4 Key Insights on Travel Tech Advances, Personalization, Voice, and Amazon
Skift Take
What do Amazon's Alexa, personalization, and the tech arms race have in common? They were common refrains overheard this week at our inaugural Skift Tech Forum in Silicon Valley.
On Tuesday, Skift Tech Forum drew about 400 attendees from dozens of travel industry segments and 20 different countries to Santa Clara, California, in Silicon Valley, to talk about what's next in travel technology.
Skift editors noticed a handful of ideas that percolated during the day's talks, workshops, and networking breaks, including the growing digital divide, best practices in personalization, the promise of voice-powered search, and speculation about Amazon or another big tech player moving into travel.
The Travel Industry Has a Growing Digital Divide
It's clear from top executives from the big players, such as Expedia and Alibaba — both of which are devoting tens of millions of dollars to tech development, such as cloud computing or artificial intelligence — that the gap between the tech haves and have-nots in the travel industry is widening.
Not all suppliers, such as smaller hotel groups or airlines or vendors, have been keeping with the times.
That’s one reason many travel companies fear what Amazon or a similar tech giant outside of the industry might do if they enter travel booking. They may be put at an even further disadvantage.
It isn’t just a big-versus-small company divide. Sectors are developing at different paces. As Sabre CEO Sean Menke said, the hotel indus
