Adventure travel specialist, G Adventures is going deep into the woods with a significant financial investment in restorative travel technology start-up, Reforest. Brisbane-based Reforest is a digital platform connecting travellers with local communities that are actively restoring their ecosystems using reforestation.
Travellers can have their own trees planted in places where community tourism relies heavily on the preservation of the local environment. The platform will then provide travellers with visible, scientific data measuring the positive impact of the trees planted on their behalf.
Reforest says its platform is innovative in the way it converts the hard science of climate action into simple yet compelling personalised interactive experiences for companies’ customers, who can then continue to plant trees themselves.
Messing with the metaverse has its benefits
A metaverse holiday may never replace the real thing, but some experts believe its application in travel can have many benefits beyond offering inspiration at the booking stage.
“For example, airlines are looking at how to give passengers headsets to make their journey more pleasant by seeming like they’re in a bigger space. We’re just at the beginning of this,” says Emilie Dumont, managing director of Digitrips Group – one of whose several B2B travel brands includes France’s leading OTA Misterfly.
Alex Barros, chief marketing & innovation officer from revenue manager Beonprice, says for an intermediary or supplier selling on dot com, “the metaverse will quickly become not only another point of sale, but a point of sale on steroids”.
“Imagine allowing a potential client to not only to inspect every aspect of a hotel room from every angle, visit the destination connecting it to the hotel and the surrounding areas, or look at experiences (like a boat that can be hired and visited virtually), but alsoto test the bed or have a look in the mini bar?
“All of this presents the opportunity for sellers to cross-sell clients a much wider range of ancillary services and even upsell higher classes of rooms or fares too,” Barros says.
“For example, by creating a metaverse shop, they could have luxury boutiques selling high-end products to their guests with huge margins. This gives hotels greater direct access to the share of the wallet of guests.”
Nium slams the door on surcharges
Global platform Nium has launched Nium Airline Payments (NAP), a solution powered by Universal Air Travel Plan (UATP).
NAP provides airlines, travel agents, and online travel agencies (OTAs) with a ‘closed loop’ payment model, which “closes the door on damaging surcharges and business restricting non-acceptance policies that have inflated the cost of B2B travel payments for decades”.
Technology for the solution came to Nium via its acquisition of travel payments optimisation leader, Ixaris, in 2021.
Nium says the closed-loop solution “eliminates margin-eating intermediaries from the payment flow, giving airlines the flexibility and control to design transparent incentives for OTA partners, based on routes, seasonality, business volumes, and more.
Airlines will benefit from significantly reduced per payment cost savings, faster settlement times, and flexible incentives for sellers – “all without requiring any additional technical integration’, Nium says.
Uber Travel keeps it all together
I received an invitation this week to sign up for Uber Travel. Curious, I discovered Uber Travel is a new feature of the Uber app that allows you to connect Gmail, Outlook, or Hotmail accounts to import flight and hotel details and create a travel itinerary with all trip information in a single view.
Rides can be reserved to and from airports and between hotels, up to 30 days ahead of a trip at a fixed price, up front.
Reassuringly, the flight-tracking feature will automatically adjust a traveller’s pickup reservation time if the airline cancels or delays their flight.
