Bedbank player Hotelbeds has released details of the audience surveys conducted at its recent MarketHub Americas and Europe events held this May in Cancun and Istanbul respectively.

Participants at both MarketHub events – which were attended by over 700 senior representatives from travel agencies, tour operators, airlines and points redemption partners from across the Americas and Europe – took part in audience surveys digitally during the conference sessions. Attendees responded to a series of questions about their views and understanding of technology.

The results showed that while the B2C travel companies are aware of the importance of technology to drive growth in their businesses, nevertheless many intermediaries in the B2C space are struggling to respond to the challenges of new technology – and could boost their business by both improving their technology and their understanding of its benefits.

When attendees at the MarketHub Americas event were asked “How do you rate your consumer mobile website?”, 44% of respondents said they needed a little help, 23% said they needed a lot of help, 6% admitted they were awful in this area, and 9% admitted to not having a site. Only 18% felt their mobile consumer site to be best in class.

Additionally, the results showed that machine learning still represents a huge opportunity for B2C travel companies. Only 24% were able to confirm that their business was currently using machine learning.

MarketHub Europe audience results showed that around 78% of the attendees admitted that their business has “no near future plans to embrace blockchain”, with only 11% having already adopted the technology and the small remainder planning to do so in the coming 12 months.

“The right product, at the right price, to the right buyer, at the right moment”

Carlos Muñoz, managing director, Hotelbeds commented: “For me these results show the role that providers such as ourselves play in the travel distribution ecosystem, supporting B2B travel trade buyers to help them respond to technological evolution and the ever increasing needs of consumers.

“For instance, our booking platform can have peaks of up to three billion searches per day, something few individual companies could cope with; so much data additionally gives us great insight into consumer desire, something we then feed back to our hotelier partners to make sure they are providing the right product, at the right price, to the right buyer, at the right moment.”