Your Reality, Augmented
Imagine if your phone could use GPS information and a compass to lead you to the nearest restaurant or cash machine. In fact, it already can: welcome to "augmented reality", or AR, a technology that overlays digital information on a real-world view, typically using your mobile phone's camera and screen.
"Point your phone at a building and see its history or look at a painting and see the Grove Dictionary article on it. In 2010, this revolution in travel information is just beginning," says James Governor, an industry analyst with Redmonk.
Mobile phone AR apps Layar (www.layar.eu) and Wikitude World Browser (www.wikitude.org) are already out there, serving up travel information from the likes of Spotted by Locals (www.spottedbylocals.com), Yelp! (www.yelp.co.uk) and social game Noticings (www.noticin.gs)
Lastminute.com was among the first travel companies to experiment with the technology. "We think AR will take a significant chunk of the market in time," says Marko Balabanovic at Lastminute.com. "What we've seen so far are the primitive beginnings, and there will be massive improvements over the next two years. Our goal, with apps such as Nru and Snaffle, is to enable "n-commerce", where "n" stands for "nearby" – showing customers great things to do nearby, right now, with real-time availability, and a great selection of deals."
By the end of this year, expect to see traditional travel publishers pushing their content through to us, hotel chains superimposing their latest offers over your real-time street view, and perhaps travellers using AR as a social space to share experiences and advice with other visitors.
The Android-iPhone Shoot-out
This year will be the year we do a lot more miles on our mobiles. For travellers, it's all about the applications, or "apps", easy-to-use mini-programs that run on your phone handset. An app can find you on a map, point you to local restaurant reviews, remember where you parked your car, or even replace your guidebook. More than three billion have gone out of the doors in just 18 months from Apple's App Store, many free to download. "As long as roaming costs can be limited, a mobile is ideal for destination information, for booking hotels and for companies providing services to travellers already in the destination," says Alex Bainbridge at TourCMS.
Apple won't have it all its own way this year. We'll hear a lot more from Google's Android mobile operating system, which is available free for phone hardware manufacturers to install. Several new handsets from Sony Ericsson, Motorola, HTC, Samsung and Google itself (the Nexus One) are Android-powered. The Android Market, the equivalent of the iPhone's App Store, opened with 50 apps in October 2008; there are now more than 15,000, including phrase books and guides from Lonely Planet. It's also possible that Microsoft's new mobile phone software, Windows Phone 7 series, will make a big splash when it's released towards the end of this year.
"Our hope is that the next big application – the future YouTube or Facebook – will be built for mobiles," says Stephany van Willigenburg at Google Travel.
e-Reading on the beach
Amazon's Kindle ($259–$489, from Amazon.com only) and the Sony eReader (£139–£219) blazed the e-book trail; now we have Apple's iPad, too. Lonely Planet already has more than 600 titles available, all of which you can now carry in a package weighing about 1lb. American bookshop chain Barnes & Noble's eReader, the Nook, was released in the US last year. Plastic Logic's Que, the Skiff and several more were stars of this year's Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. Many will appear in shops over here. eReading has only just got going.
Smarter Search
Searching the web means typing in words and expecting Google, Bing or Yahoo! to deliver the answer. It's the way we've got used to working, but it's not how real human beings sift information. We want to know what's nearby, what our friends like. Improvements in local search, social search and visual search will do just that. According to Robin Frewer, Google's industry leader, travel, image-recognition technology will be "a key area" for Google this year. A feature in Google Labs, based on vision research and known as Image Swirl (image-swirl.googlelabs.com), is experimenting with sorting images into representative groups. This technology could have eventual implications for finding your holiday online.
As far as a "normal" search goes, ways are emerging to help us look beyond the obvious when we hunt for holidays online. Search engines such as Google are dominated by large companies with big budgets for "search engine optimisation" which place their companies near the top of Google's first page of hits. "But we are starting to see a raft of new websites that connect niche travel companies to travellers," says Kevin May, editor of Tnooz. He expects new distribution models pioneered by web platforms like Tourabout (www.tourabout.com) and the TourCMS Marketplace (www.tourcms.com) to power the technology behind alternative places to search for travel.
Taking Online Offline Again
Research shows that watching a video increases our willingness to buy a holiday and lifts the amount we spend. "Six of the 10 most visible holiday websites include video right now. That figure will be 10 out of 10 by the end of this year," says Dave Howard at the online video company Trailstream, which recently launched the Trailstream.tv service for "offline" agents.
And look out for apps that won't fit in your pocket. Microsoft Surface units – giant touch-screen tables – "have the potential to bring a bit of pizzazz back into the travel-agent experience, once the costs of the hardware come down," says May.
Free Lunches All Round
Last month, Nokia started giving away point-to-point satnav on its leading smartphones. Footprint Guidebooks, which recently formed a partnership with online travel community Tripwolf.com, will relaunch its website next month, complete with "around 60 per cent" of the information from Footprint guidebooks. Frommers.com is loaded with content, and DK Travel allows you to build and download your own travel guide from its website (www.traveldk.com) Wine Travel Guides (www.winetravelguides.com) has ditched the subscription fee for its self-guided wine tours, Google laid on Wi-Fi at 54 American airports over the festive season and Lonely Planet has launched Trippy, a collaborative trip-planning gadget for Google Wave users.
The common thread? They are free and the web-savvy can expect plenty more travel somethings-for-nothing this year.
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