Fliess said that travellers were becoming more sophisticated in how they buy hotels and “a hotelier that can meet that new guest demand can improve brand loyalty”.

He said that disruption to the travel space was coming from three areas – customers, new start-ups and the new technology giants, Google and Apple – and most of it was happening in three areas, mobile, social and search.

“It is important to understand what’s happening in these three areas so that you can stay ahead of the curve,” he said.

In the first half of 2010, he said, more than US$90 million was invested in online travel start-ups.

He cited two examples of disruptors – Hotel Tonight, which allows mobile only last booking platform on iPhone and Android, and the social recommendation engine Gogobot, which tries to solve the problem of trusted hotel reviews.

Both these applications are built ground up on platforms where the customers already are – on the smartphone and on social networks like Facebook.

He said when Hotel Tonight was launched, there was skepticism about its model “but turns out that 30% of hotel reservations are made on the same day”.

“Traditional players must work and integrate with disruptors to better serve customers,” he said.

Citing the example of hotel reviews, he said nobody paid any attention to it 10 years ago and now they have emerged as a major influence on how customers book hotels.

“Leaders must embrace disruption and change,” he said. 

In a following session, Adam Goldstein, Co-Founder and CEO of Hipmunk, urged the audience to look at what Google was doing to hotel search by using maps.

Google, he said, was good at getting customers used to certain ways of searching and if this caught on, then maps would become an important part of search.

And he predicted that the combined Google-ITA Software “could turn out to be the most important flight provider that any airline has to work with in next two to three years”.

To a question on whether he is afraid of Google, he said, “We are not afraid of Google because it is a big company that moves slowly and we are a small company that innovates constantly,” he said.

Goldstein also said that mobile apps were becoming competitive with desktop applications and once mobile reached 50% of the market, companies would not feel the need to invest in the desktop and focus solely on mobile.

He also cited the Hotel Tonight example which he said could be a desktop app but because “it’s something you carry with you in your pocket, it has enabled a whole new booking experience”.

And the future of travel search would be in better results, better experience and mobile.