We were delighted to be invited to take part in the Google Travel Summit this year, held at their swanky offices in Zurich. The purpose of the event was to spark discussion around “the opportunity for the travel industry in the next 5-10 years”. Participants included 15 travel related start-ups (including TV Trip, Tripsay, Tourist Way, Memonic, eZSearch and Skyscanner), 5 VCs (Creata Ventures, Partech, Brains to Ventures, DJF Esprit and Howzat Media) and lots of Googlers to stir the debate.

The day kicked off with pitches and product demos from each company, followed by a VC panel, Google product demos and break-out sessions for business and technical debates.

Nelson Mattos, Google’s Vice President of Engineering, EMEA, gave a great introduction to the parameters of effective search: relevance, user experience, speed and comprehensiveness.  As we’ve been thinking about the growth of Zoombu travel search, we’ve focussed efforts on these domains too, so we were pleased to see the commonality.

Data was a common theme throughout, both as an enabler of innovation, and as one of the biggest challenges faced by travel start-ups.  Getting hold of data is time-consuming and difficult due to the wide rank of formats and lack of availability. However, those with data are able to do interesting and useful things in serving up information to users and ultimately helping them to make purchases.  One of our current efforts is to gather information on local ’shuttle buses’, where timetables and prices may or may not be available online, are usually difficult to locate and are certainly not in a consistent format.  It’s a painful process, but having access to this data means we can recommend great value end-to-end routes to our users.

Fancy a nap? Googlers in their sleep room.

The Googlers were keen to see what they could do to help innovation by sharing their data and services; an offer welcomed by all involved.  They also wanted to show the start-ups how to do office culture properly and gave us a warm welcome to their home.  When you have a slide into the staff canteen, Ben and Jerry’s fridges on every floor and a ’sleep room’ complete with tropical fish and jungle noises for post-lunch snoozes, you know you’ve made it.

- Posted by Rachel