LetMeGo to The PhoCusWright Conference

Those of you who follow my Twitter feed will already know this, but I spent the majority of last week attending, for the first time, the PhoCusWright conference, which is one of the premier annual meetings of professionals in the travel technology industry. I felt it might be useful to write out some of my ideas and observations about this event, so that both the members of the LetMeGo team, and those of you who are following the development of LetMeGo, might gain some knowledge about how this particular group of professionals view the current state of the industry.

Part of the production team of the PhoCusWright Conference (picture by Uptake.com/Elliottng)

Firstly, it’s worth noting that this was the best-run conference I’ve ever attended. Given that it was also the most expensive conference I’ve ever attended, as well, that seems appropriate. There were plenty of networking opportunities for attendees, as well, and I came home with a huge stack of business cards. On the other hand, I felt the majority of conference presenters did not completely understand many of the most important social media. While Twitter was on everyone’s lips, no one mentioned any of the powerful, traveler-focused social networks (like Couchsurfing). I hate to judge people based on their choice of clothing, but this was one of the most suit-heavy events I’ve attended; there is, perhaps, some connection between more formal dress, and overlooking cutting-edge social networks. Someone call the Freakonomics guys!

Day One: The Travel Innovation Summit

The chief activity on the first day was 32 presentations by various companies (each of which had paid $10,000 for the privilege). Unfortunately for their marketing budgets, most of these made relatively little impression (at least on this attendee). However, there were a few truly innovative companies presenting. One of these was Gliider, another New York-based service that I helped to beta test; another was SpeedRFP, which is a service whose model is similar to LetMeGo’s, but is focused on large events. The winner was Amadeus IT, a large (8,500 employees) company better known for its GDS, which created a map-based system to find flights and fares.

Main stage of the PhoCusWright Conference (picture by Uptake.com/Elliottng)

The other highlight of the first day, from my perspective, was meeting some really great people at that night’s networking events. I met a number of other travel-related startup founders from around the world, along with venture capitalists and others.

Days Two and Three

With the contest portion of the conference over, I attended a number of sessions that discussed travel-related topics in detail. One of the most interesting, from LetMeGo’s perspective, revealed that PhocusWright expects the U.S. lodging industry to continue suffering until 2012. For online lodging agencies, this is good news. Struggling lodgings are more open to the idea of working with new services to earn additional revenue, and travelers are interested in using services like ours to take advantage of low prices and greater choice.

There were several keynote speeches, as well as interviews with important players in the industry. Speakers included the founders and/or CEOs of companies like Expedia, Priceline, Kayak, Travelocity, and Orbitz, among others. Each used his designated 30 minutes of speaking time to justify the strategies his company employed over the preceding year, and to remind everyone in the audience why his company is superior to all of the others. I found most of these speakers to be fairly arrogant, but one stood out as less so: Barney Harford, the Orbitz CEO, is both the youngest and the most progressive of the presenters. He and I agree on the need for inclusive pricing, and he is behind opencuba.org.

Many of the new contacts I met during these two days were company founders and/or key players from the Latin American market, which up to this point seems to have been forgotten by the big online travel agencies. Again, this oversight should prove good for agencies like ours.

Take-Aways from the Conference

Most of the people to whom I mentioned the idea behind LetMeGo seemed very interested in it. Based on this interest, we may consider presenting LetMeGo at next year’s summit. On the downside, most technologies and strategies presented at the conference assume that real-time pricing and very fast booking are key to building strong businesses. In this, I hope they are wrong–LetMeGo is built upon the idea that people will be willing to wait a few hours before booking a lodging, in exchange for custom, socially responsible experiences at an equivalent or lower price.

I expected that the PhoCusWright conference would allow me to meet many other geeks, like me, obsessed with technology innovation in the travel industry. That wasn’t the case–most attendees were of a more corporate, established mindset, and little that was presented was as cutting-edge as I had hoped.  Notwithstanding, the conference’s strong networking, insights into potential strategies, and overall atmosphere were a pleasant surprise.  I look forward to attending next year’s PhocusWright in Scottsdale, Arizona. I hope to see you there.