Busy Day at the Show
It has been a particularly busy day here at PhoCusWright, and I'm exhausted. I thought it might be interesting if I posted a run through of my day so far.
9a - Meeting with Akamai I had always known Akamai for its caching solutions, but they're here to show off their web accelerator product. The basic idea is that if you use their product, you will speed up response time on your website from 30% to (in rare cases) 100%. I think few would argue that faster online response times are important, but it would be interesting to explore how many sales are lost versus how much more it would cost to speed up the process.
930a - Meeting with Kayak We all know Kayak to be a travel metasearch site, but they're also looking to make a bigger splash with review content. They inherited TravelPost when they purchased SideStep, but they hadn't really done much with it until now. The site will be relaunching in the next month or so, and I'm told it's going to be a big enhancement. Sadly, however, I still can't get them to tell me the terms of their deal with American.
10a - Presentation by United I knew this was going to be a good one when I saw the title: Customer Experience and Flying: Not an Oxymoron. This was coming from United? I actually ended up feeling bad for the presenter, Tim Simonds, after the beating he took on United's behalf. He spoke a lot about their focus on building up their premium product while failing to mention the rest of the plane or their poor on-time performance. Needless to say, the questions for him were quite pointed. In the end, United is trying to have a good product everywhere and a great one up front. Oh, and they want to be "best in class," but that only includes North American carriers.
1045a - Meeting with ExpertFlyer This is a tool for the power users of the travel world. You can get schedules and availability information for all kinds of airlines down to the booking class. In addition, they now have upgrade and frequent flier mileage availability. It's a pretty powerful tool, but it's probably only really appealing to the hard core road warrior.
1230p - Meeting with TripIt I've already written about TripIt before, so I won't dwell. But I didn't realize before that they've launched a LinkedIn application. So now, if you want, people who view your LinkedIn profile can also see what city you're in. There are all kinds of potential uses for this tool in the corporate world, and I think we've yet to really see what can be done with all this data.
2p - Visit with Wandrian This is another one I've written about, but now I at least have a better understanding of what they actually do. In short, they are the connection between rail companies and distribution partners. They can speed up and simplify the process significantly which means easier train travel purchasing for the consumer and quicker backend connections.
3p - Visit with FareCompare FareCompare relaunched their site within the last week, but the big news was released today. I always liked the site because it made it easy to get raw fare information, but it never was able to couple it with availability. Without that it was still helpful but much less so. Now they've announced a deal with ITA Software that will finally allow them to marry fares with availability. That's a much more powerful tool.
And now I'm sitting here catching up on blogging. I may not make it to the show for the last day tomorrow, but that doesn't mean I won't have more posts before the week is out.