (polygons) that will

overlay the standard set.

TTI Places will work in conjunction with TTIcodes /

GIATA MultiCodes so that subscribers can create

and filter lists of properties within a Place e.g. only 2

star upwards properties in a Place.

Properties will automatically be included in a Place

when a new Place is created or a new Property is

added to TTIcodes / MultiCodes database or

excluded if the boundaries defining a Place are

changed.

External Service Provider

Since the initial workshop, VIBE Systems contacted

TTI asking if we would be interested in a solution

based on Polygons that they have built and

enhanced over the past 4 years to support their own

reservation product.

Following due diligence undertaken by myself ,

Peter Dennis & Steve Dobson where we looked at

the software underpinning their application, the

database, the end user functionality used to build

and maintain the databases plus coverage, we

concluded that the software provides a more than

reasonable base to support TTIplaces.

In addition as the external service provider, VIBE

would be responsible for hosting the application

including providing a web service that is available

24x7 with 99.5% availability; Customer Support

team to assist with integration and on-going level 2

support, acting as the publisher for the creation of

Polygons for new Places; The development of any

additional features subject to a properly cost benefit

analysis.

Next Actions

Analyse the geographies for 10 suppliers across a

set of key markets to validate principles of the

proposal

Dry run how solution would work across a number

of key geographies

Check out interest with view to holding 2nd

workshop to go through solution in more detail

Set up a project committee to run with the project

Construct and test various pricing scenarios

TTI & VIBE to draw up a principles of co-operation

agreement including commercial framework .

Vision Statement

To create a standardised tool for the Industry that enables the cross referencing of place names across and between suppliers of hospitality based products and services.

by Peter Hazel

Project Management Committee Discussions

TTIcodes There has been an update on the affiliate product to show a preferential rate for TTI members which we expect to expand our membership. We are giving companies a month to sign up for the new rates before they revert to the higher price. We have unfortunately lost low Cost Holidays and Gateway in Belgium as they have both ceased trading. Overall TTI codes now has over 528k properties with 28million mappings covering OTA, Bed Bank, Wholesaler, GDS and third parties. Our new clients include Perfect Holidays and the Holiday Place. We also hope and expect that both GTA and Southall Travel will upgrade to TTI Codes plus. Meanwhile we continue to work on improving the quality of the data. We have decided not to map Individual Apartments and Holiday homes.

TTIplaces There are a number of action points after the May meeting to actually formulate what TTIplaces will do. A cooperation with Vibe Software will help enable this initiative. We now believe we have 80% of product requirements completed. Furthermore a commercial agreement has been agreed based on the same principles as our deal with GIATA for TTIcodes. New Members After each event Paul will contact non members and speakers to see whether they would like to join TTI. Autumn Conference 2016 This took place on 30 September and was well received. Melt Content, our new website developers, were sponsors. Winter Forum 2016 This will be from 16:00 to 17:30 with

four speakers. We are aiming to place TTI promotional flyers on delegate seats. Events in 2017 Paul suggested a subject of social media, mobile and loyalty for the spring/autumn conferences. TTI New Website Comments on the web redesign have been passed to Melt by Steve. We hope to have it functional a.s.a.p. Chairman We have a new Chairman to announce at WTM. Marketing We will discuss new ideas with Janet Butler Next Meeting This will be on 8 December by conference call.

A Warm Welcome to New Members

Selective Asia

TTI Events 2016

Project Management Meetings (All members welcome, contact Liz if you would like to take part) Thursday 8 December - by conference call

Conferences & Forums Monday 7 November - WTM Travel Innovation Summit in Association with TTI

Travel Technology Initiative Ltd, Registered office: Victoria House, 51 Victoria Street, Bristol, BS1 6AD Company Registration Number: England 2398368

Published on behalf of TTI by Genesys - The Travel Technology Consultancy - www.genesys.net

Advertise in this Newsletter

If your company wishes to place an advert or an advertorial article in this newsletter, please contact liz.rylance@tti.org

Our last project meeting took place by conference call on 13 September

by Tim Wright, Codegen

EyeforTravel is offering TTI members 20% off the delegate rates for its EyeforTravel Europe 2017 conference - 3-4 May 2017, London

Contact Liz for the discount code.