Source: WTM

 

This year felt quite special at World Travel Market – the fact that it’s WTM’s 32^nd year is even more of a testament to its continued success. Having an opportunity to see behind the scenes and to better understand all the work that goes into making WTM such a unique show was a great learning experience. I thought I’d run through some of the highlights and signpost for you some of the stories that came out this year with links to blogs where you can find more information on each topic. I also recommend that you have a read of the comments on the WTM Linkedin group about the show with some very positive feedback from first time exhibitors.

 

Attendees for day one were 14% up and overall the show saw a 5% increase in numbers this year. For those that missed it WTM had some special visitors in the form of the future King of Spain and his wife, Danni Minogue  and a few famous footballers from Eastern Europe and renowned UK entrepreneur Hilary Devey, who shared her pearls of wisdom during the WTM’s Business day on November 10^th. The show also welcomed some of the captains of the travel industry from some of the major airlines, cruise and hospitality sectors. The Director of the Fairtrade Organisation Hilary Lamb, helped to provide a real focus on responsible travel.

 

The list of press attending the show was also huge and meant that there was at times almost standing room only in the vast press room as they quietly fired off their reports to far flung corners of the world. The racks of materials displayed for the press were consumed very quickly.

 

Joanna Rigby, a cruise specialist with Thomas Cook, carried off the Pride of Travel Award for exceptional commercial performance and dedication to customer service. The award was presented by entrepreneur Hilary Devey from BBC2’s Dragons’ Den series.

 

These were given to: 

Caio Luis de Cavalho, President of Sao Paolo Tourism… read more

Anna Maria Ruffini, Founder & President of Italy’s chapter of the Green Meeting Industry Council ..read more

RENFE.. read more

Omar Samra of WILD Guanabana … read more

Butlin’s .. read more

The Sandals Foundation… read more

Travel Corporation Canada … read more

The Renaissance Moscow Hotel … read more

Dr Jyotsna Suri of The Lalit Group …read more

Porto Bay Hotels and Resorts .. read more

 

This was a tough challenge as the quality of the stands was so high and you can read about my day as a stand judge here or the full announcement.

Most innovative stand within the Technology Region – Vsourz.com/Virtualmob.co.uk
Highly commended – Bookassist

Best Stand for Interacting with Travel Agents – Slovenian Tourist Board

Best Stand Personnel – Poland 2012 – Football Camp

Best Stand Feature – Kerala

Best Stand for doing Business – Tourism Ireland

Best Stand Design – Costa Rica Tourism Board

Highly commended – The Zanzibar Collection.

 

 

This was the first year that the show had featured the Social Travel Market focused on social media and there was a lot of demand from visitors. Fortunately the show organisers were able to respond with increased capacity to accommodate everyone to minimise the disappointment for those that had not been able to attend the first session.

 

There were some lively and frank discussions on the state of travel blogging, the growth of video and how to host a blogger trip. There was also a great session from Catharine van Dijk at KLM on their social media campaigns. Sophie Collard won a prize for her blog on her visit to the Kazakhstan stand as part of the Silk Road Ch@llenge.
 

The bloggers had good fun finding their way to their party in Shoreditch using Treasure Trail clues which ended with a table football tournament.

 

The WTM 2011 industry report indicates that almost half of the travel industry believes social media will be more important than pay per click advertising (PPC) in 2016. High roaming charges have however been a deterrent to using smart phones abroad.

 

The WTM 2011 Industry Report is worth a read and highlights some of the ways that the slowing of economic growth has led to 33% of UK consumers not taking a holiday at all in 2011 with 59% of those that did taking only one and the rising popularity of all inclusives.

 

The report showed five emerging countries which are growing in popularity and next in line for rapid growth after the BRICS as follows: Sri Lanka, Indonesia, Malaysia, Mexico and Argentina.

 

There were some interesting trends emerging from this report carried out in association with Euromonitor which was unveiled at the show, including:
 

-         UK householders renting out tents in their gardens to Olympic 2012 visitors such as Campinmygarden.

-         the rise of gaming on travel websites such as Ireland Town and NothinglikeAustralia

-         a boom in the use of mobiles in Africa

-         special strategies to attract Chinese visitors whose spend abroad is forecast to rise 20% over the next five years,

-         US mystery trips such as Luxury Link and Nextpedition from Amex.

 

You can also read about some surprising European travel trends from the Phocuswright European team at the WTM session here and some key WTM trends for the last decade here.

 

Source: K Bullock - Speed Networking at WTM2011

 

Two popular sessions were the greatly expanded speed networking session on Monday 7 November (read more here) plus a very popular expert advice clinic on Thursday 10 November which enabled you to book 15 mins with an industry expert.

 

Most sessions were booked solid and it provided a great opportunity to meet a large number of potential clients in three very busy hours. I’ve had some great feedback and am still following up from my sessions and have made some new friends as a result. My one tip for next year would be to book the expert sessions early.

Source: KBullock - WTM Advice Clinic

 

Just before the show I received information on a poll which has been running for a while about which airport has the best approach and thought that as industry players who travel a lot, you might all have your favourite airport approach. One of my personal favourites is the approach into Kathmandu airport which is truly amazing, especially when you can see the Himalayas. However I’m sure you can name others so do vote for your favourite airport approach 2011 as Private Fly are keen to get your view. The poll closes on November 25^th so don’t miss the deadline.

 

Please share your comments, ideas and thoughts with us here.

 

It took a herculean effort to squeeze into the meeting room where delegates were packed in like sardines to hear from Clemont Wong and Florence Kaci from Phocuswright share their latest insights into the travel trends of the French, German and UK visitor. The research was carried out with consumers and travel suppliers in each market in 2011.

 
The key takeouts on online travel were as follows:

 

By 2013 Europe is poised to overtake the US as the place where most online travel booking is going to happen as a proportion of total travel bookings and much of this growth will be driven by the expansion plans of the Online Travel Agents (OTAs) who are moving to Eastern Europe. Players such as Booking.com have expanded rapidly and others are consolidating their power in Europe as we learn that Opodo, Go Voyage and eDreams have joined forces and HRS buys hotel.de.

The use of smartphones is changing how people book online, especially in France and the UK with the higher ownership rates.

As the traditional carriers are challenged by the Middle East airlines on long haul routes and the EU carriers are lobbying the EU to introduce a carbon tax on non EU carriers it’s likely that this sector may see some modest recovery in France, Spain and Scandinavia. UK growth was largely driven by an uplift in business travel, which has also benefited Scandinavia.

 
Growth of rail

The other threats to the airlines are the changes in the rail landscape which will challenge all flights less than 5 hours. We see Deutsche Bahn showing more interest in the UK rail industry and new entrants such as Silver Rail, which are starting to offer more seamless European online rail booking services by harmonising the national distribution systems.

 

The report interestingly featured on the tarnished image of all-inclusive and the consumer’s perceived lack of benefit to local economies.

Their findings forecast strong growth with car hire as players such as Hertz using Facebook to broaden their distribution and reach more eyeballs. There is a trend to shorter pay per hour car hire programmes such as Zipcar and Hertz on demand.

 

The survey focused on the decline in usage of travel agents and mainstream long haul tours in all markets. Speakers focused on how tour operators are purchasing specialist operators such as adventure and school trip operators to provide niche growth opportunities to stem the loss of other mainstream business.

 

This was one of the most surprising findings of the Phocuswright report, given that other research players such as Mintel have claimed that this market it not growing.

Phocuswright quoted players like Homeaway, Airbnb, Wimdu as evidence of the arrival of the vacation rental sector as it becomes easier to book this product with integrated customer reviews and as travellers switch their travel spend to self catering.

 

Blackberry Travel was quoted as a key application that will drive forward greater usage of smart phones for travel booking.

 

The consumer survey in UK, France and Germany also emphasized that online travel would be driven by 18-34 year olds. However there were words of caution about future travel intentions in the UK as a quarter of those interviewed were uncertain about their travel plans for 2012. All markets surveyed showed a trend to take a smaller number of trips with longer stays and the French and German travellers were the most optimistic about their future spend with more than a third of French showing an interest in non EU long haul travel.

 

The survey showed a marked decline in the usage of destination sites as travellers relied more on the travel content of review sites such as Trip Advisor and the OTA sites for their information. This was surprising given the recent press criticism about the integrity of Trip Advisor reviews. This indicates that tourist boards will have to innovate and provide richer content and user generated content to compete with their new rivals.

 

Germany was seen as the least social media savvy market in Europe where it’s seen mostly as a business tool for networking with colleagues. However in the UK, Facebook usage reached 66% and it’s used much more in a social context to network with friends.

 

The speakers were asked for their view on the most likely non EU destinations to be visited which were as follows:

French – Francophile Africa and Asia

Germans - SE Asia, China and India

 

For those intrepid travellers that may already know the Silk Road route, it has been famous for centuries as the 12,000 km trade route and was recorded back in 100BC when a Chinese expedition set off West to purchases horses in Central Asia, where they learned that silk was highly prized in the bazaars. UNWTO revived the Silk Road as a tourism route and project in 1993 which includes 25 countries.

There were 20 bloggers who signed up for the Silk Road Ch@llenge which involved going to visit the stands at World Travel Market (WTM) of five of these countries on the Silk Road: Albania, Armenia,Azerbaijan, Georgia and Kazakhstan.  I opted to visit the stands of the first four of these countries and wanted to know the top three reasons why I should visit. I received the friendliest welcome from the Georgia stand who took the time to explain some of the many things I could do during my stay. I explained my knowledge of the country was limited but I remembered it had some great singers and delicious breads based in part on a friend who used to sing in a Georgian choir in London. It appears that they have put aside their differences with Russia and are keen to build their tourism industry.

 

I learned that the country has a reputation for great wine as they have over 547 different types of grape and have some of the oldest vineyards anywhere and they offer wine tours to the wine region of Kakheti and Sighnaghi. It also has one of the highest mountains in Europe at 5,400m and you can climb it although it’s quite technical so you need some crampons and good climbing gear. The other big draw for jazz aficionados is that it has two big jazz festivals, one on the coast at Batumi in June/July,  a 6 hour drive from the capital Tbilisi, which also has a jazz festival in September/October time. There are also spa resorts at Tskaltubo and Borjomi. Georgia has 12 national parks for trekking, kayaking, mountain biking and even canyoning and late Spring and late Summer are recommended times to visit. There are direct flights from Heathrow to Tbilisi with BMI and it takes about 8 hours with a stop in Azerbaijan. It’s definitely going on my list for a future visit.  

 

I also visited the Armenia stand and persuaded Christina to share some information on the country’s main attractions. The landscapes, history, food and hospitality were the first things mentioned and she recommended a visit during May-June or during September-October. There are cultural concerts in late Summer with films, classical concerts and opera and they have a famous Gregorian Christian ceremony called the blowing of the candles and a foot washing ceremony.

 

The one attraction that definitely appealed was the longest cable car in the world which is over 5km long and takes one and a half hours to reach a monastery and appeared to go through a stunning gorge. The country is a bit easier to reach from London and takes 5 hours from Heathrow on a direct daily flight with BMI to the capital of Yerevan. Christina was quick to tell me that the government does not provide any support to their tourism industry, although they had a very attractive stand with some stunning pictures of Mount Arafat and the surrounding countryside. This could be a contender for a trip next year during our special Jubilee public holiday around  4th and 5th June 2012.

 

I also dropped by the Azerbaijan stand and was again encouraged to visit to see some of their old petroglyphs and rock paintings at Gobustan, enjoy their hospitality and traditional music and handicrafts. This country is famous for hunting and fishing in the Caspian Sea. The wine and the pomegranate festivals were also mentioned and I was given a very colourful comprehensive guide on why I should even live and work in Azerbaijan. BMI offers 5 hour flights from Heathrow to their capital Baku and March-April and September-October were recommended as good months to come for a visit.

 

The last stand of Albania had some stunning photos as a backdrop and I spent some time with Andi to discover that the top three attractions of this country are the cultural heritage, its nature and the fact that it’s low cost. You can apparently enjoy 3-4 star hotels for 60-70 euros. Again Spring and Autumn were recommended as the best time to visit and it has 3 UNESCO heritage sites including the ancient city of Butrint, and the orthodox old churches of Korce. Albania has 15 national parks for hiking and 12 days were recommended for a visit to see all the sights. The country has a lot of tourists from Kosovo, Macedonia and Montenegro who come for their “sun and sea product” but Andi recommended the following itinerary for a much more varied trip Tirana – Berat, Gjrokastra, Sarande, Butrint (with short ferry hop to Corfu) the Ionian cost, Shkoder and Korce. Albania can be reached in 4 hours 20 minutes from Stansted to Tirana with Belleair.

 

The winning blogger was Sophie Collard who blogs at www.sophieontrack.com. She visited all of the five stands but chose to write about an encounter on the Kazakhstan stand. She sampled some horse meat delicacies, even shooting a short video to accompany her post, and met “two buff guys” in local dress from the country. You can read about her Silk Road Ch@llenge here.

 

This session on how to do good video blogging included some key video experts such as Lisa Lubin from LLMedia, Matt Carroll from Media Ark and Julie Daniels from NutshellVideo.co.uk.

 

Matt kicked off the session with a summary of our addiction to watching videos as at June 2011, 26 million of us watched a staggering 2.3billion videos online. The amount spent on videos has doubled in the past year to £45 million. Smartphones and ipads have driven this consumption of video anytime, anywhere.

 

Video is seen as one of the best ways to:

- showcase destinations

- bring experiences to life

- introduce local characters and share what makes a place special.

 

Matt has also created a number of bespoke channels for clients and shared with us a compelling video as a portfolio of his work, including a clip from a time when a storm actually wrecked the car they were sitting in, when trying to do some filming.

 

 

TV producer Lisa Lubin then gave us her view as someone welding old school journalism with new media. Her view was that the most important thing is your story and the human element. She sees video as visual story telling. In her opinion you can often only see emotion in video. You are taking your viewer there and creating a human response.

 

Lisa shared some of her video work taken during her round the world trip and other travel adventures. They captured some of the moments, when she had, like Matt, battled with the elements.

 

The audience had a lot of questions about cost which appears to be one of the major stumbling blocks for travel clients. Matt says he can do a 2-3 minute professional video for less than £3,000. However it was recognised that much of the cost has to cover the significant editing costs to get the highest sound and image quality. The view of the video experts was that you cannot compromise on sound quality as viewers are less forgiving of poor sound quality, than of image quality.

 

An audience member from Intercontinental said they are now using videos on their site and have generated 5 million hits from them and are now looking at optimising them for the ipad. He was a firm believer in making sure you hashtag your videos, optimise them with transcripts, so the search engines can find them, and making it easy for your top influencers to retweet your video content. 

One video blogger had been invited to a mini film festival in Puerto Rico which was sponsored by the local tourist board. They invited five video bloggers to cover the festival and awarded a prize to the best coverage. The video blogs provided significant awareness for Puerto Rico. Traditional media and news sites are often hungry for video content so this can be a good way to generate it.   

 

One audience member was part of an Association of Croatian travel agencies who invited young people (especially students) to make short videos about Croatia. They created lots of great videos about the country which will now be used on their new website. The project also enabled young people to appreciate their own country’s heritage and attractions, which they were previously not familiar with.

 

Another project discussed included the Austrian tourist board working with Matt to create a total of 20 videos focused on promoting the country as a summer destination rather than a winter destination. Following this a discussion ensued about the Old Spice campaign which provided individual responses by video and was very successful.

 

 

Top tips on this topic included:

-         Be yourself and talk to the camera as if you’re talking to a friend.

-         Practice ahead of time

-         Avoid “talking head syndrome”

-         Let the person being interviewed tell the story.

-     Start talking five minutes beforehand and continue chatting

-     Do not mark the transition to the start of your filming so your subject stays relaxed.

 

 

Julie’s talk focused on top tips regarding video equipment.

 

Julie shared her top tips on the equipment she would recommend to use for video including the Flip Ultra from Cisco  (£80-100) which is ceasing production but is still available.

 

She also recommended the KodakZI8 as you can attach an external microphone to it as sound quality is so important and the Canon5Dmark2 which has a sister camera the 7D which is more expensive, but is waterproof.

 

She recommended specialists such as shure.co.uk for lenses (cost around £100 for standard ones) and because they sell every type of microphone and have a good advice section. Julie uses music on her video to help to bring immediacy and mood.

 

Julie uses final Cut Pro, a professional editing system but explained that you can get a lower cost version for about £185 for a Mac. She mentioned that Adobe makes an editing system and Avid studio for PC and a Mac.

She talked about the photographer’s rule of lower thirds but was sadly unable to illustrate her points due to some technical issues. Principally her advice was don’t just put the person in the centre of the image.

 

She also mentioned sites for royalty free music such as royaltyfreemusic.com.

 

Julie’s top tips were to keep your videos short (1-2 minutes maximum). She also recommended bloggers to get some basic training and a crash course on how to edit and how to hold a camera.

 

There was a lively exchange with the audience as they contributed their experiences and a rather heated discussion with a video blogger as to why the travel industry will not pay for video blogging. This topic merits some more exploration as a key barrier to the growth of video in travel is a perception that it’s too expensive.

 

Please share your comments and top tips below on this hot topic.

 

It was hard to predict there was going to be so much demand for social media learning at the World Travel Market (WTM) so for the first session there were more people queuing up than could fit in the small room allocated to the session. Fortunately WTM came to the rescue and the capacity was doubled enabling more to squeeze in to enjoy the social media sessions in the North Hall rooms.

 

Mark Frary explained how Social Travel Market came about as a result of an idea in a pub some time ago with veteran Sunday Times online travel writer Steve Keenan. As a couple of “old school hacks” they determined that it was a case of “evolve or die”.

 

The session kicked off with a great video cartoon to draw home the point that sometimes social media people speak a different language to the rest of mankind. The next two days of the social travel market are aimed to demystify social media and thus help you to find out if you know your bit.lys from your RTs. Social media is quite simply an easy way for people to share stuff and the key is to look at how you can use it to add value to your customer relationships.

The first session included Catharine van Dijk who has one of the longest job titles in the industry as Corporate Communications Manager Reputation & Content Social Media. She explained how they had developed their social media activity.

 How KLM got started in social media

 

KLM started monitoring online conversations involving their brand in November 2009 and opened a Twitter account and started a blog pilot. They did not involve the board at this stage as they were only doing a pilot. In February 2010 they started a Facebook campaign and then the Iceland volcano erupted in April 2010 with the subsequent ash cloud and the closure of European airspace and this had a huge impact on the business.

 

In October 2010 KLM introduced their social media hub with 24/7 service with a multi-disciplinary team.

 

KLM has three pillars to their social media strategy which includes

1. Captivate

2. Involve

3. Engage

 

This in turn drove action plans regarding Reputation, Commercial and Service.

 

KLM focused on developing the right storylines, customer relevance & value, metrics to measure success, and processes for issue management and dialogue.

 

Authentic and open dialogue are key to their social media offering and their call centre take over the calls after office hours to provide their 24/7 service.

 

For one day they involved 5-600 of colleagues in a campaign to promote their social media activity and their aim to answer every tweet and Facebook post. They have active listening and 2 way conversations as a central aspect of their social media and strive to answer customers within one hour.

 

KLM has several rules as follows:
 

- embrace feedback even when negative.

- respect privacy – do not share info publicly

- show empathy

- stay in control, don’t argue.

- be friendly, correct and businesslike.

 

Their plan involves working together and creating inspiring content.

 

They have an editorial team which creates planned and unplanned social media content. They use old pictures of KLM from their archive in their posts which generates interest and retweets. They ask their fans to share all the time and have created the hashtag #KLMGeek

 

They showed a video of their “KLM Surprise” Campaign team which was extremely successful in generating social media coverage and won the Simplifying Social Media award in Amsterdam a couple of weeks ago.

 

They asked their staff to research a sample of their customers online using social media and they had to find them at the airport to give each customer a suitable gift based on their social profile and interests. They captured their response on video and gave out a total of 28 gifts which created over 100,000 posts over a 3 week period as the KLM customers shared their experience on social media. The campaign showed the viral impact of doing something personal to engage with customers and is a great example of an integrated offline and online campaign.

 

 

Fans were asked to upload their picture with an inspirational message – if they got 3000 images KLM agreed they would be used to decorate a plane which is still flying on their routes.

 

There are 30,000 staff in KLM and the airline does not allow all staff to post or tweet and ran an internal campaign to raise awareness of the impact that negligent social media activity can have on the brand. They created an educational video for staff to ensure they think before they post.

 

KLM now has 350,000 Twitter followers and over 200,000 Facebook fans and has

just opened a business account on Google+.

 

In response to questions Catharine confirmed that they work with small agencies to organise and produce the campaigns but try to do a lot of the work in house.

 

There was a good question related to whether KLM put a business case together. They did not have a business case but do log every question in Salesforce. They are surprisingly still not currently tracking ROI.

 

Given the challenge of managing multi lingual social pages, they only tweet in English and provide servicing in Dutch and English.  A local office will send a translation if the question is in another language.

 

Despite the campaigns Catharine admits that some staff still don’t understand why they are doing social media.