From now on, you cannot afford to ignore technology

I am currently at the annual Expedia Partners Conference at the sensational Bellagio hotel in Las Vegas, in the United States. I was kindly invited by Expedia to better understand their value proposition.

Normally I try to retain a healthy level of cynicism where corporate events are concerned – naturally they are great big sales pitches to the attendees – but in the case of Expedia I have to say I have been impressed so far.

Aside from the fact that the scale of the event is very large indeed – they have hired out the entire Convention Centre in the Bellagio for a 3,700-strong audience and are hosting a huge party later in the evening – the performance and activities of the business are themselves highly noteworthy.

You can read our coverage of the morning’s speeches to learn about some of the stats (this piece will be updated as the speeches progress), but the main gist of conference has been about the enormous growth of mobile. Just two years ago, 75%  searches on Expedia were run on the desktop version of the website. This figure has now fallen to less than 50% and is projected to continue its downward trend, with mobile taking up the slack and then some.

A key piece of analysis is that the growth of mobile in China and India is unprecedented. One speaker noted that these countries did not join in with the PC and laptop years, being as they were less developed economies without as much disposable income amongst consumers. But now that the cost of smartphones has fallen, as an average, to around $65, they are now buying them in their millions.

Add to this the fact that China is now the largest outbound travel market in the world with around 100 million visitors heading to other countries per  year –  a figure which will continue to grow rapidly – and you can see that unlike in other industries, travel is coming to your doorstep from absolutely gargantuan economies.

I do not intend this analysis as a plug for Expedia necessarily, but suffice it to say the conference has made it plain to me that it is nigh on lunacy for any hotelier in 2015 onwards to imagine that technology and online are somehow ‘just one approach’ that can be sidestepped. Not only will the slowest adopters lose ground to our own domestic market in the UK, but they will be left standing in the most brutal fashion once the inbound visitor market from emerging economies really starts to rock and roll.

There is a very bright future for the UK hospitality industry, if only it can digest the importance of technology in enough time.

CORRECTION 16/12/14: The original version of this article quoted 75% of “bookings” through Expedia were on desktop PCs. This should have read “searches”.