LOS ANGELES — The 2016 Phocuswright Conference last week placed a spotlight on niche travel-technology companies as alternatives to the raft of general digital-travel-planning startups.
The event, which drew 1,800 attendees to the JW Marriott Los Angeles L.A. Live, also feted tech firms offering services ranging from a revenue-management programming tool for vacation-rental property owners to vacation-financing services to digital concierge services for boutique and independent hotels.
While at least a dozen of the 47 fledgling travel-tech companies competing in the conference’s Innovation Summit forum pitched a variation of the digital travel assistant/booking service, the forum’s judges appeared to dismiss the theory pitched by those companies that prospective travelers don’t enjoy shopping around for travel choices.
Instead, the judges rewarded companies that took a smaller-picture approach to travel growth.
Amid that backdrop, Hello Scout, the digital-concierge service that specializes in sourcing and servicing in-destination attractions for independent hotels, won both the conference’s General Catalyst award, which included a $ 100,000 prize, and the runner-up vote among the startup companies in the conference’s Innovation Summit competition.
Beyond Pricing, the revenue-management company, won the Innovation Summit’s startup category, while Local Measure, a social-media aggregation tool that hotel companies can use to better serve their guests, took the Innovation Summit’s top prize among emerging companies. The runner-up in that category was Uplift, which provides low-interest loans for prospective travelers.
Beyond Pricing “took a problem that everyone in the audience already knew existed, which is that you can make more money if you price your properties better,” Hipmunk CEO Adam Goldstein, one of the forum’s judges, said in an interview. “They applied that to a vertical that has historically not had great pricing, and they showed how that software solved it better.”
The glut of travel-planning pitches and some of the resulting pushback from panel judges appeared to reveal a travel-technology sector rife with consolidation, where many of the travel-tech firms have been snapped up by the largest players.
Notably, Expedia completed its $ 3.9 billion acquisition of vacation-rentals listing service HomeAway last December after acquiring smaller OTA Orbitz Worldwide for $ 1.6 billion just four months earlier.
Those acquisitions followed up Priceline Group’s buyouts of the metasearch company Kayak in 2013 and restaurant-reservations service OpenTable the following year.
“There was a theory, maybe two or three years ago, that you can build a new channel for mobile because maybe the traditional players aren’t going into that space,” said John Kim, who will succeed HomeAway co-founder Brian Sharples as CEO in January. “All of those opportunities seem to be closing down one by one.”
The judges also appeared to take issue with many of the company founders’ claims that most travelers dislike spending time researching trips and are on the prowl for all-in-one digital-booking services.
“It’s a fallacy that people don’t like searching,” panel judge Rod Cuthbert, CEO of Rome2Rio and founder of Viator, said in response to one of the firm’s presentations. “People visit 28 sites because they like it.”
The judges appeared to engage is some pushback against companies whose founders pitched business plans that merely appealed to millennials, whose influence on travel spending continues to grow.
“It drives me crazy when people say: my market is millennials,” forum judge Jim Hornthal, chairman of Triporati and founder of Preview Travel (which later merged with Travelocity), said in an interview. “There’s a 20-year-old fraternity brother at the University of Alabama who sleeps in until noon because he likes to drink, and that’s a millennial. And there’s a 26-year-old attorney in Manhattan, she’s married with one infant, and her husband’s a surgeon, and she’s a millennial. What do those two have in common?”
The judges appeared to favor companies willing to take a smaller slice of the $ 1.3 trillion global travel sector, leaving the broader digital-booking services to larger, more established companies and focusing on areas such as vacation-rental revenue management, destination-activity sourcing and onsite travel-supplier services.
“A lot of judges are suckers for unsexy pitches,” said Goldstein, whose metasearch company was acquired by Concur in September. “If they were sexy and exciting, chances are that one of the existing companies would’ve done it already.
Phocuswright is owned by Travel Weekly parent Northstar Travel Group.
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