So what is this innovation talk all about then – an important question to consider when working on and inevitably claiming such a lofty ideal?
In the travel sector, innovation is supposedly ready to greet us on every street corner, waiting to whisk the marketplace into a frenzy of adulation and change.
But actually this is very rarely ever the case. In fact, what passes off for innovation is often just a re-organisation of an existing model or process.
One could argue that this is not innovation at all but applying a new methodology to arrive at an outcome in a more efficient way.
There is, of course, often nothing simple about this approach, with many of the sector’s complex problems eased and the creation of numerous and successful businesses.
One of Tnooz’s writers, Alex Bainbridge of software company TourCMS, says that even some of the most fundamental changes in the travel industry which are perceived as being major marks of innovation over the course of its history are, in fact, just forms of commoditisation.
Not innovation at all, in other words.
The widely-lauded package holiday is seen by many as an innovative step, for example, but is in fact the commoditisation of tailor-made tours.
A scheduled flight is just a commoditised version of chartering an aircraft for groups of passengers, and so on and so forth.
If this is the case and some of the biggest alterations over the years are also just the implementation of efficiencies against an existing problem, where was the real innovation in the travel industry and where might it come from next?
First of all it appears that one only needs to look at the disruption (a favourite phrase of ours at Tnooz) in the travel industry to perhaps find where the real innovation has taken place.
And perhaps it is only in the past 15 or so years that we have seen better examples of such activity.
Although online travel agencies could in some respects be seen to be making just an existing process more efficient, how companies early in the space utilised web technology to perform a myriad of tasks within an entirely new channel was unique.
Perhaps the same could be said for metasearch engines, too? Data crunching at such huge speeds and using new web techniques to illustrate results was entirely different to anything that had come before it.
But arguably the process that disrupted the travel industry the most, and was clearly an innovation in many other verticals, was that of search, including both the natural and paid-for search marketing.
From within this area, driven by the likes of Yahoo, Miva and Google, web advertising was turned on its head and spawned many a different business model.
Think of the vast number of affiliate-driven travel businesses, which may not be pretty, household names or but are established companies that until web marketing came along did not have the means to exist.
So, disappointingly, perhaps the most innovative and disruptive change to the travel industry over the past decade was actually born outside the sector.
Recent years, however, have seen areas of the business where the collaboration of new and existing technology is leading to some interesting, dare we say it, innovation ideas in the travel space.
This is driven almost exclusively by mobile. Marrying augmented reality and content (much of it user generated) with search and booking is something even the most visionary of technologists in travel would not have foreseen just a decade ago.
And this is extremely exciting.
But maybe we are being just a little disingenuous to the reams of companies that have claimed innovation as the driving force behind their new ideas for the industry.
Perhaps understanding and implementing efficiency IS innovation? Or, in reality, perhaps we are still yet to see something truly innovative in travel?
* TNooz is partnering WIT in the WITovation Entrepreneur Bootcamp being held on Oct 18 in conjunction with the WIT Conference, Oct 19-22.
