Educational programme 2019
Thursday, 31 January
Opening keynote: Being mobile-ready now
10:00 – 10:30
Travel is not a one-size-fits-all experience; motivations, preferences, and booking behaviours vary around the world and across generations. With more than 20 brands touching every aspect of travel, Expedia Group will take you on a deep dive through mobile in travel. How is mobile changing booking behaviour and how fast is it changing? What do these changes mean for different generations of travellers as they search, plan, and book their journeys? What should you be doing to be mobile-ready now? Join Olivier Pernoud, Expedia Group’s Senior Director, Market Management Northern Europe, at the STAY WYSE Hostel Conference to find out.
Speaker
Olivier Pernoud
Senior Director, Market Management Northern Europe
Expedia Group
Hostel benchmarking
17:00 – 17:30
An expanded view of hostel performance data shows markets in flux. While strong demand is buying some cities, it’s failing to manifest as rate growth in others. During this data dive, Patrick Mayock of benchmarking provider STR will unveil the latest in hostel performance and explore some of the trends that underlie it. Additional context will be provided via comparative data from other accommodation types, including hotels.
Speaker
Patrick Mayock
Senior Director of Research & Development
STR
Beyond the backpacker – building the right platform experience for younger travellers
16:15 – 17:00
Each day, more than 1,550,000 room nights are reserved on Booking.com. With a mission to empower people to experience the world, Booking.com’s ambitions go far beyond hotels and include much more than just accommodation. This is why there are various teams at the company looking at different types of accommodation and optimising for the kinds of customers that want to stay there, including younger travellers. As this demographic often values experiences and prioritises budget when deciding where to stay, they have unique needs.
In this keynote, Max van der Heijden, Product Manager at Booking.com, will explain the company’s mission, how the company works and why his team is focusing on hostels. He’ll talk about what they have worked on so far and share some of their exciting plans for the future.
Speaker
Max van der Heijden
Product Manager
Booking.com
Friday, 1 February
Friday Keynote: Where in the world are the best (and worst) cities?
11:00 – 11:30
We continue to dig deep into the data of the leading global survey of the youth travel market, New Horizons IV. During this session, we will offer a distillation of youth traveller ratings on world cities. Which cities are considered the friendliest? What makes up for an unsafe destination? Does culture matter more than city size? Which cities score as best overall value destinations with young travellers? Find out what we learned from how millennials and gen z travellers rated 70 cities.
Speaker
Greg Richards
Research Advisor
WYSE Travel Confederation
Beyond travel – engaging the next generation of experience seekers
11:30 – 12:15
Traditional online travel agents focus purely on the transaction. They hijack customers and focus on expensive conversions a long way down the funnel, but is this sustainable? Today’s travellers are chasing authentic cultural experiences, looking for inspiration and emotional connections as they explore the world around them. In this session, we look at what motivates people to seek out new experiences and how disruptor brands providing creative, diversified content are influencing the travel sector.
Speaker
Andy Washington
Senior Vice President of Travel
Culture Trip
