A decade has passed since Bitcoin's mysterious founder published a paper describing blockchain, the technology behind the world's first decentralized cryptocurrency. Exuberant evangelists have since touted blockchain's potential to solve many of the world's problems. Pundits claim it will revolutionize the global economy, end poverty, eliminate identity theft and transform the future of work.

Five key takeaways from new Phocuswright research providing a detailed profile of the South Korean leisure traveler.

Trip inspiration comes from all directions. While more Americans traveled for leisure in 2017 compared to the previous year, understanding what motivated these trips and how they took shape can be tricky. In addition to deciding where to go, travelers are faced with figuring out how much to spend, whom to travel with and how to get there.

In some years, traveler behavior changes slowly. In 2017, however, there was a big shift in the way consumers shop for leisure travel. Phocuswright surveyed nearly 4,000 leisure travelers and found three shifts in the way they are shopping and booking travel.

For all of the skills in Amazon's Alexa voice marketplace, the majority can still be described as "unskilled" for travel planning and booking tasks. The same can be said for Google Assistant and most other available voice experiences. Recent Phocuswright research tested voice apps on multiple platforms from major travel intermediaries, suppliers and startups. Read on to find out the results.

The leisure traveler population grew in 2017, but the benefits were not felt equally across all travel segments. While the purchase incidence for some travel products declined, there were gains for others.

More Americans traveled for leisure in 2017 than in any other year, surging ahead of its 2015 peak. Pushed by a strong economy, over 70% of the U.S. online population took a leisure trip in 2017, bringing in a new group of travelers compared to previous years. This jump in leisure travel suggests rising consumer confidence, particularly among …

The concepts of personalization, big data analysis and dynamic pricing/offers have been discussed and debated in the press for a number of years, though limited evidence exists of any wide-level adoption in the travel industry today. The field of AI has been around for decades, but over the past few years, advancements in big data analytics, machine and deep learning, natural language processing and predictive analytics have ushered in a new era of AI-impacted applications. At the heart of these efforts is to better understand and anticipate the needs of the traveler. The question still remains on whether the desire for greater personalization will actually meet the needs of the traveler, particularly based on their specific context and persona.

In March of this year, the innovative online media company Quartz proclaimed that somebody should let Airbnb know that travelers don't like booking tours and activities online. We at Phocuswright were flattered because they cited our research as a basis for their declaration. There is just one problem. They are wrong. Here's why.

Google's entry into metasearch may be more than half a decade old, but it continues to be a closely watched obsession for the travel industry. Since the very beginning, Phocuswright has carefully tracked the evolution of Google travel products and their growing role in travel's search-shop-buy funnel. Phocuswright's 2017 deep dive on metasearch revealed two clear trends.