In less than 2 weeks PhoCusWright’s Travel Innovation Summit will be rocking and rolling.

The Travel Innovation Summit is a new PhoCusWright event that showcases the travel industry’s hottest, most innovative Web and mobile-based applications.

Travel, tourism and hospitality is the world’s largest industry, responsible for 8% of global employment, 9% of invested capital and 10% of global GDP. Millions of citizens will leave their borders for the first time this year; international tourism actually grew year-over-year about 5 per cent in the first four months of 2008 (UN World Tourism Organization).

The marketplace is enormously fragmented because of the terrestrial nature of travel itself. Companies and infrastructure are required to be located all over the world, one destination at a time. However, the travel researching, planning, sharing and purchasing process is wholly digital, which is why travel is an e-commerce category killer. Technology-based innovation that improves customer travel planning experiences are therefore enormously important to the overall industry.

The Society is honored to be selected as one of the presenters. On Nov 17th from 12:21 - 12:34 (yes that is the official time) we will be on stage. The event has some other very prominent presenters including:

• http://www.adventurelink.com/
• http://www.cadabra.com/
• http://www.dealbase.com/
• http://escapia.com/
• http://www.liverez.com/
• http://www.travelmuse.com/
• http://www.tripit.com/
• http://www.triporati.com/
• http://www.uptake.com/
• http://www.yapta.com/

In addition to the Travel Innovation Summit, we will be hanging around and attending the Center Stage event on Wednesday and Thursday. On Tuesday, Flipkey, Endless Vacation Rentals (Wyndham Worldwide), HomeAway, LeisureLink, USDM and VacationRoost.com will be sharing insights on the entire vacation rental industry. I believe each of these companies sponsored the Vacation Rentals Industry report that PhoCusWright fielded this year (due out in Jan 2009).