Travel companies including SAS, SABRE, Lufthansa, Finnish Tourist Board, Swissair, lastminute.com, Icelandair Oracle, Transport for London, will be speaking at the SMS and Location Based Services for the Travel Industry Conference that will take place this February 12-13 in Olympia London.

SMS is the fastest growing form of communication. Whilst April 99 saw only 1 billion sent text messages, today over 16 billion messages are sent every month. This fast growing medium has only just started to be tapped into by the Travel Industry as a means to sell, retain customers and reduce costs.

Airlines and Travel Agents first implemented SMS as a way to alert high paying passengers to delays, gates changes and other operational information. What has been the take up rate amongst travellers using this service? Can airlines exploit their early adventures in SMS? As Business class fares come under pressure how can SMS be used to service all passengers? Can Airlines use their SMS database to sell related travel products such as car hire, hotels, restaurants or theatre tickets to their customers once the traveller has arrived in a destination?

Tour Operators have used SMS to provide another booking mechanism. Experiments have also been made to sign up holidaymakers to destination-orientated information about tours, restaurants and bars. This has been sold as a subscription service and has increased the numbers of tours being sold and could be a useful generator of commission based earnings.

DMOs. The cities of Bath, New York, Washington and many more have started to offer tours of the city via your cell phone. Forget pre booking of hotel rooms most people still find accommodation when they arrive at a destination. SMS could be the perfect booking channel for these unplanned travellers. Can DMO’s provide a city based SMS hotel booking portal?

Hotels. How many of your customers book when they arrive in your town? No one like s to queue at a tourist information office to try and find accommodation and as a hotelier you do not like to pay their high commission rates. SMS could allow your customer to find your hotel via their mobile phone as they travel from the airport.

Transport providers should use SMS to provide time sensitive, location orientated customer focussed information to keep the travelling public informed about problems on the service so reducing complaints, queues and reduce costs. Will people pay for such a service and how do you link legacy operational sources of information to this new communication channel?

SMS should provide the ultimate distressed inventory distribution channel. But will people really decide to fly to Paris on the basis of a text message? What other channels are needed to back up SMS travel sales and how will the technology be driven?

Travel portals, partnerships and low priced travel products. A location based SMS service could drive customers to all sorts of purchases. The travel industry knows about web commerce. 1in 3 web transactions are travel related! People like to use email and the web to buy their travel. Airlines, hotels car hire, train and coach companies have used the web to drive down distribution costs. Now it is time for the lower priced travel products to use technology to drive customers to them. People on the streets could be directed to restaurants, bars theatres. To create the service will need partnerships that could include Airlines (they have the numbers and know the tourists when they arrive), the attractions and the technology providers.

This Conference is packed full of travel companies that are using SMS to sell as well as industry leaders looking to implement SMS for the first time or develop their current service.

SMS as a communication medium has been chosen by the public not by marketers. The intrusiveness of the message, the limited number of digits makes your job harder. To send an unwanted email is bad marketing but to spam a mobile phone will be disastrous. SMS marketers report response rates of 5%. How do you build the databases and create the content that will ensure you are never a SMS spammer?

At SMS and Location Based Services for the Travel industry you will meet with travel executives that are applying these new technologies today. You will be able to listen to experts, who will tell you what works and what fails. You will form partnerships that will enable you to successfully tap this new resource as well as develop guidelines that will make your customers want your SMS service.

The event is collocated with the SMS 2002 event and M-commerce world. Together these events will attract thousands of forward-looking entrepreneurs that will drive the business into the latest communication medium.

The potential is huge but SMS commerce has to be perfected at a time when money is short and there is no margin for error. SMS and Location Based Services for the Travel industry will give you the research, the ideas and the partnerships to make sure you implement the technology correctly and profitably. Sign up today!

Click here for a full program of events.

 

DMOs. The cities of Bath, New York, Washington and many more have started to offer tours of the city via your cell phone. Forget pre booking of hotel rooms most people still find accommodation when they arrive at a destination. SMS could be the perfect booking channel for these unplanned travellers. Can DMO’s provide a city based SMS hotel booking portal?

Hotels. How many of your customers book when they arrive in your town? No one like s to queue at a tourist information office to try and find accommodation and as a hotelier you do not like to pay their high commission rates. SMS could allow your customer to find your hotel via their mobile phone as they travel from the airport.

Transport providers should use SMS to provide time sensitive, location orientated customer focussed information to keep the travelling public informed about problems on the service so reducing complaints, queues and reduce costs. Will people pay for such a service and how do you link legacy operational sources of information to this new communication channel?

SMS should provide the ultimate distressed inventory distribution channel. But will people really decide to fly to Paris on the basis of a text message? What other channels are needed to back up SMS travel sales and how will the technology be driven?

Travel portals, partnerships and low priced travel products. A location based SMS service could drive customers to all sorts of purchases. The travel industry knows about web commerce. 1in 3 web transactions are travel related! People like to use email and the web to buy their travel. Airlines, hotels car hire, train and coach companies have used the web to drive down distribution costs. Now it is time for the lower priced travel products to use technology to drive customers to them. People on the streets could be directed to restaurants, bars theatres. To create the service will need partnerships that could include Airlines (they have the numbers and know the tourists when they arrive), the attractions and the technology providers.

This Conference is packed full of travel companies that are using SMS to sell as well as industry leaders looking to implement SMS for the first time or develop their current service.

SMS as a communication medium has been chosen by the public not by marketers. The intrusiveness of the message, the limited number of digits makes your job harder. To send an unwanted email is bad marketing but to spam a mobile phone will be disastrous. SMS marketers report response rates of 5%. How do you build the databases and create the content that will ensure you are never a SMS spammer?

At SMS and Location Based Services for the Travel industry you will meet with travel executives that are applying these new technologies today. You will be able to listen to experts, who will tell you what works and what fails. You will form partnerships that will enable you to successfully tap this new resource as well as develop guidelines that will make your customers want your SMS service.

The event is collocated with the SMS 2002 event and M-commerce world. Together these events will attract thousands of forward-looking entrepreneurs that will drive the business into the latest communication medium.

The potential is huge but SMS commerce has to be perfected at a time when money is short and there is no margin for error. SMS and Location Based Services for the Travel industry will give you the research, the ideas and the partnerships to make sure you implement the technology correctly and profitably. Sign up today!

 

 

 

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