Phocuswright 2017: Defining the Future of Multilingual Communication for Travel Brands
TransPerfect’s participation in travel industry conferences and events goes beyond paying a sponsorship package or hosting fancy parties (although our guests will say we’re good at that too!). It’s always a proud moment to represent TransPerfect, especially this past May at Phocuswright in Amsterdam.
TransPerfect’s Travel and Hospitality Group is extremely active in industry-wide events; participating in round tables, speaking opportunities, and industry research, all while presenting case studies with our clients throughout the year. It’s great to see everyone come together to educate the travel and hospitality world, and the best part of it is that we love what we do.
In my 3+ years at TransPerfect, I’ve attended three Phocuswright conferences in North America and Europe. My favorite part is the “Battleground” session where start-ups and emerging companies pitch their innovative products aimed at relieving obstacles and pain points in the travel ecosystem. After the “shark tank” round of elevator pitches and rigorous Q&A, voting begins for each group on the following subjects:
- Technical innovation
- Business model
- Potential business value: market size and impact
- Selling ability
- Quality of management team
- Personal investment(s)
The center stage offered our team the chance to listen to thought leaders such as Kayak’s CEO, Steve Hafner; Google’s Head of Hospitality, Terri Scriven; and Trivago’s Johannes Thomas. There was a lot of buzz about incorporating artificial intelligence and machine learning in company processes to add value. Capturing growth in emerging markets and the importance of communicating in local languages were other hot topics that obviously excited our team of localization enthusiasts.
At TransPerfect, we’re continuously improving our services with top-of-the-line hybrid translation solutions featuring smart machine translation (MT) and human review customized for your project. Another area we’re defining with our travel partners is the discovery of critical content and paths on their websites to increase booking conversion rates and maximize budget for ROI.
We’re counting down the days to Phocuswright in Florida on November 7-9. Will you be there? Let’s meet up!
A special thank you goes out to Phocuswright for putting together this brief video of our team in Amsterdam.
