With the first month of 2017 nearly behind us, there have been numerous articles about the trends, storylines, and narratives likely to emerge in the travel industry during the next year; in fact, we’ve recently published a handful of entries along similar lines in order to discover where the travel industry is headed and why 2016 was such a critical year across nearly all touch points of the travel landscape. While these forecasts and predictions are interesting in terms of plotting what 2017 might look like, they offer very little in terms practical changes to the industry in specific or targeted areas.
While the idea of booking travel accommodations is most certainly a broad topic, travel bookings are poised to undergo some significant shifts in the coming year, both through the adoption of intelligent search and booking engines, but also in terms of how travel companies position themselves between suppliers and customers in the booking process. In addition, other elements such as the continued growth of mobile technology, emergence of new markets, and further fragmentation of the travel market all add up to some fundamental changes in the way customers complete bookings and travel companies facilitate them.
