While air passenger volume has moderated in the second half of the year, Asia’s the best place to be at right now, affirmed Abacus International at its International Conference in Seoul this week.

“The industry is still healthy, growth is still ahead that of last year and the money is still there for travel,” said president and CEO Robert Bailey. “We’re still looking at an industry growth of 3-5 percent.”

But most exciting of all is that Abacus is sitting in a region that’s not only prospering relative to others but is also seeing dynamic changes in technology adoption and rapid changes in customer behaviour.

By 2025, a third of the world’s airline traffic is expected to originate from Asia, which will represent 43% of the world’s GDP by 2020, larger than the United Stats and European Union combined.

More immediate is the advent of what Abacus calls Web 3.0 – a new wave of innovation based on the always-connected vision offered by consumer mobile technologies.

The region already has the largest mobile subscriber base in the world with aggressive smartphone adoption. Both Malaysia and Singapore lead the region in smartphone penetration rates at 88% within a South-east Asia region that sold US$2.4 billion worth of smartphones in just the first three months of 2012.

In Australia and Japan, smartphone users (74% and 78% respectively) do not ever leave home without their phone and in China, more than half of smartphone owners would rather give up their television over their smartphone, said Abacus, citing various research sources.

So with all the changes going on, what’s the traditional travel agent, the bulk of Abacus’ customers, to do to compete in a world where technology is getting so personal and people are getting so social?

With online bookings in Asia Pacific set to reach US$90.8 billion in 2013, out of which 32% are being driven by the OTAs, the fastest growing distribution channel in the region, there is reason for brick and mortar agents to be concerned.

Brett Henry, vice president commercial and marketing of Abacus though believes that mobile will shift power to the intermediaries away from supplier direct “because who wants to download every supplier app?”

The question is which intermediaries – the ones who leverage technology to achieve scale, price and choice for their customers or the ones who get smart about using technology to maximize productivity and efficiency and deliver personal service to their customers?

If Henry has his way of course, all these intermediaries would use Abacus products and he was very clear in claiming leadership in innovation in agency product. “We are serious about product, we are 12-24 months ahead of competitors in every product category and we are the global leader in mobile solutions for travel agencies,” he stated.

Abacus is betting its mobile future on HTML5. “You get it right once and it works across all platforms,” he said.

The Abacus Mobility Suite comprising Abacus Mobile, Virtually There, WebStart and TripPlan, is seeing good adoption. Abacus Mobile now accounts for over 78,000 visits, with a 50% increase in active subscribers as well as a visits in the first half of 2012. Virtually There gets more than 40 million unique visitors a year, said Abacus.

Quite a few of the solutions are aimed at improving productivity and saving costs. Launched in Seoul is the Automation Hub which is aimed at automating business process and eliminating time-consuming manual tasks.

Other than becoming more efficient and productive, what else can travel agents do?

Well, Dan Lynn, CEO of AirAsia Expedia had this advice – don’t do what OTAs do not attempt to compete on price and selection but instead focus on why your customers use you,” he said during a panel session.

“By all means do a website, do a low cost website, but ask yourself what do your customers use you for and focus on making that better.”

The one area OTAs cannot do as well as travel agents is personalization and although big data is coming and that will help OTAs personalize to some extent, “it will never solve personalization”.

“You sell the complete trip, you sell the itinerary and you make people feel comfortable with that.”

Lynn cited the example of Flight Centre Australia which was doing a good job helping their customers feel assured about the complete itinerary.

But obviously that doesn’t stop Abacus from wanting to help its agents compete in the area of choice and price and its RoomDeal product is aimed at doing precisely that in the competitive hotel segment.

Developed in partnership with Indonesia’s RajaKamar group, RoomDeal is aimed at unlocking the best hotel deals from key hotel content aggregators across the region and offering them at net rates to agents, thus allowing agents thereotically to compete on price with the likes of Expedia, Agoda or Booking.com.

It’s signed partnerships with aggregators such as Asian Trails, hotelbeds, the AOT group and HS Travel International. Aimed at the leisure and smaller corporate travel agents, it has 140,000 hotels in the system, allows agents to merge PNR with flight tickets and has its own payment gateway so agents can issue their own vouchers.

Bailey detects a shift in the mindset of travel agents to technology adoption. “When the Internet first came in, they saw it as a threat to their business. Now with mobile, people are excited by it and are trying it out.

“In a sense, we have to hold them back because we want to make sure they apply these solutions to get a business result, rather than a quick gee whiz kind of thing.”