eTourism - a look into the Future!

On 29th April 2008 South West Tourism hosted an event funded by the South West Regional Development Agency entitled eTourism – A look into the Future!

The purpose of this event was to pull together all tourism stakeholders and to look into the innovations in online technologies and infrastructure to enable us as Destinations, Destination Management Organisation’s and Regional Tourist Boards to further increase the awareness of what we offer visitors.

I hosted and facilitated the event and also decided to film the event so that the messages being presentetd could be re-heared by delegqates and also spread to a much wider audience to include those that weren;t abel to attend.

All the videos can be accessed here: www.swtourism.co.uk/etourism.

The videos are unqiue in teh way that not only do they film the rpesenter then all diaplys the slides as the rpesenter talks through their presentation. This servcie was provided by 2.0 Ltd - check out their website for more info.

Tourism Marketing Dynamics!

Last Wednesday I attended the Tourism Marketing Dynamics event at Bournemouth University. The event was organised by the Tourism Society in association with South West Tourism.

The event consisted of academic and practical presentations. I picked out a couple of interesting pointws which were:

- We must create a space for consumers to share their experiences
This focussing around the social networking world and forums, allowing our consumers an area to discuss and share ideas, expereinces on their trips.

- The Consumer when booking is looking for security and safety
With all the terroer and natural disatsers around the world, our consumers are looking to have a holiday where they feel safe and secure, if we can provide this we must shout about it - obviously subtly!

The agenda and presentations form the day can be downloaded from the Tourism Society website.

Credit crunch starting to bite?

There have been some conflicting reports over the past few weeks with regards to some research indicating that holiday bookings, with the most recent from Savebuckets.com (online comparison shopping service) indicating a 1 in 5 people have been forced to cancel their holiday; while Kayak.co.uk recently suggested rather than give up their holiday consumers are favouring cutting back on luxuries.

Personally I think this has some relation to the sustainability agenda where people happily will switch-off their standby buttons, recycle and maybe even use more public transport, but when it comes to a holiday (something they have worked hard all year for!) they don't think twice about the environment - I think the same goes for holiday bookings and I would encline to agree with Kayaks finding that we are willing to reduce our monthly spend to ensure we can get that annual holiday, something we have worked all year hard for and deserve!

Would welcome your thoughts on how bookings are going......