Opportunity, Apocalypse and Twitter
The Tracking Tourism team is currently in Berlin attending ITB and, courtesy of PhoCusWright, the conference organizers, attending the PhoCusWright@ITB conference and Bloggers Summit. All in all, a fantastic chance to meet with the great and good of travel and analyse where the industry is, where it is going and what the heck can be done about it.
And what a day one it has been – social media optimism, mobile as critical to business strategy, a new word “moxie” for the vocabulary – oh, and a dash of economic apocalypse.
We’ll have a series of posts over the next few days looking in detail at some of these themes, but we thought we would kick off with a quick report from the opening day, including the Bloggers Summit part of the conference.
Wise words from Philip C Wolf
The briefing from PhoCusWright’s CEO, Philip C Wolf, is always a highlight for me, and this year was no exception. With a self-confessed “keen sense of what’s hot and what’s not” he proclaimed 2009 as the year of 4 Ms:
- Money - not just lack of it, but also in terms of low interest rates and “bottom feeding” investors
- Media - “its all rough and tumble right now” with pay per click and user generated media really impacting travel distribution models.
- Mobile - “2009 is the year when mobile platforms become a strategic business imperative” (quote of the day in my opinion!)
- Moxie - (for readers outside of North America: verve, pep, know how and guts). The business acumen to “be comfortable swimming against the tide”
As Philip explained, it takes lots of moxie to control costs in the operating plan, while simultaneously investing in capital expenditures/innovation. For if companies only play defence then at best they may preserve their business entity – “but what if you work really hard to preserve something that is out of sync when the tide starts rising?”
Philip was careful not to dwell on bleak economic scenarios. His focus was primarily on identifying opportunity and “the big rewards for gutsy innovation”. He explained the signals of recovery that his analysts are looking out for.
The views at the ITB Convention Future Day was both more apocalyptic while actually reinforcing some of Philip’s sentiments.
You don’t even want to hear the worst case scenario…
I guess “Tourism in Times of the Global Financial Crisis” was never going to be uplifting. In the course of his introduction, Professor Max Otte, author of “The Crash Comes” managed to depress the audience into shell-shocked wide-eyedness with promises that “there are lots of bombs still to go off”, that the global banking system is technically insolvent and that in the worst case scenario of global depression “all bets are off“.
Professor Lipman of the UNWTO tried to raise spirits but somehow “as the economy goes so goes tourism” didn’t achieve the desired bounce. He did however express the goal to get tourism on the table as part of the G20 stimulus package discussions, due to its critical role in two way trade.
Some good news to be had the fact that a lot of the fundamental shifts in responding to the customer in travel have already been underway for some time. Meaning those who have already invested in understanding what the customer wants and building business models that enable them to deliver on that are in a stronger position. But as Dr Auliana Poon of Tourism Intelligence International warned:
“Customers have long memories… destinations and companies not on track with what the customer wants will fall by the wayside… customers are deciding”.
People still want to travel – I loved Dr Dieter Semnelrioth of the TUI’s analogy that “25 million Germans are sitting on their packed luggage.” But the early bird offers are not working, bookings are down – operators may move straight to last minute deals, eroding margins. As we have heard previously, customers are not trading out completely, but they are trading typically down (though it is the middle ground, 3 stars, feeling the most pain).
“Transformative” was used a little too much for comfort – the point being that there remain opportunities and that to quote Dr Poon “this recession will force us to live differently and travel differently and travel differently.” But transformative sounds kind of apocalyptic to me – after all, isn’t transformative what they said about the Black Death?
However, the themes mentioned at the PhoCusWright session earlier – particularly Moxie and Money – also made an appearance at an earlier presentation by Rolf Frietag, delivering the results of the largest worldwide travel survey in the form of the ITB World Travel Trends Report.
Put simply, if you have the guts to invest in the present climate, then there are great opportunities – construction costs and interest rates are low but you’ve got to be able to ride out a recession potentially lasting until late 2012.
I (Vicky) have lots more notes from this session, with each sound bite more depressing than the last – but for all our sakes I will handover to Stephen and the cheerier travel bloggers and their discussions on social media in tourism and travel.
The Top Social Media Trends for Travel and Tourism
The bloggers workshop sessions explored what blogging folk from within the industry believe are the top social media trends for travel and tourism.
Asked to choose a main theme for the coming year, the panelists opted for:
* More Twitter
* Better understanding how to use social media
* Increased use of social media as a PR tool
* More Twitter
* Employing a social media guy
These issues were then put before the audience to vote on what they thought of these prognostications. Despite the endorsement of Twitter from the panel, I seemed to detect a degree of skepticism in the hall and Twitter got lowest audience votes on key trends – suggesting perhaps that people feel the need to drive philosophy change and strategies, rather than simply focus on specific applications.
The discussions moved onto practical applications of social media within travel organisations. Klaus Hildebrandt reminded the audience that businesses didn’t used to be able to see how the web could deliver revenue – they finally saw that it comes with investment and effort. To get buy in to social media is to highlight the business cases, the good examples of how to add this to strategy.
Kevin May of Travolution cited the Queensland Dream Job as the perfect example of an integrated destination campaign using both traditional PR and social media marketing.
Stephen Joyce summarized the workshops with the sensible conclusion that “your customers are talking about you anyway. How are you, as leaders in your organisation, going to step into the conversation in the most meaningful way?”
However, while PhoCusWright is following a deliberate policy here of focusing on the can-do in the programming of the conference on the basis that wallowing in gloom isn’t really going to help any of us, I think there is still a world represented here at this conference that is a) frightened at what’s to come and b) has bigger fish to fry than considering the best way to use Twitter.
As a Twittersceptic (note not a Twitter-phobe!), I thought the more practical suggestions from the panel included:
- The role of mobiles will increase (more on this in a coming post)
- Using 2.0 for PR in a more savvy way and integrating this messaging with traditional forms of PR will grow
- Feedback 2.0 – tourism providers might start to listen to what their customers are saying across multiple channels.
- Context rather than content will become important – you need to get to the real info you want, not wade through interminable irrelevant guff.
- ‘We must do our homework’ – Companies must take a hard look to define what goals they want to reach, what target groups do we want to reach?
- Traditional metrics for online activity are inadequate for measuring social media.
- New metrics such as ‘volume of mentions’ will become important in judging success.
We look forward to tomorrow’s PhoCusWright@ITB09 conference.
- Joint post by Vicky and Stephen
This entry was posted on Thursday, March 12th, 2009 at 9:08 am and is filed under Conference learnings, Future trends, Opinion, Tourism blogging. 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.