Thanks to everyone we met and spoke to at TDS: Europe 2009.  It was a little quiet, after speaking with people who had attended last year it sounded like attendance this year was less than half of that of 2008.  Regardless, it was nice to get down to London again, meet some new companies and lots of new people!

It seems like the industry has matured since I was last active and speaking to online travel providers -  both technically and fundamentally.  There were many companies who now have well established sites and have been activly engaging in ppc and seo campaigns.  Their sites (sometimes a second site after a poor first revision) were generally rather good – there was a surprising amount of people there also who had recently launched new websites.  Usability and optimisation of on-site elements such as booking processes and search facilites was just beginning to enter the picture for a lot of comapnies – most of them had minor projects they were working on but were looking to run some for of optimisitation on their sites over the next 8-12 months.

It is still a less digitally mature industry than retail, but is is slowly catching up and it’s advanced far from where it was a year from now.

Overall though, very productive and insightful!