As travel managers, we face a significant challenge: how do we stay on top of changing travel tech trends and developments?
More than ever, our organisations expect us to make sense (and have an opinion) on what is happening in the travel industry.
Whether it’s travel chatbots, that handle research and book flights, or Virtual Reality, that allows us to ‘visit’ new places without leaving our desk, we need to know what is coming down the line and how we can use them.
The good news? With some simple tools, it’s easy to organise the latest business travel trends. Here are four tools that can help you gather together the information you need – when you need it.
#1 Evernote – the notebook tool
Create a dedicated notebook in Evernote to pull together all your research on travel tech, which you can use across all your devices. Share with colleagues, so that you can collaborate together on research and idea generation.
Feature Highlight: Use the Evernote Web Clipper Extension for Chrome to save interesting articles to look back on at a later date. It frees your inbox from endless emails and makes it easy to store all those travel tech newsletters you’ve been saving. You can tag notes, to group them together, making it simple to find the right information.
#2 Feedly – the blog and news aggregation tool
Search, share and save the blogs you like to follow. Feedly gives you one place to go and read up on the latest in travel tech disruption, rather than having to visit multiple sites. To begin, why not start by following these blogs:
- Business Travel News
- Skift
- Booking for Business Travel Blog
- GBTA
- Business Travel iQ
- Business Travel Direct
- Eye for Travel
- The Business Travel Magazine
(Want to find out more about these blogs? Check our our post on 4 must-follow business travel blogs.)
Feature highlight: Create multiple collections in Feedly, to group together blogs that cover different topics. So, if there’s a particular area you want to deep dive into, you can focus you research without being distracted.
#3 IFTTT – the connecting tool
Pull together news from different sources into one place – automatically. IFTTT works on the principle of if this happens here, that happens there. For example, star an email in Gmail to get it to save to Evernote. The beauty of IFTTT is that you can use the sources and tools you already know and love (like Twitter, Facebook, Google Drive) and make them smarter by getting them to talk to each other.
Feature highlight: Create a search on Twitter to monitor travel tech updates and then use IFTTT to send the results to your inbox as a daily email digest.
#4 Google Alerts – the notification tool
Create an alert for anything and everything that you want to monitor. Google Alerts will let you know when there’s new content on the web. Choose to keep the alert very general, to see updates from around the world, or make it more precise, so they only cover your region.
Feature highlight: Customise the notification frequency to a level that suits you, so you only get updated as often as you want.