Livn took centre-stage at the Travel DAZE conference in Sydney this week with an engaging presentation from our Founder & CCO Steve Martinez.
Travel Daze is Australia’s only TED-style conference for travel, focusing on the challenges that face marketers, business leaders, travel agents and senior management in today’s rapidly evolving leisure and corporate travel landscape, via rapid-paced 18-minute talks.
The speakers line up included Jodie Sangster - CMO Liaison Lead at IBM, Sam McDonagh – Country Manager Aus & NZ at Airbnb, Jason Juma-Ross - APAC Head of Technology Industry Strategy at Facebook, Bruce Poon Tip – Founder of G Adventures and Andy Lark – CMO at Foxtel.
The speakers delivered presentations on topics covering technology, marketing, the future of the industry. This year’s overarching theme was: Kick Arse, and how to Kick Arse in general.
Steve spoke of the technology revolution set to transform the Tours & Activities sector, which has an estimated 10% share of the global travel market, bigger than rail, car and cruise categories.
As the fastest growing sector in Travel its mostly still sold the old-fashioned way via phone and email. In fact, offline bookings account for more than 80% of all T&A sales, says leading industry researcher Phocuswright, lagging way behind hotels and airlines, while OTA’s and other online intermediaries account for just 3% of T&A bookings.
“We need the industry to reach its full potential and that means overcoming barriers of integration.”
Steve also predicted change is on the way thanks to a new wave of well-run and resourced tech companies shaking up the industry.
“All these developments clearly represent a new opportunity for traditional travel resellers, as an entire untapped travel category is rapidly moving into the digital travel ecosystem for consumers”.