Travolution@PhoCusWright Brussels - Where the puck is it all going?

Bob Offutt, senior technology analyst at PhoCusWright, has just used a 15-minute speech to bamboozle delegates perhaps recovering from a slumber after lunch.

He references a US ice hockey player who used to say: “Look where the puck is going.”

Alongside the usual suspects, like user-generated content – “it’s nothing new” – and contextual advertising, Offatt reveals some key areas where innovation is going to lead the industry into what PhoCusWright calls Travel 2.0.

Perhaps most interesting for large number of travel companies is where travel search is heading, or tackling the “large sea content our there”.

The meta search sites – which, in fact, feel like a bit of a dirty word round here today – are popular with almost a third of online users.

But the likes of Farecast and Farechase are around the corner, with amazingly clever uses of tools such as Flash and Ajax [see our Explanations 101 for definitions], while Del.icio.us is also expected to feature heavily as a search tool.

Finally Offatt turns his attention to mashups. The ex-Sabre executive has used a variety of APIs from various sources to create Bobstravel, a fictitious travel service provider that exists solely by using content from other sites.

He uses Yahoo! Trip Planner for guides, Michelin for restaurants, Flickr for photos, Dolphin Dynamics for flight search and Hotels.com’s IAN tool for hotels.

Mind-blowing…

And apparently there are on average 2.77 new mash-ups created every day.

Kevin May, editor, Travolution