Iceland Travel Tech 2023 - Recordings and photos

GODO offers complete solutions for the travel tech and in their talk Ástþór and Sverrir have a focus on how to ease the life of the tourism employer. GODO is one of the two main partners of Iceland Travel Tech 2023 and a value member of the ecosystem of tourism in Iceland.

GODO is dedicated to streamlining the lives of employees and managers in the travel industry, by developing software solutions tailored to the accommodation providers, travel agencies, and now recently car rentals and tour operators as well. From property management systems, channel management, invoicing, automation, guest communication. GODO covers almost every aspect of the travel technology.

And throughout this presentation Sverrir and Ástþór showcase examples of individuals whom GODO have assisted in transforming their businesses through the power of travel tech.

Trip Creator is a travel management system that gives you complete control over your work, whether it's the itinerary, customer pricing, or the booking process. Trip Creator is also a partner of Iceland Travel Tech 2023.

Ásgeir Fannar presentation is about empowering employees with tech solutions built to maximize customer satisfaction, or in other words, the day-to-day activities of those who create itineraries. He starts by introducing himself and the company a little bit and then goes into the platform itself, speaks about one testimonial, and then about what Trip Creator is currently developing.

Sweeply is a mobile and web app that automates everyday tasks for hospitality staff. By simplifying communication and teamwork it empowers deskless staff, housekeeping, engineering, guest services, maintenance, incident security and so on. Thousands of people are using Sweeply today.

In the presentation Pétur Orri, CEO of Sweeply, and Danel, CEO of KEA Hotels, share the story of implementation and process at KEA Hotels. This is a story about how KEA Hotels found 179 hours in just one month in one of their hotels.

Sýndarveruleiki is a progressive innovation and technology company that runs the 1238 Battle of Iceland, an immersive virtual reality exhibition in Sauðárkrókur North Iceland that goes a step beyond the regular history museum.

In this presentation Freyja Rut Emilsdóttir goes over the idea behinde the project. Sauðárkrókur and surrounding areas are known for rich history and culture and an abundance of historical sites, but perhaps a little bit off the beaten track. When starting this project, the main idea was to create a new magnet to promote Sauðárkrókur and to add an interesting stop to an already rich variety of stops in Iceland for heritage-seeking tourists. And last but not least, the goal was to bring to life Sturlungasaga story and its main events, battles that can be described as a civil war that cost Icelanders their independence, which took 700 years to regain.

Glaze is building a solution they believe to be the fastest way for the hospitality industry to accept orders and payments. No more hardware, endless downloads and complex setups. Only a simple way to glaze through your day-to-day operations while providing a beautiful, functional, and joyful user experience.

In his presentation Arnþór Ingi from Glaze explains that the company passion is basically to try to remove all the hindrances that are for staff to be capturing orders. Quite often the guests need to wait to be served because staff is busy collecting orders from other guests, capturing payments or fixing things like a printer. And this all adds to the time that it takes for customers to get served.

Glaze believes that their solution could be a piece of the puzzle to solve this issue. Companies can get operational excellence by allowing their customers to choose to do their own orders, to allow the customer to choose to do their own payment and give the staff then the opportunity to focus on what they do best, and that's to serve the guests.

Managing an in-destination tour operation brings a lot of challenges that often need to be tackled within a very condensed timeframe. Pax Flow empowers tour operators to streamline operations with automation data driven workflows and customer self-service that drastically saves time spent on tour management and improves the customer experience.

In her presentation Soffía explains that she has a really simple message, that proper planning delivers the best experience for a customer. For most people that might sound like common sense. But in stakeholder interviews she has been taking for the past five years, talking to people in tour operation about their struggles, she has heard the same thing over and over again. Everybody is struggling with operation and there's no wonder why. Because for the past decade or so, travel technology companies, especially in the tourism activity space, have been really focused on sales and distribution and haven't really given operations a big part. “And we all know that the satisfaction of the customer is down to the whole experience. And if we cannot deliver, our reputation is at stake and we know that those reviews at the end of the trip, they also mean a lot to us.”

Reserva Tours is an innovative booking platform where hotels and their agents trade directly with each other in all matters concerning their business relationship.

In his presentation Steinar Atli talks about how tourism has many different types of companies. We have hotels, rental cars, travel agencies, tour operators and so on. Although all those companies want to work together it has been complicated to share inventory and make a booking for a hotel room or a rental car. The reason lies in the number of systems behind the hotels and behind the current rentals. The hotels can choose between 1,300 systems around the world. And Iceland is more closely to 20 systems and the rental car industry does the same.

Then he asks: “But what if there was a solution to combine all this inventory into one place, one user interface, or even one api?” Reserva is built as a platform, making it easy for travel companies to book, modify and even cancel the bookings from any integrated booking system. And of course, based on the cancellation policies and the logic behind the booking. Reserva have created a unique voucher system as well for hotels so they can share their inventory with people online, creating their own reservations. This can be used as a gift card application or for disrupt passengers at an airport. Reserva is currently working on our wallet feature that will automate all the billing between suppliers and buyers.

TourDesk offers a comprehensive tour booking service for accommodation providers, allowing partners to offer their guest experiences to book in a simple and secure way. TourDesk has created a brand-new revenue streams for accommodations all over the world.

In his presentation Hjörtur Atli talks about how TourDesk can create significant value for all parties using it: airline, travel agency or travel influencer, and all the while their guests are getting a better service. TourDesk works on the notion of trust. The trust guests have towards their accommodations, airline, travel agency, or travel influencer. “By capitalizing on that trust in a responsible manner, we can create significant value for all parties involved. TourDesk enables anyone to offer tours and activities to their guests and to earn a commission on every booking made. We work primarily with accommodation providers, but in reality, the platform is great for travel agencies, airlines, travel bloggers, anyone that deals with people. Their guests finalize bookings on their own. In addition to that, we offer an agent solution that allows receptionist, concierge and sales departments to book tours directly for their guests.”

In their presentation Hjalti and Tryggvi from Datera covered the issue whether Chat-GPT is a friend or foe and the future of SEO and content writing in travel.

First, they defined or explained what artificial intelligent (AI) is, with some doubts if AI is indeed intelligent. But AI is all around us today and using it is nothing new, not least in travel marketing. But bringing Chat-GPT into the picture really changes everything. Because it is a natural language generating system, that understand patterns and relationship between words. I it means that you can actually go back and forth discussing something. Therefore, the impact is so heavy on the way we work with content and seo. The arrival of Chat-GPT has the potential to be game changing and brings an immense opportunity for businesses within the Icelandic travel industry. But we need to know how to use it and when to use it.

Þóranna K. Jónsdóttir is a senior digital strategist at The Engine, part of Pipar/TBWA advertising agnecy. The title of Þóranna's talk was don't do it yourself. Digital marketing, automation and tourism. As we all know, the competition is fierce. Consumer behaviour is rapidly changing, and expectations for personalized experience are growing.

The core of marketing is personalization. Today, businesses that just speak generically to everyone will lose out to the ones that actually personalize. We could do it more because if we automate things, personalization is one of the major benefits but it's not the only benefit. We can also save time and effort and still get better results. Also get better information to allow us to make better decisions in our business along with less errors and mistakes in the marketing. Many businesses are using social media for marketing and also things like scheduling posts, but there are other things that can be automated, such as certain types of ad, optimizing the ads, social listening to hear what people are saying about you. There's tech that analyses your results, which in turn, allows you to optimize your results. There are tools to find and curate content and there are loads and loads of other things. And you can just imagine once we have ChatGPT and their friends doing it, how much better that's going to be.

Guðrún Hildur og Nína Louise are the founder of Keeps and they founded Keeps to eliminate the manual process of uploading and updating content on different sales channels. In their presentation Guðrún and Nína started by emphasizing the power of photos in travel marketing because when travellers start to look for a hotel and they want to book one for the vacation, the number one factor in the decision-making process is photos.

It is therefore essential to have good quality photos and they have to be consistent throughout all the different booking sites because we need to be able to build trust to the traveller. They must know that this is what they're going to get, because travellers will look at multiple sales channels. Updating all those channels take considerable time, but with the Keeps you can update all sales channels at once and keep the same quality content updated at all points.

Final remarks on Iceland Travel Tech 2023 came from Signe Jungersted, CEO and founding partner in innovation and strategy agency group, NAO from Denmark. The title of her talk was: Tourism - Lost in space?