After
a slightly delayed flight to Dublin from Stansted with RyanAir, I arrived at my
hotel - the Pembroke TownHouse - at 1.30am on Monday morning after waiting almost 1/2 hour at the airport for a taxi.
The
HEDNA conference started at 8.30am at the Burlington Hotel. The hotel is part
of Jurys Doyle – which will be demolished in a couple of weeks (that’s what I
heard anyway)
That
was my second attendance to this European conference. My first conference was
in Barcelona in 2004.
Day
1 started with an hour long presentation of Jeoff Ramsey from eMarketer.com who
presented too many a lot of statistics about the audience perception of the
different new things who came out in Web 2.0. That where I have learned that
among US top online travel executive (who are they?), 40% of them said that blogs will have the least
impact on the travel industry…
There
were so many charts and slides that I can’t remember other relevant
information. Besides saying that all Internet measurement companies have
different figures. I was disappointed to hear too many sources coming from the
US and not enough from Europe. But this is not the first time. The
conference about the European Podcasting summit had the same issue.
The
GDS debate was another highlight of the day where hoteliers, travel agents and
the 4 GDSs (Amadeus, Galileo, Sabre and Worldspan) could confront their
ideas/problems. There is unfortunately always this same issue about rates
loading and the complexity of updating or creating rates codes and so on. Where
hotel chains might be more educated and trained, independent hotels seem to
struggle on how to optimise their rates on the GDS distribution.
Something
rather amusing is that moderator Dr. Lalia Rach from New York University started to show a first slide
with the White and Blue GDS screen where you see all codes that TAs have to
enter. But quickly after, she showed that GDSs have moved away from their
archaic way of making a hotel booking by implementing a comprehensive graphical
interface for the new travel agents generation.
Now,
there was this question about why some agents are not switching to the
graphical interface. They say it’s quicker this way…
The
evening/dinner was organized at the Guinness StoreHouse where we did have a
tour of the plant and were invited at the top of the building to have a meal
and have quite a few of pint of Guinness. The top floor was a all open glass
windows bar where you could see all Dublin in a clear sky. An absolutely
fantastic view…
Day
2 started in the morning with 2 comitees. One on the Credit Cards issues and
the other one Tour Operators.
In
the afternoon, the anticipated panel was featuring top executives from
Lastminute, Flairview Travel, Google, TripAdvisor who discussed about this
fascinating topic “Search”.
I
didn’t think that the debate was bringing anything new under the sun. The
debate was slighted diverted to the topic of hotel reviews were FlairView,
Lastminute and TripAdvisor were exchanging their initiative regarding User Generated
Content. I start to think that incentivising consumers to review hotels (or
anything else) would be required in the near future (I will write an article
about it on a future post to explain my reasons).
Finally,
I have listened to the last speaker named Daniel Levine from Avant-Guide.com
who gave the “five cultural trends that will propel hotel electronic
distribution into the next decade”. That was for the best presentation given
during those 2 days. Plenty of relevant examples inside and outside the
industry. I was also very pleased to see Daniel mentioning on his PowerPoint
presentation the Trivop.com project alongside innovative online hospitality
initiatives.
I think this event is much valuable by the the networking opportunities it offers and the long list of attendees - more than 300 - specialised in the hotel electronic distribution industry.
So very good event indeed and I am looking forward to attending the next one.
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