The travel industry has witnessed the rise of this phenomenon as much as any other. With the rise of low-cost carriers and a plethora of hotel sub-types such as luxury, eco and spa, the Amateur-Expert Traveller is becoming used to getting what he or she wants. The panel of experts we consulted generally agreed with the view that “the future of the travel business is in the millions of niche markets at the shallow end of the distribution curve”. We asked them to rate the opportunities of potential niche markets:

Family-friendly travel was a market that our experts overwhelmingly viewed as a major opportunity; but there are more specific, emerging niche markets to consider as well. ‘Green’ travel is an area which could continue to grow as issues of sustainability become even more prominent in the consumer’s mind – so they might want to travel by boat or train, rather than plane, and stay in a hotel with grey-water plumbing. Another particularly specialised niche is religious travel. Though this caters to a small and limited group of consumers, they have very specific needs, and 22% of our experts viewed this niche as a major opportunity. Established niches will continue to be popular and even grow – weddings abroad, for example, or adventure travel, loved by thrill-seekers the world over. Even aircraft charter was identified as a potential niche.

The one thing a customer can’t buy online is expertise. This is where the travel agent is as invaluable to the customer as the customer is to the agent. Providing expertise or specialisation across many small niche products is an ideal way to compete in an increasingly web-dominated environment. The Amateur-Expert Traveller is evolving, just like travel services themselves. In the future niche travel may be more in demand than ever as customers realise that not only can they travel to the particular destination they want, but they can also have a choice of transport, have a choice between eco hotels and luxury hotels, and fit the activities on holiday to their own lifestyle and interests.

Without further ado, over to Professor Howard…

Professor Howard

The section of the Amateur-Expert Traveller report that looks at future technological innovations within the travel industry is very compelling. The concept of virtual reality has been discussed for a while now and I am not surprised – it is a compelling proposition.

Think about it: if you walk into a travel agent to book a trip to China, you may be handed a number of brochures, have hotels highlighted to you and visits you can make while you are there, but, after a while, they can all look similar! Just think what it would be like to be able to spend 5 minutes experiencing the sounds, sites and smells of your destination in a virtual world created for you. It certainly would reduce the number of disappointed customers, and it is clear from the report that the travel industry is looking forward to when this technology becomes a reality – if you forgive the pun.

This technology is just around the corner. Our work at Warwick and York Universities means that we are devising outlines for a helmet that recreates the sights, smells, sounds and tastes of far-flung destinations. This type of technology could become an invaluable tool in setting travellers’ expectations and giving them a clearer sense of what they’re buying. As consumers start to become more interested in more far-flung destinations, this will become increasingly important.

So, in the future, you and your children could experience the plains of the Serengeti as part of your geography lesson, and you will also know that each of your holidays will be exactly the once in a lifetime experience you were looking for!

- Professor David Howard, University of York

Denis Lacroix, our VP of Sales & e-Commerce Platforms, was among the thirty three candidates invited to perform onstage demonstrations, aiming for highest scores among audience votes. And he used his ‘Five Minutes of Fame’ well.

Denis Lacroix (left), VP of Sales & e-Commerce Platforms, Amadeus and Marcus Casey, Head of e-Commerce & Mobile, Lufthansa

He pointed out that “Current searching is not in line with the way people think. Travellers often do not know what they really want, and even if they do, they will still want to compare options and offers. Research conducted for our leisure travel technology business revealed that 70 percent of holiday makers do not have a firm idea of where they want to go when they start looking. This new search technology will map onto the way consumers want to purchase travel.”

It seemed to strike a chord. Travellers want to ask deceptively simple questions such as “What can I do for what I want to spend? And where can I go? I want to go scuba diving, but I do not know where. And I want a beach holiday but I do not want the temperature to be above 25C.” They find it frustrating that they have to do a ‘linear search’, in which they might find the perfect flight to the perfect hotel – then find the dates aren’t available. This is a principle we call Extreme Search, in which travellers can ask  questions that humans are likely ask, but which are difficult for computers to answer.

But it’s not just in principle – Affinity Shopper does this in practice, as showcased together with Lufthansa at the Travel Innovation Summit.
Marcus Casey, Head of e-Commerce & Mobile of Lufthansa, take on it is that “Amadeus Affinity Shopper gives our customers further options to use our website as a traveller playground where users can explore and determine their trip based on what they would like to do during their travel. The ability to inspire the traveller to search easily and fast, through quality data, gives us a considerable competitive edge.”

Clearly Marcus is happy with the product, and so it would seem is the PoChusWright summit. We’re going to use this “ability to inspire” to drive us forward from now on.

So, we’re very excited to be able to post today that our Affinity Shopper product has been shortlisted as one of the four finalists for the Innovation Summit award to be announced today at Phocuswright event in Orlando (5pm US time).

Affinity Shopper is the first in a suite of Extreme Search products, and you can see the demo below.

This is a real vote of confidence from the industry. The PhoCusWright attendees comprise over 900 travel industry leaders from around the world, with  leading individuals from the largest corporations and most visionary companies in this growing industry.

We can’t really put it better than the PhoCusWright website itself:

Only the most innovative and exciting will make the cut.

Four finalists with the highest audience scores advance to the next round during Center Stage@The PhoCusWright Conference. They each have Five Minutes of Fame to describe their innovation and convince a blue ribbon panel of judges that they will be a notable success. The “PhoCusWright Travel Innovation Summit Winner” is announced at the conclusion of the conference.

So we’re looking forward to our Five Minutes of Fame, and will keep you posted on our progress!

This is an easy question for a traveller to ask, but extremely difficult for a computer to answer. If you’ve ever found the perfect hotel online, with the perfect flight, only to stumble at the perfect dates, you’ll know how frustrating it can be to find what you want.

This is where Extreme Search comes in. It’s a concept that takes innovation, inspiration, interaction, transparency, data quality and speed, and brings them together to serve the needs of people who want to travel. It enables people to query computers through their own criteria, rather than being limited to what is available. It wraps the technology around the traveller.

Affinity Shopper: extreme search in action

So, what does extreme search look like?

The answer to this question is Affinity Shopper. The first product of an Extreme Search suite of solutions.

Watch the demo:

This is a new search engine that transforms airline websites into a ‘traveller playground’. It is where consumers can explore and select their trip based on their desired holiday experience, rather than simply searching for flights along specific routes on exact dates.

Affinity Shopper enables airlines to improve their share of the leisure travel market, increase look to book ratios, boost customer retention and improve the online customer shopping experience.

Meanwhile, it enables customers to shop in the way they think, not in a linear destination-and-date way. They can now ask questions such as: “What can I do for what I want to spend? And where can I go? I want to go scuba diving, but I do not know where. And I want a beach holiday but I do not want the temperature to be above 25C.”

The Amateur-Expert Traveller: A new phenomenon, and the future of travel

At Amadeus we believe that people drive the technology, and this is borne out by our new report, called “The Amateur-Expert Traveller”.

Today, we are seeing a new generation of travellers. They have been empowered by the internet, with more information available to them, in particular user-generated information in the form of blogs, videos, pictures, ratings and reviews, and so on.

So, the relationship between travel companies and their customers is changing. Customers know more, need more, and expect more. We call them Amateur-Experts because they are often highly informed and discerning. And they present a great opportunity for the travel industry to improve to match their requirements.

Based on primary research with 2,719 travel professionals and 30 thought-leaders and senior executives from companies such as Kayak, Forrester and Qatar Airways, the Amateur-Expert Traveller report highlights three significant developments: the rise of the Amateur-Expert Traveller; the potential for massive technological innovation before, during and after a trip, which we term The Responsive Journey; and the way in which the industry is moving towards niche experiences which, again, offer huge potential for travellers and travel companies alike.

Download the Amateur-Expert Traveller Report.

Read about it in the Wall Street Journal: “Amadeus’s New Booking System Targets Leisure Travelers”.

Watch an interview with Amateur-Expert Traveller Steven Domanski:

So we have asked Steven Domanski, one of the Amateur-Expert Travellers we identified during our research project, to outline some of his top tips for what you should be looking for. Steven is a thirty year-old venture capitalist who was born in Brussels and now lives in London. He travels regularly to the US, Europe and South America – so he knows about travel!

Here, Steven gives his take on travel tips, both from the technology perspective, and the people. And he looks ahead to a time when the two might not be quite as separated as they are now…

A checklist for travel – Steven Domanski

First, you’re sitting at a screen reading this, so it’s likely you’re looking online, right now, possibly considering how the internet can help you research, plan and book your travel.

Here are some tips which have helped me with regular travel over the recent years:

• It’s all about the price. Many of us are price-sensitive, especially during the current economic downturn, and the internet can be a great tool to help you hunt out the very best price for the travel you wish to take. Most airline websites today display the best available price during booking, which is great – but what about planning? What time is best to travel? The demand for flights and hotels can affect the price. By using websites like Farecast (the Bing Travel site) and Farecompare you can predict which months are going to cost less.
• Listen to your peers. Increasingly there are ways to check out the service levels and quality of service you should expect from other travellers. They are using forums, sites and blogs to provide feedback on the service they have received at hotels, airlines and destinations. Before I travel for leisure I usually consult blogs and forums to see what other travellers have to say. Delicious and Digg can be useful here. Delicious is a social bookmarking site, so by searching through that, you find pages that people have tagged – not computers! – which can add credibility to the results. Digg is similar, with people voting pages ‘up’ or ‘down’ in preference, so the ‘best’ pages float to the top. Again, you get consensus from people as to what is most relevant or helpful.
• Don’t settle for less. When I first started to travel, my budget meant I’d often book into hostels, but after further investigation it transpired that with a little careful planning I could have booked into a better quality of hotel under a promotional deal. The lesson for me was not to be put off by luxury brand positioning. It’s always worth a look.
• Loyalty schemes pay off. I’m a regular traveller (in the past this was often for business). By registering as a frequent flyer with my favorite airline and hotel chain I managed to amass a large number of loyalty points which translate into great value leisure trips and flights.
• Lead from the front. Of late I’ve been elected as group travel leader amongst my friends. This means booking our joint holidays and city breaks which can often be a complex process, requiring a lot of time and vast numbers of e-mails and phone calls. So, I’ve started to use travel booking applications on social networking sites like Facebook and investigated travel social networking sites like Tripmate. Some of these sites allow you to share calendars with friends and it takes the hassle out of the planning and booking stage.

I’m aware that everyone has their own personal favorites, so by all means, use every site at your disposal. And don’t forget that even seemingly unrelated sites such as Google Maps can help pin down locations, and there are many, many sites that can help with local knowledge.

There are also plenty of ratings and reviews sites that tell you in no uncertain terms what particular places are like, because they’re written by the people who have been there.

You can also take a look through blog search engines such as Google Blog Search or Technorati to find first-hand accounts that might help. Use them.

Don’t forget people!

And, at the end of the day, ask people!

This blog is called the Amateur-Expert Traveller blog for a reason. People are fast becoming experts themselves, and there’s no substitute for asking around. Those small hints and tips – for example, the best type of mosquito repellent, where to get visas, what sorts of vaccinations you might need – could help you avoid those minor irritations that can ruin any trip.

Increasingly there’s an interplay between people and technology, and this is giving rise to the Amateur-Expert Traveller. The tech seems to be empowering more people to find more experiences, and then to write about them online. I’ve already mentioned the blog search engines that might help, and blogs can be very powerful references from people who are passionate enough about travel to have written about it.

So the web is becoming an incredibly powerful way of conveying thoughts, feelings, emotions and opinions, and this can only benefit the travel industry and travellers alike.

Balance and decide

Still, it’s a balancing act. You need to balance out what you need, with what sites provide. You need to gauge how expert your advisors are. And there are probably plenty more decisions you’ll need to make, to get what you want.

Technology helps, and so do people. Amadeus looks to a future where both can work together more closely – where, instead of having to work around online systems, they work around you. Actually, it shouldn’t be a balancing act, because that takes time to learn. So for now, use the best of what’s available now, and talk to people, but look forward to a time when you get to play around, ask ‘what-if’ questions, and arrive at an itinerary without the hassle.

Over the next few days we’ll be looking at major trends we see emerging in the world of travel and technology, and making some important announcements along the way.

Are you an Amateur-Expert traveller?

Patients can sometimes rival their doctors for specialist knowledge, and we see this happening in the travel industry too.

Who do you turn to for specialist advice? Friends and family? Colleagues? The web?

We’re betting a combination of those people, none of whom are specialists – unless you’re married to a travel agent – but most of whom you value as advisors.

And perhaps people ask you. Perhaps they ask you because you’ve been to the destination, or because you’re crafty at online searches.

Isn’t this curious? We think so.

We think of these people as Amateur-Experts. They don’t have any formal training or qualifications. Only a few years ago you would have been much more likely to walk into a travel agent for advice, actually to talk to someone ‘qualified’. Not any more.

This is a major trend in the travel industry. It’s being driven by readily available information, especially from user-generated information, and it’s only going to grow. The challenge lies in how to harness this phenomenon.

More tech is less tech

While the web empowers the rise of the Amateur-Expert traveller, as we’re able to access it throughout our journey – from home, to airport, to destination – the tech goes on the journey with us. We think this presents staggering opportunities for the travel industry, in improving the customer experience before, during and after a trip.

But if the industry is to make the most of these opportunities it really does have to embrace the technology. It needs to see that it can make the travel experience more comfortable, secure and personalised. It has to humanise the technology.

So, if we accept that people are Amateur-Experts, then instead of overwhelming them with information, we need to think of ways to help them. How do you pluck meaning from over 4,000 reviews? How do you measure and compare experiences?

In short, how do you fit the technology around the person, and not the other way around?

Search technology is getting there – sort of.

We already have algorithmic search – you may even have used it to find this blog post, if you used a search engine – and increasingly social search is pointing the way through users tagging pages, pictures and videos. Vertical search engines specialise in deep, specific areas of knowledge, such as law or medicine. And semantic searching, which looks for meaning in language rather than simply recognising keywords, connections or tags, is looking like a promising technology for the future.

But you still need a certain amount of know-how to make these work. You cannot put anyone in front of a machine and tell them to find ‘stuff’.

So again, there’s a challenge here. We need to find smart ways to shape information so that people can use it to their advantage, almost without thinking about it.

Time for change

We think the time is ripe for massive change in the travel industry.

We believe there are going to be significant changes in the way people use travel information, driven by the interplay between technology and human behaviour.

And we say that it’s time for the travel industry to recognise this, and the potential for this, and make it work.

So that’s what we’ll be talking about! And shortly we’ll be making some major announcements that are going to address some of these issues too.

If you think this is interesting enough to know about, then subscribe, or simply drop by over the next few days. If you think it’s interesting enough to talk about, then talk! Feel free to comment on this, or any aspect of the travel industry.

Tag us, share us, talk about us. As Amateur-Experts, you have control!