When I reflect on my most notable travel experiences, many of them occurred on business trips, not vacations.

Attending a majlis in Kuwait and a tribal durbar in Ghana were moments that probably would not have come my way as a tourist: visiting a country with purpose, to meet and discuss with the people who live there, can provide a deeper engagement than a passing stay in a hotel or resort.

The research carried out recently for Amadeus suggested that appropriate combinations of business and pleasure may play a growing role in travel. Employers are concerned to ensure the wellbeing of their staff, travel providers are keen to ensure repeat business – and business travellers want new experiences whilst they are away.

Our survey showed that 71% of business travellers – compared with only 60% of tourists – want a complete contrast to their daily life whilst they’re away. This may suggest a trend for hotels which are true to their surroundings with concierge support to enable easy evening encounters with local life. It’s suggested that hotels may become community hubs – with local artists and artisans demonstrating their skills.

All this will have to develop in parallel with tighter travel management, of course. No organisation wants to see spurious meetings in exotic locations, and business tourism will only grow if employers can be confident their tracking data demonstrates it’s not being abused. As ever, the growing availability of detailed data and the ability to process that into information is key.

This post is the last in this series looking at our report on collaborative travel. If this subject is of interest, please do look at the full report, and why not sign up for regular updates from this blog? We publish regularly on both the present and the future of travel technology – so do keep in touch and check back regularly.

How much research did you do before your last trip away? Recent research for Amadeus  found that the answer to that question is closely linked to your generation. If you’re over 50, or between 30 and 49, you’re most likely to have used a single source, but if you’re between 16 and 29, you’re most likely to have used five or more sources in planning your trip. In the years ahead, as the Millennial generation forms a larger and more influential proportion of economically active adults, the trend to extensive and ongoing research around travel will become increasingly significant.

With more information than ever available to us, intelligent recommendation will be essential to make sense of all the data. Peer recommendations – of not just a restaurant, but the best dish to eat there, of great viewpoints and of exhilarating hikes – will be crucial and we will judge those recommendations critically based on our view of the reviewer. Enhanced search is already enabling us to identify vacation opportunities not just by choice of destination but by the key requirements we want from our time away. And there will still be a key role for experts – for travel agents – in guiding us through the cloud of information through their skills in sifting myriad recommendations and providing us with that which is most relevant to us.

Intelligent recommendation won’t be just about preparing for a trip, it will help us on the way as well. Our study showed a demand for personalised travel guides, most probably delivered via the mobile internet, providing us with real time advice – the hidden away cafe just off the street we’re standing on that offers our favourite cuisine. As this trend develops, it should enable us to get more out of our travels, whether on business or pleasure. Or both, and my next and final post in this series will look at the emerging trend of business tourism.

How can the travel industry build the store of knowledge necessary to deliver the next generation experience? Individual hotel chains or airlines know a lot about their frequent customers, but their view of the traveller more generally is often restricted to those parts of the trip they have provided. A hotel might provide a guest with a soft mattress based on a request during a previous stay, but not know he complained of a backache during the flight in.

Two overlapping clouds of data enable our travel plans: Passenger Name Records and payment data. It’s a vital rule of digital identity that users must support the way in which their data are used for it to be sustainable. Privacy and security concerns are significant – most notably amongst older age groups – and addressing these is a prerequisite. If users wish it there are opportunities for payments to carry memories, to enable travel providers to be better informed about travellers’ wants and needs.

Amadeus’ recent report sees additional information accompanying payment data as offering travel providers the potential to go beyond proprietary Customer Relationship Management systems in tailoring the customer experience. To do this, of course, requires collaboration. And that suggests using community IT solutions.

Such richer access to travel data will enable more intelligent recommendations to travellers – which will be covered in the next post.

For more information on trends relating to travel and payments, see Amadeus’ report on transformative travel.

How do you decide where to spend your time off? Do you go for a new experience, somewhere you’ve never been before, or something reassuringly familiar? A place recommended by a friend, or something you saw on a TV travel show?

Holidays are a relatively recent invention – for most of human history we were too busy just staying alive. The Renaissance introduced the custom of wealthy travellers taking “The Grand Tour”, the Industrial Revolution led to seaside and country trips for the masses, then package holidays took most people beyond their own borders for the first time, for pleasure rather than war. See more on this in this video from the BBC.

To date, most travellers have been seeking breadth of experience – new destinations, more distant lands, new activities. Research commissioned by Amadeus shows that this is changing, with people now seeking depth beyond breadth.  It’s no longer about going where no one else (or none of your friends) have been before, it’s about the richness of your experience whilst you’re there.

Developments in mobile technology underlie this change, allowing access to dynamic content in real time at the destination. Rather than relying on a travel writer’s view in a guidebook, we will be able to see the experience our friends had on previous visits. Augmented reality will allow us to view our location not only in the present, but also as it would have appeared at different times in the past – the wall in Berlin or the pyramids under construction.

But providing deeper experience requires deeper data – the next blog post will look at how that might be delivered.

For more information on next generation experience in travel, see Amadeus’ report on transformative travel.

As a native English speaker (though my American colleagues may disagree with that) I’m always amused by the overhead messages on French motorways instructing “restez zen!” – keep calm!

Travel is one of the most stress-inducing experiences we voluntarily subject ourselves to – will I miss my departure, will it be on time, where do I go in this unfamiliar place, am I safe? Recent research commissioned by Amadeus  suggests that taking the stress out of travel will be increasingly important – for travellers and travel providers alike.

How can technology reduce stress? Automatic transit  can reduce queues; augmented reality can make it easier to navigate through rail stations and airports. Amadeus is already piloting systems to reduce the number of lost and delayed bags and in the future wider use of intelligent bag-tags will help this further.

Travellers acknowledge their own responsibility for looking after their health on the move, so mHealth applications – mobile device based monitoring and diagnosis tools – are likely to grow to meet this need. This will include devices embedded in our clothes.

Of course, enjoyable travel is about more than simply avoiding stress. Travellers are clamouring for deeper experiences – more on that in the next post.

For more information on trends relating to travel-stress, see Amadeus’ report on transformative travel.

My dog and I often cross borders together. That’s not Border Collies, but actual national boundaries with passport checks. When we approach immigration, it’s interesting to see how each of us interacts with technology. We both have our identity confirmed by chips, but whereas I must delve in a pocket for a small booklet and pass it to the officer, his chip is implanted under his skin and is read in a second with a wave of an electronic wand.

Automatic transit is one area highlighted in a recent report from Amadeus. It’s a good example where in looking at the future we must balance the technology available with its social acceptability. The technology exists to replace passports with implanted chips – for humans as well as canines – but concerns about privacy and the intrusiveness of security measures create resistance. It’s not enough for something to be technically possible, it also has to be socially feasible.

So what changes may we see? Near Field Communication enabled devices should increasingly replace physical ticket inspections and hotel check-ins. Identity will be established without direct contact – already fingerprint scanning can be carried out from 2m (6 1/2ft) away. Sensors and artificial intelligence can help focus the work of security staff on travellers displaying unusual behaviours – or behaviours consistent with illegal activities. They will also be used to help manage the flow of travellers at busy interchange points – rail stations and airports – allocating resources intelligently to reduce not only time in transit, but the stress involved as well. The stress of travel, however, is another subject, for another blog.

For more information on trends in automatic transit, see Amadeus’ report on transformative travel.

Last week we launched a major new whitepaper entitled Back on Track with the aim of stimulating debate around the theme of how outsourcing can help drive modernisation in the rail industry.

Authored by Professor James Woudhuysen, the paper explores in detail the role of technology and in particular whether the IT infrastructure that sits behind modern rail systems can deliver against the promise of high speed rail travel in Europe, and more specifically, against the objectives laid out in the EC Whitepaper – ‘Roadmap to a single European Transport Network’.

Against the backdrop of greater de-regulation in Europe and ever-expanding high-speed rail networks, rail companies are presented with an unprecedented opportunity to become the traveller’s mode of choice.

However, complex and outdated legacy IT systems are preventing rail companies from capitalising on this opportunity and in turn establishing the competitive differentiation that will be crucial in this new age of rail.

Some of the report’s key findings include:

• Supporting modernisation: how outsourcing IT systems to a community platform will free rail companies to focus on improving the customer experience (both on-board and in the station) and taking full advantage of the significant growth opportunities for international rail
• Establishing competitive differentiation: rail companies will be able to achieve this differentiation by applying their own business rules – but will also enjoy the benefits of easy collaboration
• Realising through-ticketing: a community platform would also make it easier for travellers to book through-tickets. In a recent pan-European survey which Amadeus commissioned with YouGov, 60% of respondents indicated that they would like to be able to reserve connecting rail travel and other modes of transport in advance when booking their long distance, high speed rail journey

In parallel, it is worth noting that another recently-launched corporate Amadeus study explores, amongst other issues, how to deliver a more seamless door-to-door experience for the traveller.

Recently, I was privileged to participate in the ENTER conference organised by the International Federation of Information Technology for Travel and Tourism (IFITT) in Helsingborg, Sweden.

This year’s conference focused on eTourism Present and Future, Services and Applications, and more specifically looked at the role both demand and supply play in this quite clearly hectic arena.

The programme included a range of panels and presentations across increasingly popular topics such as social media, mobile, semantic search, user-generated content and many others by researchers, professors and other industry players alike.

As part of the event I had the opportunity to present on behalf of Amadeus at one of the many industry panels. I focused on interoperability issues in our industry – a challenging and complex topic to present in 20 minutes to a very heterogeneous audience!

As part of this, I drilled down into two very relevant cases studies that are becoming more and more relevant for the industry: enhancing the traveller experience at the ‘airport of tomorrow’, and the door to door journey management process.  Both cases present serious interoperability issues and help to illustrate how Amadeus is directly working with the industry to deliver a better all-round travel experience – for the traveller – from start to finish.

I want to focus now on the door-to-door issue (much has been said already on the airport of tomorrow). This essentially concerns the global integration of transport services that enables a traveller to plan (and by extension shop/book/ticket) address-to-address travel solutions involving more than one transport mode. It is the backbone of the holistic travel process and an experience and vision that is being pushed and supported by the Transport Director General in the European Commission.

Today, full integration of travel and transport services does not exist, which largely prevents the different travel industry providers from offering existing services in a better, more seamless way. Indeed, in 2012 organising a door-to-door trip is actually a very complex and time-consuming experience, especially since all of the various important parts of the travel process are not yet connected.

For example, let’s consider a trip from Madrid to Antwerp: where is the closest airport versus other airport hubs? What is the best connection from the airport to the city centre? What are the differences in cost? Is there wireless on the train? This whole thinking process defines and requires a new integrated travel planning process.

Here’s another example: let’s say you have a flight scheduled to depart in two hours’ time – and you then find out that it has been delayed by an hour.  Thanks to new and seamless travel services, you can reschedule your day, and by extension your life, more quickly; thus creating better value for the whole travel eco-system in the process. Any disruption element will trigger different processes and actions.

Of course I would say this, but Amadeus is uniquely placed at the heart of the global travel technology industry and arguably best positioned to make this vision a reality. We can work with other industry stakeholders in order to facilitate the provision of technology worldwide to deploy an optimised end-to-end service that ultimately improves the total trip experience for the traveller.

I hope you have found this interesting and that I have given you something to think about. And for those who wish to know about the conference in particular please see this post on ENTER2012 main conclusions.

“On ancillaries, the sky really is the limit”. This was the opening salvo of the New Airline Commercial Models, Retailing and Merchandising 2012 conference, which gathered industry experts in London last week to explore new ways of distributing airfares and inventory. As we heard at the conference, there are over 50 different types of ancillary services being offered by airlines today worldwide, from extra-leg room and empty seat options, to extra products and services that can be bought on-board, including branded shoes and even roses.

 The ultimate ancillary service from Air Baltic: selling romantic red roses on board.#airlinebusinessncm

— Marian (@windowseat10A) January 26, 2012

The key, most panellists seemed to agree, is to customise, to understand how travellers make decisions and how they want to shop. Retailing is paramount. As David Doctor, Director Distribution Marketing Amadeus, suggested in his previous blog: “we are moving from Global Distribution Systems to Global Retailing Systems (GRS)”, which add more interactive control over the airline product, and how that is sold.

At the event, David encouraged consideration of the entire journey experience (moving away from origin-destination-based search and fare-based comparison) and how to best use the ‘context’ airlines hold about their customers to deliver tailored offers that boost upsell and merchandising opportunities. Without merchandising approaches, airlines would only be selling based on price and availability, which isn’t compelling enough.

By taking an open and transparent approach to deploying ancillary services both airlines and travellers benefit. Delivering a well-executed and thought through ancillary service strategy provides the traveller with greater choice, control and flexibility. It allows them to more effectively tailor the trip to their individual needs, more so than is possible in a fully bundled ticket.

At Amadeus, David explained, we are considering how to incorporate traveller information into the sales process more fully, especially in the travel agency channel.

Sebastien Touraine from IATA’s StB (Simplify the Business) team pointed out that 50% of airline sales are generated by travel agencies, so equipping this channel to sell ancillary services offers the industry a vast untapped opportunity.

Ancillary services innovation was prominently illustrated by Patrick Edmond, managing director of e2consult, who explained how an airline and an airport can team up to deliver a “virtual trolley”. The airline opens up its on-board market in order to sell a catalogue of ancillary services – focusing on items that are unsuitable to store on board, e.g. large bottles of alcohol. The customer then collects these items at the arrival airport duty free shop or they are shipped to customers’ homes.

Janis Vanagas at AirBaltic outlined his airline’s range of creative ancillaries that comprised his ‘megastore’ concept. Optional products and services include rental bikes in Riga, right the way through iPad rental on flight and Mini Cooper cars! According to Janis, Air Baltic’s sales represent 7% of Latvia’s total exports and based on this logic and his quick calculations, AirBaltic ancillaries could be actually worth 1% of Latvia’s total exports.

Yesterday and today we have been keeping you updated regarding the development of a systems incident. This has been resolved, as we communicated earlier today.

Minimising such incidents and their impact on our customers is very important to Amadeus. During the incident, our priority was to return to normal service as quickly as possible; once it closed we focused on identifying the cause and analysing actions we could take to avoid reoccurrence. The cause of the problem appears to be a network component. We are continuing to investigate this in detail.

Once again, we regret the inconvenience this incident may have caused.