Mobile Travel Technologies - Gerry Samuels
March 5, 2008
Gerry Samuels, Founder & Executive Director, Mobile Travel Technologies Ltd.
Who are MTT’s customers?
Hotels, airlines, and intermediaries. Their core technology enables certain aspects of the customer’s mobile services. The technology can do things like deliver travel information, select seats, and even have boarding passes sent to the phone. The technology connects on the back-end with the customer systems and cherry pick the information that needs to be delivered and modifies or smart edits the information in order to be viewed on both high-end users and basic mobile devices.
Do companies need to change their websites in order to support mobile moving forward?
Yes, because the activities that mobile users do on their mobile devices is different then what they do on their PCs. It is expected that there will be 500 million mobile users by the end of the year. In many markets like India and China, mobile is the internet. In these markets there is a significant opportunity to utilize the mobile web services for transactional services.
Mobile Commerce is actually more advanced in India then they are in Europe and North America primarily because of the lack of use of credit cards in these markets.
What is the opportunity?
Mobile travel services are still primarily used by business services. We are at the point where we are looking at delivering very light travel information versus the multi-media downloads that would be provided to a more leisure market. The opportunity is delivering important key travel services that can be used and are valuable now versus trying to deliver products and services that are not well supported.
YourTour’s trip engine technology: exclusif interview
March 4, 2008
Decizium team launches their “YourTour’s trip engine technology” , a new step for the mass-customization of travel packages and itineraries.
They have a stand at ITB (hall 6.1, stand 141). I suggest you contact them and make a appointment and business!
Emmanuel Guisset tell us more about Decizium and the YourTour technology.
> Emmanuel, can you tell some information about you and the Decizium team.
Well, Decizium started in 2005 after 10 years of R&D in collaboration with the Polytechnic Faculty of Mons. Last year, we received some private and public investments and since then we’ve been working on improving our technology, business development and creating a B2C website.
As far I am concerned, after receiving my international business degree, I traveled quite a lot and completed a few internships abroad until Decizium allowed me to stay in the travel world and be part of a new exciting challenge: changing the way Internet users buy travel packages.
Currently, Decizium, located in Belgium employs a young international team of 10.
>Can you give us some outline about your goals with YOUR TOUR!
We have spent years developing our YourTour system, under which it is no longer necessary for tourists to make a trade-off between a tailor-made holiday where he/she might need to wait days before obtaining a first trip proposition, and a pre-packaged offer that is not tuned to his/her wishes but that is immediately available. The system makes possible what seemed to be impossible: the mass-customization of travel packages and itineraries.
YourTour’s trip engine technology allows travel companies to go much further than the currently available packaging solutions by taking into account the appropriate on-site activities for the tourist and automatically arranging it all (transportation, accommodations and activities) in a coherent way, using multiple criteria.
This results in a comprehensive and detailed travel itinerary, accommodating the restrictions imposed by the tourist (trip duration, areas to visit, travel budget, etc.) and respecting the tourist’s compromise between the various costs (for transportation, accommodations and activities) and the appeal of the trip (quality of the activities, hotel comfort level, etc.).
In addition, we are currently developing a B2C website that will allow tourists to build and book their customized self drive trip in France in a few clicks. Indeed, we feel it was necessary to have something online to reach better the B2B market. You’ll have to wait until it’s online to learn more…
Stephen Joyce - Profile
February 19, 2008
Mr. Joyce has been working as a travel & tourism technology consultant since 1995. In 2005 Mr. Joyce and his company, Sentias Software Corp., began development on Rezgo.com, a next generation Web 2.0 tour and activity booking engine for small and medium sized tour operators. In June of 2007, Rezgo.com was officially released and now boasts a user base of 500+ companies. Mr. Joyce is also very active in fostering tourism technology and is the founding President of the North American Chapter of the International Federation for IT and Travel & Tourism (IFITT North America). He is also on the judging committee for the first Canadian E-Tourism Awards and is the publisher of the Tips from the T-List book. In addition to his tourism initiatives, Mr. Joyce is also on the Board of Directors of the North Vancouver Chamber of Commerce.
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