Travel 2.0 | Travel-lighter: Will the smartphone become the new backpackers’ bible?

Lift10 is happening in Geneva right now! The group of students that won free passes offered by the City of Geneva to participate in Lift will be blogging on the conference happenings...

Alexander Gnoyke talks about workshop, "Travel 2.0" (edited by Sachin Gaur)

Matthias Luefkens is an Associate Director in charge of digital media at the World Economic Forum and founder of the In Your Pocket city guides .

After having mentioned very shortly the organization of the annual World Economic gathering in Davos, he directly started brainstorming on how the smartphone can become the new backpackers’ bible. His workshop was set up into 3 topics: travel planning, travel on site and the final documentation of your travel.

The 2.5h workshop was attended by an audience of 37 people, most aged around 25 – 35 years, of which almost no one was using offline travel agencies to organize their trips. Nevertheless, 80% of the attendees admitted to have recently bought a printed travel guide.

TRAVEL PLANING

Matthias introduced the first topic of the day, Travel Planning, by saying that 1 out of of 4 adults make their travel decision thanks to friends’ recommendations, followed by Tripadvisor & Co and guide books. He mentioned the social flight that was first introduced by Jeff Jarvis and is about travelers sitting next to travelers with same hobbies and interests while being on the airplane to share and enhance their vacation ideas already in advance.

After the first brainstorming, the audience concluded that there is an issue with too much choice when planning a trip that is very time consuming. One idea raised was setting up a tool that could give smart recommendations. For example, someone plans a business trip abroad to go to a client in Nuremberg, she sets up a meeting on her e-calendar. Then by a one-click solution this person would be provided with a hotel near the client’s place and a flight proposal to be on time for the meeting.
Other ideas were a tool that inspires you where to go – a kind of the new Expedia’s Strand-Inspirator™. It was recently launched as a search engine where customers can find their spot to be by using specific criteria such as a region with warm climate, a fun place with lots of activities around etc. I It seemed to be exactly what offline travel agencies are doing and were doing in the past, but in the form of a digital solution.
Another consideration was how to organize group travelling via internet in a much more efficient way, i.e. the customer (group) gets well-suited travelling packages by multiple sources without having to spend lots of time and effort to get the right trip, a subject on which Gruppenmanager, a Berlin-based start-up that has just recently launched its services.
Matthias then shared his twitter experience with us, once posting a tweet where he asked for a cheap flight to Paris or in another case for a room in Berlin. In both cases he got offers by either airplane companies or hotels. But the audience was scrutinizing this by asking how to really find a good host and not to be found by a bad one?

TRAVEL ON SITE

The second part was about Travel On Site and what the expectations users place on their smartphones Matthias began by giving a quick insight into the print travel guides market (British Lonely planet, French Le Routard, American Let’s go) that dropped by 8% in 2009 whereby Smartphone’s apps were the big gainers. He also mentioned the very successful promotion of free Lonely planet city guides with more than 3mn downloads in 3 weeks, which was during the chaos by Iceland’s Eyjafjallajokull volcano that caused lots of stranded travelers.

The biggest issue for the audience was still the high cost of data plans while being abroad instead of not having the right app or tool to use. People talked about Google maps’ street views and Wikipedia layer, augmented reality through wikitude, and other apps such as foursquare which was used by 10 out of 37 people already, although it is still marginal in Europe compared to US.

Participants also said that business travel and leisure travel differ strongly because travelers place very different expectations on them. While a business trip needs to be well organized, vacations do not have to. Many individual travelers feel it is much more charming and adventurous to go to local people or walk to the streets and not to use a smartphone all the time.
One group pointed out that they wish to have a Smartphone that becomes an all-in-one-solution; either it includes your passport that can be scanned on the airport, or integrates your drivers’ license when going to a car rental, as well your public transport card and payment solution such as the new mobile payment system Square etc.
Another group was still looking for an intelligent app that would adapt and learn through a user’s past choices and therefore provide better travelling or entertainment proposals for future requests. This meant that if a choice was accepted or evaluated by a user as a good proposal, the system behind would recognize this and use this input for the next time the user uses that app.

TRAVEL DOCUMENTATION

The workshop was finished with “documenting your travel” where Matthias showed the audience a great example of sharing pictures of cruising ships by the Schiff’ pool group. It even turned out that the pictures are of such a good quality that the company decided to use these for the next catalog. An attendee mentioned that travel agencies are linking to their customers’ travelling blogs as a referenced customer case.

In general, participants were of the opinion that although some users are sharing their travel experience using flickr, facebook and other mainstream solutions while travelling, other travelers want to get away and disconnect from the everyday life, including communication technology. Some travelers do not want loose too much time sharing their information, but rather prefer to enjoy their trips in the real world instead of being constantly connected to the virtual one.

CONCLUSION

To summarize my impressions of the workshop, it seemed to me that the focus should be laid on trip planning instead of the activities on a trip. The planning is very time consuming and complicated due to the many offers one is confronted with and the choices one has to make. Even very spontaneous travelers plan their trips to some extent in advance. Well suited printed guides or apps exist and are used already. However, on a trip itself, using technology is often tedious or even not favored, and there is a great problem with high roaming costs.