ITB Berlin 2014 the leading travel exhibition with more than 174,000 visitors, among these 114,000 trade visitors, and 11,000 represented companies from 189 countries provided unique opportunity to the technology companies to present to the travel trade e-solutions. In the middle of the Exhibition Grounds, located directly next to ITB Convention, and the Business Travel Panel, was an entire area dedicated only for social media and mobile travel services.
The biggest and more famous companies exhibited at the ITB eTravel World presented their innovations to the international travel industry. In the area of eTravel World speakers analyzed issues such as the opportunities and challenges of Big Data, Wearable technologies, Bug-proof mobile communication, Responsive design of web sites and apps, the real cost for development of sites and apps, ROI and how to calculate online value, and of course the opportunities for hotels and destinations of social media.
GIATA presented its products and services at ITB Berlin. GIATA prepares digital text and image data for almost all well-known tour operators and travel agencies and from it creates ready-to-use applications for the web, smartphones and iPads. Also, the GIATA ID (and the unique hotel identifier TTIcode for the UK market) together with the comprehensive mapping database MultiCodes delivers the world wide largest GDS database including more than 355,000 hotel entries and more than 8 million cross-referenced booking codes from more than 325 suppliers.
Amadeus was present in ITB Berlin with a modern stand and ready to talk about the technology that will shape the future of travel. For the first time Amadeus was sharing a joint stand with TravelTainment, pixell and travel audience giving the opportunity to the visitors to discuss many issues with travel tech experts. Among other the following IT solutions were on display, Checkmytrip Premium, Amadeus Featured Results™, the Amadeus Social Media Suite, and the Amadeus Marketing Suite.
“ITB is one of our biggest shows of the year and we are delighted to have had a particularly busy time with considerable interest for our suite of apps this year“, said the spokesman of iRiS. iRiS Software Systems is an award-winning, multilingual, interactive hospitality applications provider whose innovative apps are at the forefront of hospitality technology and have been designed to improve the guest experience, generate additional revenue and reduce costs for hotels and restaurants.
Revinate helps hotels and especially small hotels to track their online reputation by making easy to aggregate, analyze and utilize guest feedback in order to improve operations and drive new sales. Revinate customers include 23,000 of the world’s leading hotels and hospitality brands.
The ReviewPro team, including CEO RJ Friedlander, attended ITB Berlin 2014 in full force. Mr Friedlander expects review analytics and social insights to play an important role this year, whether at conference panels, B2B networking conversations or important meetings. ReviewPro was started with the idea that if hotels could listen and respond to what customers are saying about them online, they could improve guest experience and drive revenue growth.
Visitors met all the brands at Expedia stand, the biggest travel company in the world.
TAC, The Assistance Company, offers solutions to the hoteliers, especially for the management of the spa. As their staff explains connects all modules together and makes booking and billing an easy process for all departments.
Pegasus presented in the stand its products and services. The company bridges the gap between hotels and the distributors that sell them. As the single largest processor of electronic hotel transactions, it delivers advanced and affordable connectivity and distribution solutions to nearly 100,000 hotels worldwide.
Hotel online distribution specialist eRevMax brought an Asian twist to ITB Berlin. The company were hosted its signature TigerTime sessions with an interesting mix of major Asian OTAs. The aim of the sessions was to provide hotels with valuable insights into how to capture their fair share of bookings in these emerging markets from the key online distribution players in the region.
The international team of TravelClick presented in ITB its innovative cloud-based solutions for hotels around the globe helping them to grow their revenue, reduce costs, and improve performance. TravelClick has offices in New York, Atlanta, Philadelphia, Chicago, Barcelona, Dubai, Hong Kong, Houston, Melbourne, Orlando, Shanghai, Singapore and Tokyo, with more than 36,000 hotel clients in over 160 countries.
The experts of Rate Gain helped companies to increase revenue, market share, and profitability.
Gateway, with more than 20 years of experience in offering fare loading services and booking engines for comparing and reserving hotels, flights, transfers, holidays and rental cars, was present at ITB 2014. These software applications are available as B2B office solutions for travel agents. According to the company, many thousands of travel agents, tour operators, brokers and airlines all over the world use its services every day.
Customer Alliance, a Berlin based company, offers smart cloud-based solutions for hotels, by collecting, analyzing, distributing, and integrate customer centric data to provide valuable insights for any operational and strategic decisions. Since officially started in the year of 2009, Customer Alliance has grown to over 2000 customers in 35 countries worldwide. By today, Customer Alliance is a 50 people strong, multinational team coming from various backgrounds on the tourism & hotel industry.
Busy Room presented its solution that allows the accommodation providers to manage all their distribution via one central reservation system which stores all content and data required for efficient channel management. For distribution channels Busy Rooms provides a central repository for content, rates, restrictions and availability.
Theodore is the Co-Founder and Managing Editor of TravelDailyNews Media Network; his responsibilities include business development and planning for TravelDailyNews long-term opportunities.
