In this special edition episode of Suite Spot, we discuss the recent 2018 Phocuswright conference in Los Angeles.  Host Ryan Embree is joined by Patrick O’Brien, product manager and Phocuswright attendee veteran, who gives his take on the innovative technology conference. Hear from Patrick as he talks about the theme of this year’s conference and how it sets the stage for the future of the hotel industry. Learn what industry leaders from companies like Airbnb, TripAdvisor, and Expedia are saying about what they have in store for the future of their companies. This episode is an excellent glimpse of where the hotel industry is headed in 2019 and beyond. Episode Transcript Our podcast is produced as an audio resource. Transcripts are generated using speech recognition software and human editing and may contain errors. Before republishing quotes, we ask that you reference the audio. Ryan Embree: Welcome to Suite Spot where hoteliers check in and we check out what's trending in hotel marketing. I'm your host, Ryan Embree. Ryan Embree: Today we have a very special edition of the Suite Spot. As digital marketing leaders in the industry, it is always our job to make sure that we are at the forefront of all innovations and conferences that are going on around the industry and we have been busy over the past couple of months to give you that insight. Today our episode is going to be focused around Phocuswright Conference, which was in Los Angeles, California at the end of November. I'm here with a guest, Patrick O'Brien. He is our digital product manager. He's been on Suite Spot before, but he is back to give us his insights on the conference, which we both attended. So let me go ahead and first off, welcome Patrick to the show. Welcome. Patrick O'Brien: Thank you very much. Ryan Embree: So I want to first start off uh Phocuswright - this is not your first time going and attending. Um, and really this is a hospitality tech conference, correct? Patrick O'Brien: Yes. Ryan Embree: Like all conferences, every single year they have sort of a common theme that you would find for each year. And I'm curious what you felt was the theme of this year, 2018's, Phocuswright Conference. Patrick O'Brien: Yeah. So I think this is the fifth or sixth year that I have, I've gone to Phocuswright. And there always seems to be some type of new theme in the years past, uh, you know, it's been kind of around mobile and mobile booking and mobile technology around disruption in the sharing economy and what that's going to do to the travel industry. This year, I kind of felt like you had a collective cooling from the travel industry where it's like we've had all this disruption, all of this growth and everything's maturing a little bit more. And you know, you've had the consolidation of all of these OTA sites and the OTA is gobbling up other, other companies and kind of creating this bigger platform. You know, Airbnb is kind of starting to see their growth level out a little bit more. And so it's, it's obviously now, you know, one of the big players in the industry and so now I feel like you had everybody kind of sitting back and looking out and saying, okay, now we have these big companies out there. Um, travel, I think on the whole is, is increasing. What can we do now to continue to build wealth and sort of get a bigger share of the pie. One of the most interesting statistics that I saw year over year and I may get the year wrong, but I think since like 2014 that founding has gone down and funding has gone up. So what that means is that there are less and less startups coming into the industry. But there's more and more money being pumped into the industry. And I think that is kind of a direct result of what we were seeing is: So now you've had all these startups and all of this money go into the industry. They've sort of proven out the ideas that are going to work. Now they're pumping more money into trying to figure ...