The Travolution European Summit returns to The Brewery, London on February 28, 2023. The Summit has been brought forward as the brand provides a platform that supports technology suppliers to meet with new clients at a crucial time in the business year.
This year's #metatravel theme reflects on how the way consumers will interact with technology is changing and that travel firms must be prepared for that.
We will be joined by senior travel and non-travel industry leaders who will present, discuss and debate how technology and digital developments are set to shape the future of travel.
The summit will also include a one-to-one meetings schedule after it was successfully introduced for the first time in 2022. Suppliers and buyers will agree to pre-confirmed 15-minute meetings with attending delegates during an extended lunchbreak.
Whether there’s an evolution or a revolution on the horizon, register for the 2023 Summit and get prepared for a Travolution.
Spaces at the Summit are limited, so if you would still like to register to attend please email maisie.meehan@jacobsmediagroup.com.
Paula is a highly experienced, international executive director with a track record in delivering strong business performance and in leading and transforming technology, operations, digital and innovation functions to deliver genuine commercial results.
Having held senior positions at Ingenico, Visa Europe, Barclays, Prudential and Telefonica, she has a proven track record in strategy, M&A and corporate development, focusing on new opportunities and successful integrations to drive business growth.
Paula believes passionately about investing in individuals and teams, and in harnessing the power of engaged and motivated employees to deliver tangible transformation. As Hotelbeds’ chief technology and operations officer, Paula leads all aspects of end-to-end delivery across the business including technology, product management, operations, customer services, digital delivery, first-line risk and business intelligence.
She is a strong advocate of diversity in the workplace and has led numerous initiatives to drive improvements in this area.
Speaker:
Paula Felstead, chief technology and operations officer, Hotelbeds
This session will see our panel of technology experts discuss many of the topics raised in the previous session by Paula.
We will look at the key technological solutions that all travel companies must adopt today as they prepare for the future and put the challenges of the COVID pandemic behind them.
What are the key trends in technology and investment in IT products and skills and how important are partnerships with supplier that have specialist skills and products?
Speakers:
Paul Nixon, chief executive, intuitive
Paul Curtis, technical director, easyJet Holidays
Tom Kelly, sales director, Modulr
Travellers from all walks of life are keen to make up for lost time following the COVID-19 restrictions of recent years.
Thanks to the rapid adoption of technology by customers during lockdown, today’s travellers are not only comfortable with booking their trips online, they are actively demanding it.
Booking trips online brings with it a new set of experiences and requirements, but many travel sites are still falling short, providing only for solo travellers, not groups. After all, travel is social, so why isn’t the booking experience?
In this session, Doron Luder, Vice President of Sales at Joyned, discusses the evolving technologies that are shaping the future of the user experience for friends and family travel, the need for online travel companies to innovate through providing live experiences and why owning their customer’s natural social engagements directly on site is the key to increasing loyalty and conversion.
Speaker:
Doron Luder, vice president sales, Joyned
Axita Bhalsod leads Global Analytics at Egencia, supporting cross functional internal groups that are identifying opportunities for optimization. She has over 15 years of experience in senior data related roles, having spent multiple years across Expedia Group brands, bringing analytical rigor to the field of decision making and strategic planning. She has held multiple senior roles building teams from the ground up in management analytics, developing business intelligent platforms and, in recent years, shifted towards driving machine learning and data science practices across business-critical activities.
Speaker:
Axita Bhalsod, senior director analytics, Egencia
Had Covid not struck in 2020, travel would have entered this decade facing its most challenging period as its impact on the environment comes under ever-greater scrutiny.
Now, with the pandemic’s impact receding, attention has turned back to how the sector is doing its bit to decarbonise and to protect the environment and the destinations it serves.
However, despite all the talk about how travel is rising to the challenge, pledges to achieve net zero by 2050 have been described as a ‘big lie’ and the industry stands accused of ‘greenwashing’.
In this session we’ll hear how technology can provide solutions to how travel will deliver on what it says it intends to achieve.
Speakers:
Cat Jones, founder and chief executive, Byway
Patrick Richards, travel sector board director, TerraVerde
Tony Wheble, chief executive, Feefo
Moderated by Charlotte Lamp Davies, founder & ceo, A Bright Approach
Brought to you by WeTravel
WeTravel’s Head of Partnerships, Shayna Zand (she/her), will discuss the emergence of innovative, travel-specific technology created to support small- to medium-sized travel businesses with operational necessities.
Using the business’s annual trends report, Purchasing Habits: The Future of Travel Bookings and Payments, she’ll present operators and travel professionals with an outlook on how travel purchasing is shifting in post-pandemic consumerism, with stats from thousands of travel businesses from tour operators to travel advisors and destination management companies.
Join the masterclass to get a solid understanding on how your business can use technology as a support to providing best-in-class front-end support to prospective and current travellers, while using the back-end functionalities to support the efficient and effective management of your travel business.
Speaker:
Shayna Zand, head of partnerships, WeTravel
Speaker:
Morgann Lesne, partner, Cambon Partners
For attendees not participating in the scheduled one-to-one meeting programme, during this time Travolution will showcase a series of focused product demonstrations and also facilitate a meet the speakers briefing with our assembled panel of experts.
The astonishing recent rise to public consciousness of OpenAI’s ChatGPT has, if nothing else, underlined the speed with which new technologies are able to emerge and disrupt.
The jury remains firmly out on the impact of the proliferation of AI-powered technologies but with Google entering the fray with Bard one thing’s for sure, it’s here and it’s here to stay.
In this session we’ll discuss what applications of AI travel businesses should be embedding today to prepare themselves for a future that is likely to be both unpredictable and uncertain.
Speakers
Bart Platts, managing director, Melt Digital
James Spalding, regional director northern europe flight business unit, Trip.com
In this session we’ll take predictions submitted by our delegates during the day about the future of travel.
Our panel will tackle everything from the sublime to the ridiculous and give their views on what is, or is not, likely to come to pass in the travel industry in the future.
Nothing is off the table, so come armed with your most imaginative predictions. The wackier the better.
Speakers:
Will Plummer, chief executive, Trust My Group
Tim Hentschel, chief executive, Hotelplanner
Peter Gerstle, head of travel, Collinson Group
James Lemon, global lead for travel, leisure, transport & automotive, Stripe
Ralf Usbeck is the widely respected German entrepreneur and founder and chief executive of Chain4Travel, his latest venture in a stellar career in the travel technology sector.
In 1999, he founded technology company Traveltainment which quickly became a mainstay of the travel sector in Europe before it was sold to Amadeus in 2006.
Ralf remained for two years as chief executive of Amadeus Leisure Group before going on to found Peakwork in 2009 which has brought its unique Player Hub platform to the world of travel product distribution.
In 2013, his contribution to the industry was marked by the awarding of a World Travel Market Global Award for which he was nominated by Travolution. He is also the founder of Vtours and Weekend.com.
Today he is pioneering the adoption of blockchain technology in travel with Chan4Travel, a start-up that promises to build a new operating system for the sector built for and ready to take advantage of the next iteration of technology and the Web 3.0 age.
Speaker:
Ralf Usbeck, chief executive, Peakwork and founder and chief executive, Chain4Travel
Graham Cooke is a digital evangelist, a founder, a start-up supporter and now a published author whose book Web3 - The End Of Business As Usual is a wake up call to all businesses.
He worked as an analyst and eCommerce project manager for Google for four years before establishing his own digital agency, Qubit, in 2020 which he sold to Coveo in 2021.
In this session he will explain how the age of the internet has already seen technology paradigms shift from Web1 to Web2 and we are seeing the emergence of Web3.
In this period he argues new tech protocols are being developed today that will touch every area of business and the private lives of everyone on the planet.
Web4 will see the consumer-grade applications emerge that will super-charge adoption of a more decentralised internet that returns agency and power to consumers over their data.
Speaker:
Graham Cooke, digital entrepreneur and author of Web3 – The End Of Business As Usual
Our speakers are experts drawn from leading travel and disruptive digital brands
By attending the summit you will be able to take part in pre-arranged one-to-one meetings with our sponsors and meeting partners that are at the cutting edge of marketing distribution and innovative thinking.