What started years ago as a small gathering for hotel clients has developed into a high-profile event. With Trust International’s hotelier group clients, industry experts and technology gurus gathered from across the globe in Amsterdam in late May, Trust conducted a fourfold event that featured international experts identifying and discussing the biggest trends impacting hotel bookings, explored in-depth some of the most avant garde innovations on the horizon for the industry, unveiled the newest technologies and systems Trust has developed for hoteliers and interactively gathered hotelier input for the next wave of products and services still in development.
Highlights of the conference included:
•Fascinating insights Dr. Thomas Alt from Metaio into augmented reality showing applications in the travel and tourism space, such as city or mall navigation, virtual information on points of interest, translation, location-based content for sightseeing, restaurants, public transportation, events and more.
•Industry expert Peter O´Connor from Essec Business School shared his perceptions of current travel and technology trends. Highlighting key concepts to contemplate as regards the future of distribution, including how to handle customers' ubiquitous and instant access to information; changing customer needs; managing online search positioning and customer conversion; leveraging mobile and metasearch as well as strategies for capitalizing on the info sources consumers trust most.
•A sneak preview of Trust|Corporate, the internet booking engine (IBE) that allows hotel groups to manage their corporate or wholesale reservations locally which is currently being piloted with two hotel groupsNew features in the works for Trust’s yourVoyager CRS, Trust|GuestBooker, Trust|Channels (an integrated channel manager) and new services to easily manage metasearch campaigns.
“Trust’s customer conference is always a phenomenal information gathering and networking event for us, and this was one of the best ever,” said Sebastián Lora, Partners Program and Key Accounts Manager at Iberostar Hotels and Resorts.
“This was our first Trust conference since joining Trust in 2014 and it was quite impressive,” stated Alan Gonzalez, Director, Distribution & e-Commerce Warwick International Hotels. “The information shared by Trust and other innovators, plus the opportunity to have in-depth discussions on where the industry is heading and how all the new technology plays into it is invaluable and gives us an incredible competitive advantage. Unlike other conferences where thousands of our competitors get the same info, as special guests of Trust, a very select group of us are privy to it. We are already using the insights and networking contacts from the conference to our advantage.”
A key part of the conference for both clients and Trust is the discussion forum where clients and Trust representatives share their thoughts on the products and services needed to meet the changing customer environment and anticipate the trends as they unfold. The information gathered in these sessions is critical in shaping Trust’s products and services for the future.
“Our customer conference is always the launch pad for many innovative strategies, partnerships and technologies,” said Richard Wiegmann, Managing Director of Trust International. “We really value the time spent with our clients, partners and industry experts discussing trends and technologies, as it has always sparked ideas for a new partnership or concept that takes on a life of its own.”
Wiegmann noted, “The conference is our way of giving customers an additional inside edge by taking their input to create the next generation of products tailored to enable them to take advantage of emerging trends and meet their guests’ needs.”
