Nominations now open for EyeforTravel’s Start-Up Travel Awards 2017

Does your travel company have what it takes to succeed in travel?  Is your app or product a key weapon in your battle to win and engage travel consumers?  New travel brands will find out as they battle it out as part of EyeforTravel’s Start-Up Travel awards taking place in San Francisco, April 24th – 25 as part of EyeforTravel’s San Francisco Summit.

Research showed us Travel startups attracted billions of dollars in funding last year, and the travel booking sector attracted some of the most investment — more than $650 million.

“Start-ups represents a fundamental shift in innovation in travel.  At EyeforTravel we believe that the brands investing and innovating in mobile and new offerings deserve to be recognised”, says Tim Gunstone, MD, EyeforTravel Ltd.

As Charles Ralston from TripStreak said on the previous EyeforTravel Awards “The Start-up Village is a really great value for money, especially for start-ups that can’t typically afford to spend thousands on conference. Bravo to EyeforTravel for pioneering this!”

Travel is being changed by mobile, the sharing economy social media and that constant drive to deliver the best customer experience.  Technology is transforming the way travel is sold – providing exciting opportunities to enhance the customer experience, grow loyalty and ancillary revenues.

EyeforTravel’s Start-Up Awards seek to recognize the young brands who are making significant progress for travel – trailblazing the way for others to follow.

With new apps, services and devices hitting the travel market and extra capabilities coming to devices, travel brands cannot sit still and must continue to innovate. EyeforTravel are offering new brands a stage to shout about it!

Previous finalists include FLYR, Seatwizer, Flitways, Stiya, Biz Airlines, spacebase, tripstr, Grabr, wellobox and more!

The Start-up awards is a day-long event

• Starting with learning sessions – quizzing travel entrepreneurs on their secrets of success
• Meet the investors – and see what they look for in a travel start-up
• Start-up Pitches for the companies that are shortlisted
• Finalists and Winners announced

To get involved and see if you make the cut you can register today to pitch or just attend the day – learn more here

All entries must be received by February 28^th. Find out how to enter your brand and for full terms and conditions, visit –http://events.eyefortravel.com/san-francisco-summit/startup-village.php

For all awards enquires contact: -

Shreya Ganapathy

Project and Content Director | Eyefortravel

W:  +44 20 7375 7150

shreya@eyefortravel.com

Should hotels be worried about Airbnb's business travel plans?

The hospitality industry has been one of the most vocal opponents of Airbnb's unfettered expansion. Industry bodies have regularly pushed for for increased oversight and regulation. This is not without reason, as it now claims to have over 2 million listings worldwide. To put that in perspective, the new Marriott-Starwood merger has 1.1 million rooms in its global portfolio. However, to date one of the key advantages hotels had over Airbnb was the business travel market. Convenience, facilities along with security of location and payment helped to differentiate hotels and convince business travellers of their value. However, Airbnb has announced a major assault on this last redoubt, so should hotels be worried?

Well just in our office, two of my colleagues are staying with Airbnb during our San Francisco summits. On a less anecdotal level though, there seems to be some strong evidence that Airbnb is making inroads.  It has assumed an aggressive strategy, deepening its value proposition to business travellers with greater screening of listings, new search functions, and tools to make business travel easier to pay for and more accountable.

The end results seem to be an accelerating rate of growth. Certify, a travel expense software provider reported that US growth from Q1 2015 to Q2 was 143%. This has shot up to 261% growth in the US across the whole of 2015 and 249% internationally. Furthermore, they found that users were rating their stays higher on Airbnb than hotels.

A recent and comprehensive study from the University of Boston does give some hope though. It found that hotels with dedicated meeting and conference spaces were some of the least affected by the introduction of Airbnb. Overall, it found that in cities with at least 100 Airbnb listings, a "10% increase in Airbnb supply is associated with a statistically significant (p <0.01) price decrease of 0.19%." This may not seem a lot, but given Airbnb's growth, it quickly adds up. Hotels without meetings and conference spaces suffer a further fall in Average Daily Rate (ADR) when compared to hotels with these facilities. The paper calculates the loss at 0.15% per 10% expansion of Airbnb supply. If you haven't already read the study, you should definitely give it a read.

Given the lucrative nature of the business travel market, hotels should be concerned about this growth. However, business users are looking for a degree of reliability that Airbnb may never fully reach. Clearly, they also expect more facilities both in terms of convenience and comfort, with meeting and conference spaces creating a premium and also luxury hotels seeing the lowest negative effects from Airbnb. However, hotels will need to advertise these facilities better, maximise business loyalty rewards and pick up their game, particularly in terms of business guest satisfaction, to prevent haemorrhaging valuable business bookings.

You can hear directly from the Airbnb team at TDS Europe 2016, where James McClure, General Manager UK & Ireland, is speaking. This event is being held on 19-20 April in London. We also have presentations from Airbnb in our On Demand library.

Alex Hadwick

Head of Research, EyeforTravel