Well, it’s the Year of the Water Snake, according to the Chinese calendar which begins February 10, so I thought I’d find myself a snake on New Year’s Day to help me predict what will happen in the next 12 months.
So here goes.
1. More than half of OTA revenues in Japan and Korea will come from mobile by the end of year. App fever is over. People will realize that mobile web will become far more important than apps.
2. Facebook goes vertical. First with commerce and then travel. Facebook also becomes a major threat to Google in its core ad business. Travel companies will spend significantly more amounts on Facebook for user acquisition.
3. Media players (metasearch, hotel reviews, destination guide) continue their growth and will accelerate to capture higher growth than the OTAs. Market will reevaluate it and more M&As will be seen.
• Kei Shibata is CEO of Venture Republic which runs two travel metasearch sites in Japan, travel.jp and hotel.jp
