Author: Sean Keener

What is PhoCusWright 2010?

This week is the PhoCusWright 2010 Conference – and even if you feel like you know the travel world well, don’t be surprised if you’ve never heard of it.

Many of my friends in the Travel Blogging world ask me “What is PhoCusWright?” and let me tell you, for BootsnAll’s first 6 or 7 years we had no idea either. JR, one of the Co-Founders of Virtual Tourist and Dena Yehya (now one of the 35 under 35 folks) asked me around that time, “Sean, are you going to PhoCusWright?” After taking a risk and plopping down 3 or 4 large, I went and I have been coming back ever since.
So what is PhoCusWright? It’s the ultimate B to B Travel Industry Conference, in my opinion. CEO’s of large publicly traded companies like Expedia, Priceline and many B to B companies that I never heard of before coming to PCW are here. As well as start-ups with a hopes, prayers and swinging for the fences in the travel industry come as well. So I find it to be a excellent chance to meet-up with lots of new and old friends and competitors to talk, learn, and evolve.
Someone from BootsnAll, usually me, has been attending the PhoCusWright Conference for several years, but this year we’ll be gathering more information to share with our readers than ever before.
We’ll be publishing a blog post every 10-15 minutes on the BootsnAll Blog on the first day of the conference, November 16th, during the Travel Innovation Summit. More than 30 companies get 12 minutes each to tell the audience about their product or service, and at the end of the day there are five finalists. The overall winner is chosen later in the week. After we publish information about every single company that’s presenting, you can weigh in on which ones sound like the best ideas to you – and then see if they match up with what the audience at the conference picked as the finalists.
We’ll be attending workshops on Wednesday to learn more about different aspects of the online travel industry, and we’ll be posting updates to Twitter throughout the day about what we’re hearing. We’ll also be live-blogging the keynote presentations on both Wednesday and Thursday so those of you who can’t be at the conference itself can follow along and – perhaps more importantly – contribute your thoughts as well.
photo by: kozumel