I spoke to Sue Crossman, Director of the Edinburgh based Tourism Innovation Group, last week about the forthcoming Tourism Innovation Day and the work the Tourism Innovation Group (TiG) is doing.
For those of you who are not aware of TiG, it is a Scottish tourism industry body led by the private sector dedicated to improving the quality of the Scottish tourism sector though innovation.
What this means at a practical level is that TiG stimulates, facilitates and leads debate on how Scotland’s tourism operators can improve their offering – whether that is demonstrating to an industry the importance of ‘green tourism’ or in showing operators practical ways to process customers using new technology.
As part of that ongoing process, Tourism Innovation Day is TiG’s yearly showcase event – with the theme this year being Technology and Tourism.
I think there is a recognition in the Scottish Tourism industry that many businesses are not taking full advantage of tools that could enhance their business. And for Sue, this is an important reason to come to Tourism Innovation Day:
“There’s a low uptake of new approaches in tourism – whether that be in new products or innovative processes and the Tourism Innovation Day should be a interactive showcase for the wider tourism community to learn why this stuff is important and how it can change their business.”
But Sue also stressed that this wasn’t just a case of seeing the latest gizmos, “I would like to think it will help Scotland’s tourism sector become more effective in telling its story as well as making it easier to access the great products.”
We also discussed how Tourism Innovation Day at Hampden Park is itself taking an innovative approach in that the old conference format of a series of sequential speakers has been played around with. There will now be sofa discussions with industry leaders and experts and, more importantly, time within those sessions when the audience is encouraged to approach the speakers and experts for informal chats and to really pick their brains.
Speaking as an interview host for one of the streams, this approach seems both exciting and a little nerve-wracking – possibly as all good innovation should be!
There will be four of these ‘expert’ streams – Look & Book, On the Ground, Feedback & Research, and Returners and Business Systems. Each will have around 6 experts as well as a main speaker on hand. The aim is to get everyone attending each of the sessions at some point in the day – although I think Sue is threatening to mark the end of each session by borrowing one of Hampden Park’s referee whistle. Main speakers this year will include Ben Vinod, Chief Innovator for brands including lastminute.com, Holiday Autos and travel community IgoUgo.
As well as me hosting sessions, Tracking Tourism’s Vicky Brock will also be one of the experts on hand to speak about new media and research opportunities in the Feedback and Research stream. We’ll both be blogging from the event so if you are approached by someone with a video camera on the day, have a good memorable quote ready for us!
Booking details of the Tourism Innovation Day on 28th February can be found here and, if any of you can make it, I would urge you to attend a great day out.
Finally, Scottish tourism providers are invited to contribute to our 2008 Scottish Tourism e-Business Survey at http://www.scottishtourismsurvey.com/ – it would be great if we can get a good sample in advance of Tourism Innovation Day to really inform the debate.
View our Tourism Innovation Day preview video interviews
(Videos will open in a new window)
- Robin Worsnop, Chairman of the Tourism Innovation Group, on why the Tourism Innovation Day is a must
- Tourism Innovation Day host Stephen Budd talks about why customer feedback is important for tourism businesses
- TrackingTourism’s Stephen Budd talks about the Feedback and Research workshop sessions he will be hosting, featuring speaker Malcolm Roughead.
- Tourism Innovation Day exemplar, Gilbert Summers of ExtramileScotland talks about positive user reviews
This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 12th, 2008 at 1:17 pm and is filed under Conference learnings, Industry interview. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.