The last bit of conference business at ResExpo / TravelCom was the “Innovator Awards". ITA Software won the "Established Innovator Award" for a company at least five years old. Other finalists included GetThere, Amadeoose FlexPricer, Omniture, and TravelClick.
More interesting was the “New Innovator Award", for a company less than five years old. The winner was FareCast – which is hard to argue against since they’ve been making a huge splash the past year or so, and also won a ton of other "Innovation" awards. An airfare predicition website??!! THAT's pretty cool since they put their money where their mouth is!
(If you get a chance, you should check out the “Travel Start-up Blog” by Mike Fridgen of FareCast).
The thing that really interested us was that, other than DoHop, we had NO idea who these other finalists were – and that’s kinda embarrassing. So consider this a public service announcement:
1) DoHop- A group out of Iceland that has a nice search engine “covering 660 airlines right around the world”. Originally built to search the Low Cost Carriers, they don’t book but they do have a nice interface to filter results.
2) AltiusPAR - They seem to have the complete technology suite for hoteliers - everything from reservation systems, inventory control, and loyalty programs. Although they didn’t win the innovation award, they do win "Best use of B-School buzz words" on their website:
- AltiusPAR combines next generation technology with a dedication to best-of-breed processes to deliver a broad suite of inventory management, central reservations and revenue management solutions for hotel companies…
- The solution and services are customized to match clients' unique business needs while offering flexible financial business models...
- Technology still holds the key to both driving and enabling substantial product differentiation and significantly improving business processes – from real-time access to inventory, transparency across multiple channels, seamless exchange of operational information and access to performance and guest data.
Heh, heh - that's just great stuff.
3) EZ Yield - A software platform that allows hotels to manage all their rates (in different currencies), and inventory restrictions online. It’s hard for FMV to really understand this system since we’re mainly airline geeks, but this seems pretty cool if you can look at all your rates, inventory, and channel supply on a single screen.
4) Open Travel Software / RFP Marketplace. FMV pretty much hates all things related to RFP’s. We hate reading them, writing them, and ESPECIALLY responding to them. So anything that can cut any time out of this process is a good thing. The RFP Marketplace gets the RFP, matches likely providers (with the eye towards the little hotel guys), and then automates the submittal process. Plus they are crazy cheap - $1,000 per year??! Wow.
Congratulations to both winners and all nominees. Now the pressure's on to continue to innovate.
And with that, TravelCom, like our run at the craps table, came to a screeching, jarring, horrible stop. We must have missed the sign out front of the casino where they held a contest to see “who can roll 7 the quickest and lose everyones' money”. FMV came in first and third. We swear we’ll never gamble again. Well, never bet the hardways at least…
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