Tnooz have gatherered the predictions of 20 industry crystal ball gazers, myself included, so I will reflect here on what a few of the other nodes have forecast for the coming year. I have also repeated the two predictions that I submitted. In the Tnooz article the hyperlinks were omitted, so I’ve added them here as they give a lot more context to some of my phases, often explaining in more detail why I’ve come to the conclusion I have.
My 2011 Predictons as published on Tnooz
The booking path goes non linear
There are so many different and seemingly unrelated changes happening in the world of online travel, but many of these converge at the point of reinventing the way a person searches for, buys, and then consumes the travel experience. In future, this path moves from linear to seemingly haphazard – steps are skipped whilst others occur in an order that may appear incomprehensible today. Some of the individual impacts feeding into this tectonic trend are campaign management, content management, inspiration, mobile proliferation, personalization, intelligent caching and the merging of pre-shopping and shopping. This prediction will take a number of years to play out fully, but the first real signs will be visible during 2011.
Mobile apps and airport kiosks begin their decline
It is always difficult to predict exactly the high water mark during a flood, or the top of the stock market bull run prior to a correction; likewise it is difficult to say that a current hot technology will not get any hotter. This is not to say people won’t be making good money for years to come, but reverting to the old BCG Growth-Share Matrix, 2011 is the start of the cash cow period. App fatigue is rearing its head, ad spend is elsewhere, and HTML 5 is gaining momentum. Games via mobile and other certain segments may still favor native apps, but I remember 10 years ago when I had to download a web app to use online banking – today doing this outside the PC browser would be laughable. Travel will follow the same path, and one impact of everything becoming mobile is that airport kiosks will play a smaller and smaller role over time in the airport as space is freed up for more productive uses.
The booking path goes non linear
There are so many different and seemingly unrelated changes happening in the world of online travel, but many of these converge at the point of reinventing the way a person searches for, buys, and then consumes the travel experience. In future, this path moves from linear to seemingly haphazard – steps are skipped whilst others occur in an order that may appear incomprehensible today. Some of the individual impacts feeding into this tectonic trend are campaign management, content management, inspiration, mobile proliferation, personalization, intelligent caching and the merging of pre-shopping and shopping. This prediction will take a number of years to play out fully, but the first real signs will be visible during 2011.
Mobile apps and airport kiosks begin their decline
It is always difficult to predict exactly the high water mark during a flood, or the top of the stock market bull run prior to a correction; likewise it is difficult to say that a current hot technology will not get any hotter. This is not to say people won’t be making good money for years to come, but reverting to the old BCG Growth-Share Matrix, 2011 is the start of the cash cow period. App fatigue is rearing its head, ad spend is elsewhere, and HTML 5 is gaining momentum. Games via mobile and other certain segments may still favor native apps, but I remember 10 years ago when I had to download a web app to use online banking – today doing this outside the PC browser would be laughable. Travel will follow the same path, and one impact of everything becoming mobile is that airport kiosks will play a smaller and smaller role over time in the airport as space is freed up for more productive uses.
And a quick review of the other forecasters
A few common themes that I tend to agree with are the rise of the supplier (Alex Bainbridge and Gene Quinn) and social influencing search results (Graham Robertson, Glenn Gruber, Sarah Kennedy Ellis, Tim Hughes, Troy Thompson and maybe even Timothy O’Neil-Dunne if you extend his Value Finding hypothesis).
There are some curious and conflicting predictions on mobile. Alex Gisbert is claiming mobile will be more about content than bookings and that monetization will be tough (not sure Mobiata would agree), Charlie Li is claims mobile still offers good opportunities for small companies to compete with global players (not sure I agree) and Norm Rose is predicting a big interest in native apps with booking functionality for tablets (I definitely don’t agree). My thinking is much more in line with Tim Hughes when he predicts The mobile/tablet/PC debate will change from building for devices to building for display preferences.
But my favorite prediction has to go to the first one offered by Sarah Kennedy Ellis. Too many predictions in any list compiled by anyone in any publication really are just extentions of trends that are already well established today, but someone taking a contrarian viewpoint and swimming against the tide is to be commended. She writes:
From socially loud to anti-crowd
In 2011, travelers begin to shift from “always-on” travel experiences to “digitally-disconnected” preferences. Technology companies start to support this shift through integration of unique data in the shopping process. Check-ins, social shares and real-time supplier inventory will be used in aggregate to inform travelers of the most likely recommended destinations featuring short lines and low occupancy bliss. Today, we use this data to see where our network is now/who’s nearby, as well as where, when and with whom friends have future travel plans. But in 2011, this data will be used to optimize preferences and inform travelers of destinations people aren’t visiting and which beach or ski mountain the crowds won’t be occupying on specific dates.
December 22, 2010 at 6:33 pm
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Dennis Schaal. Dennis Schaal said: RT @ggruber66: Tnooz nodes give their 2011 predictions http://is.gd/jg8ZF [...]