PhoCusWright Travel Innovators – Part I

31 October 2009

The PhoCusWright Conference takes place Nov 17-19 in Orlando, and the highlight on Day 1 – Tuesday, Nov 17, 2009, is the Travel Innovation Summit. Attendees are expected to rate all 30 innovators in real-time, based on their demonstrations.

Over the next few days, we’ll introduce to you all 30 travel innovators. In this post, we take a look at the first 10 companies.

10Best Solutions

10Best Solutions (www.10bestsolutions.com/) – Greenville, SC based 10Best Solutions provides search engine optimization, content management, content creation and design/development services to an impressive roster of clients including major hotel chains, cruise lines, airlines and travel sites. 10Best Solutions is a division of 10Best, Inc.

AboutAnywhere

AboutAnywhere (www.aboutanywhere.com/) – Miami, FL based AboutAnywhere.com offers a direct-to-consumer travel website, with a low-cost online travel agency business model with major innovations in e-marketing services and improved functionality for both hotel partners and consumers.

Amadeus

Amadeus (www.amadeus.com/) – Madrid, Spain based Amadeus IT Group SA is the leading Global Distribution System (GDS) and the biggest processor of travel bookings in the world. From global network airlines to low cost carriers, from multinational travel agencies to independent hotels, Amadeus provides IT solutions to everyone in the tourism and travel industry.

CarTrawler

CarTrawler (www.cartrawler.com/) – Dublin, Ireland based global car rental distribution company CarTrawler offers large selection of car rentals from over 500 car rental suppliers in 135 countries in 15,000 city and airport locations.

CheapLimoRates

CheapLimoRates(www.cheaplimorates.com/) – Phoenix, AZ based CheapLimoRates.com claims to be the first comparison shopping and booking engine website for the limousine industry, and matches millions of consumers with nearly 10,000 limousine companies who offer discounted rates to book their unused vehicle inventory.

Twavl

Twavl (www.connectme360.com/) – Twavl is a city-specific community service based on twitter which offers answers and provides insider tips in the form of tweets. Twavl is run by Connectme 360 – a Denver, CO based answer logistics company which helps employees of travel and hospitality companies locate the perfect response to customers’ queries in less than a minute.

Dapper

Dapper (www.dapper.net/) – San Francisco (and New York) based Dapper provides technical solutions for quickly creating widgets, Google gadgets, and Facebook apps — leading to its flagship product, Dapper Dynamic Ads, which pull live product and inventory from your site, bringing the right offer to the right consumer at the right time.

Exalead

Exalead (www.exalead.com/) – Paris, France based Exalead is a global software provider in the enterprise and Web search markets, and the maker of CloudView, one of the top platforms for search-based applications (SBAs), which uses advanced semantic technologies to bring structure, meaning and accessibility to previously unused or under-utilized data.

Expedia Media Solutions

Expedia Media Solutions (www.advertising.expedia.com/) – Bellevue, WA based Expedia Media Solutions is the world’s largest travel lifestyle media company, which leverages the nearly 30 million customers that visit the Expedia, Inc. network of sites every month.

Gliider

Gliider (www.gliider.com/) – Based in Brooklyn, NY, Gliider offers a browser plugin and travel tool which helps you to collect travel information from around the web in one place by simply highlighting and dragging and dropping the part you like.

The rest of the PhoCusWright Conference Travel Innovators are introduced in Part II & Part III.