Our team came back from ITB Berlin, which took place on March 4–6 this year, and we are ready to reflect on our experience so that you could hear it firsthand.

As usual, ITB Berlin became a center of attraction for industry players from all over the world. Exhibitors and trade visitors were divided by geographic destinations and market segments (Adventure Tourism, Business Travel, LGBTQ+ Travel, Luxury Travel, Medical Tourism, and Travel Technology), which helped navigate the vast space of Berlin Expo Center and not miss out on valuable networking and business opportunities.

Apart from the exhibition area, the venue housed the ITB Berlin Convention area packed with workshops, presentations, and round tables covering all possible topics relevant to travel:

  • Green travel and sustainability
  • AI as the new normal in travel
  • Emerging travel trends
  • Autonomous agents in travel
  • Inclusivity and diversity
  • Business travel
  • Young generations as new traveler groups
  • Future of travel experiences
  • Developments in the cruise industry
  • Tour operator markets
  • Destination marketing

Our VP of Product, Maria Bondarenko, was also among speakers at the event with her presentation “Effective Path to Digitalization — What Really Matters?” “Participation in conferences is a great chance to share thoughts and challenges in the industry and explore key strategies for moving forward,” comments Maria.

GP Solutions at the Exhibition Stand

The technology area seemed more lively and buzzy, especially compared to other parts of the exhibition, and was drawing a crowd consistently. For our sales team, ITB Berlin has created a favorable ground for high-quality meetings that combine business drive and a friendly atmosphere in their nature.

“The quality of meetings at ITB Berlin was at a high level, as we expected. We put great hopes that many of them will soon turn into finalized deals and signed contracts,” adds CEO Segey Zubekhin.

It lines up with the overall trend that at such travel industry events, attendees primarily show interest in our ready-to-go travel tech products such as GP Travel Enterprise and GP Travel Hub rather than custom development or outsourcing. “You come with your pain points looking for an immediate solution that you can implement fairly quickly,” continues Sergey Zubekhin. “That is why we normally start our discussions with offering the products that are already available.”

Which Functionality Was of Special Interest to Attendees

  • Growth and scalability of their businesses
  • Inventory management
  • Reservation management
  • Distribution and integration capabilities
  • Group booking functionality, which is keeping up to come up in the market and has become a long-lasting pain point for many

To our surprise, despite the general hype surrounding AI, there was no noticeable interest or questions about it from attendees during meetings.

We were astonished to see such an immense interest in our services from countries in every corner of our planet — Germany, Cyprus, Ireland, Indonesia, Australia, Armenia, Georgia, the USA, the UK, Italy, Norway, the UAE — the list goes on and on. At the moment, our team has got down to processing all the requests for software development we accumulated during the event.

These March days were intense, but it was worth all the effort. Thank you all for your sincere appreciation of our software development services! ITB has proved once and again that it is one of the heavy hitters in the travel trade show circuit. Looking forward to seeing you at the upcoming events!