The word was "s-----" and it rhymed with city. It was used, repeatedly, by Groupon co-founder Andrew Mason, describing for an audience of about 1,500 his take on current travel services and how his interactive smartphone walking tour, Detour, would not be ... well, "s-----."
To paraphrase the Ritz-Carlton slogan, this was not Ladies and Gentlemen talking to Ladies and Gentlemen.
Business conferences are typically genteel affairs, with suit-wearing executives either loath to mention the competition by name or, in some cases, using the platform to present a united front on issues such as improved airport technology, fewer barriers to international travel or increased regulations for relative upstarts like Airbnb.
With travel technology companies, though, the expected demeanor is brash. Shoes are often brightly colored sneakers. T-shirts are acceptable apparel for presentations. Profanity is part of the syntax. Socks are optional.
And the knives are out.
A case in point was the three-day Phocuswright Conference at Los Angeles' JW Marriott last month, where the first day's pitch session of startups was described as "a combination of 'American Idol' and 'Shark Tank,'" and where everyone could smell blood in the water.
Some of the backbiting was reserved for panels that pitted executives pitching traditional services against the newer breed. There was no better example than the panel that included both the aforementioned (and repeatedly profane) Mason and Brad Weber, CEO of Gray Line Worldwide, the tour bus operator.
Weber was quick to take issue after Mason presented Detour, slated to debut next year, as an alternative to a traditional tour, which he described as being inflexible, impersonal and constrictive.
"With Detour, I'm by myself," Weber said. "Is there something missing? Isn't human interaction part of it?"
More prevalent, though, was the sort of infighting that took place within the travel technology industry, where many of the top executives had worked for each other before joining the competition or branching out on their own.
Such familiarity has bred more than a bit of contempt. A case in point was travel review leader TripAdvisor and its recent decision to start enabling visitors to book hotels and destinations on its own site instead of sending them to online travel agencies' (OTAs) or suppliers' sites.
After hearing various OTAs debate the pros and cons of the new strategy (and whether they were going to cooperate), TripAdvisor CEO Steve Kaufer used his on-stage time to play the idea-theft card. Noting that companies like Expedia (TripAdvisor's former parent) have added user reviews to their site, Kaufer asserted, "OTAs have copied some of the things we've done."
And at a time when the acquisition costs of travel tech companies are often measured in billions of dollars, taking a shot at someone's financial standing wasn't off limits. After Orbitz founder and current Kayak CEO Steve Hafner, whose company was acquired by Priceline Group last year for $1.8 billion, spoke glowingly of current Orbitz CEO Barney Harford, he was less charitable about that company's growth prospects.
Harford, Hafner said, "doesn't have enough cash in his pocket to buy anything. They're subscale."
The aggressive and blunt approach reflects a travel-tech industry in which billions of dollars are up for grabs as more consumers exclusively use their smartphones and tablets when planning a trip. About 104 million Americans now use mobile devices to shop for or buy travel products.
Expedia and ComScore reported at the conference that while the number of Americans using a personal computer or laptop to find and book travel has fallen about 9% in the past year, the number of people using smartphones for that purpose has jumped 39% from a year ago.
That trend sparked a lot of blind ambition, best expressed at the conference by Brian Sharples, co-founder and CEO of online vacation-rentals distributor HomeAway: "You can either sit back and let market forces change things at the rate they're going to change, or you can pick a spot in the future and go after it hard."
Making things testier was the fact that unlike travel suppliers or even OTAs, many of the newest products focus on what was repeatedly referred to as "the top of the funnel" travel distribution, where both the margins and revenue opportunities appear to be thinning out -- a trend that made one venture capitalist cranky.
"I'm tired of seeing so many entrepreneurs who are incredibly smart people making a tiny turn of the screw on the top of the funnel," said Altimeter Capital CEO Brad Gerstner.
The upshot is that anyone thinking that the industry's shortcomings will be papered over by slick-speaking executives or P.R. people need not worry. In response to a question about how well the travel industry personalizes consumer preferences, Hafner didn't mince words. "We suck at it," he said. "Everybody does. We're all terrible."
Gerstner was even more blunt, calling the typical travel experience "a pain in the ass."
How much more blunt and cutthroat these competitors will get as the travel-tech space grows and evolves is anyone's guess, though at least one rapidly growing player appears to have tested those limits.
This summer, Uber and Lyft, the two largest companies in the ride-hailing app space, made news by accusing each other of trying to slow down each other's pickup times by making thousands of fake ride requests, then canceling them.
That alleged sabotage now seems tame compared with what an Uber senior executive said at a recent dinner event in New York. According to the online news site BuzzFeed, Uber Senior Vice President Emil Michael (in comments he would later say were supposed to be off the record) suggested that the company dig up dirt on the personal lives of journalists who write critically about the company.
BuzzFeed reported that Michael, citing one female journalist who had written that Uber did not focus enough on ensuring the safety of female passengers, said she should be held personally responsible for any woman who switched from Uber to traditional taxis and then was sexually assaulted.
In a series of tweets the following day, Uber CEO Travis Kalanick called Michael's comments "terrible" and said they "showed a lack of leadership, a lack of humanity and a departure from our values and ideals."
Still, the comments also shed light on the company's bare-knuckles approach to both competition and dealings with the media.
On the other hand, there were also reminders at the Phocuswright event of old-school decorum, none more telling than Priceline CEO Darren Huston. Here's a guy who could have boasted about his company now being the world's largest OTA, its $60 billion market value, its recent $2.6 billion acquisition of restaurant-reservation system Open Table or its stock's fivefold price increase over the past five years.
Instead, the Priceline chief, attired in blazer, tie-less dress shirt and dress shoes, kept it humble, expressing appreciation for a vibrant travel industry, stressing the importance of staying hungry and insisting that Priceline's relationship with companies like Expedia and TripAdvisor was as much cooperative as it was competitive.
Then, almost as if the travel-tech gods sensed that something had suddenly gone awry and panicked, the JW Marriott's fire alarm went off in the middle of his Q&A session.