Glenn Gruber on Apple, Facebook, OpenTravel, and Enabling Tour Operators
Posted on Fri, May 14, 2010
Glenn Gruber is AVP of the Travel Technologies Group at Ness and we were able to catch him on video at TravDex sharing his thoughts on trends and developments in the travel technology marketplace.
Among other things, Glenn sees Apple's acquisition of Siri as having a potentially greater impact on travel than either their iTravel app or Google's acquisition of ITA Software. As he points out, Siri is a "do engine" and when people are conducting mobile searches, they don't want to comb through results, they want to make reservations, book travel, or buy things. Siri allows them to do just that.
On the Facebook front, Glenn emphasizes the power of Open Graph, which extends Facebook's abiity to collect user preferences over a much broader universe (i.e., the entire web). Since people are much more influenced by the opinions of their friends than those of strangers or marketers, the impact this can have on travel preferences can't be underestimated.
Finally, Glenn also discusses the efforts of the OpenTravel Alliance to provide a platform that will allow companies, such as airlines, which are currently in the process of disaggregating their offerings to repackage and present these offerings in different formats. At the same time, he highlights the opportunity for technology to help those who are already disaggregated - independent tour operators running programs at destinations around the world - connect with potential customers in a more integrated and targeted way.
So much for the summary, here's the video:
What's your take on these trends?
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