Tracking Tourism: The Tourism Research Blog Archive for the ‘Conference learnings’ Category

How one online company found that small numbers of customer problems were often the tips of large icebergs…and turned this insight around to improve conversions and sales

I thought I would share with you one insight from the eMetrics Summit about how one travel sector company used feedback mechanisms to identify seemingly small problems…and then discovered that these were not isolated incidents but issues affecting appreciable numbers of customers each day, resulting in avoidable loses.

The company is a major Online Travel Agent dealing with a huge number of global transactions and queries each day. Their site has tools that capture (anonymously) all consumer sessions on the site so, if there is a problem, they can work to find out exactly what was going wrong in that specific instance.

In practice they have two big ways of capturing customer interaction data on site. The first is by offering the customer the ability to pass comment throughout the booking process. Therefore, if my valid UK address was not being accepted at the booking page, then I could leave a note to the site owners to do something about this.

The second way of capturing data is by effectively recording each user session for playback. The point of this is to see how the customer actually got to the position they did - something that becomes vital in those situations when the site really shouldn’t act in that way and an action seems to be failing for no apparent reason.

With this dual approach, when an issue was identified the OTA was able to define some parameters that allowed them to use all the data of previously recorded sessions to see whether other customers had also experienced similar problems but had not complained about it. Rather they had simply walked away from the site and possibly taken their business elsewhere.

What they discovered was that, in some cases, one or two people complaining were often the tip of the iceberg and that one small issue was in fact potentially affecting literally hundreds of customers. The company declined to offer figures but it is easy to imagine that if the average transaction was, say, a couple of hundred dollars, then this apparently insignificant issues would soon add up to serious money over the year.

By using the same analysis techniques that led them to discover the size of the problem, the company was able to monitor whether the problem was still occurring after a fix or whether its incidence had dropped to zero or acceptable levels.

So what?

We can’t all afford the kind of systems that this company was using but the business approach they took is available to everyone and I would summarize the insights as follows:

• Always take customer comments seriously and probably indicative of a larger silent body of suffering customers
• Have systems that allow these comments to be captured
• See if you can work out how many other customers this might be affecting
• Have a system that allows you to work out what the impact is on your bottom line - this will either help you to prioritize next steps or present a convincing case to your boss if larger steps need to be taken
• Use your Research RADAR to ensure that the problem has been solved – if you are still seeing it occurring, then it hasn’t been fixed. If you don’t look to see whether it is still occurring, then you won’t know whether it has been fixed or not.

As an aside, the company this post is about stated that anything written about them had to be passed through their PR department. I think this approach is a little heavy handed and not one I’m happy to participate in. I also sensed that their heavy handedness might continue had I gone down the compliant route and, frankly, that’s not what this blog is about. Which is a pity because I think they have a great story to tell but I’m afraid they will remain anonymous is in this instance.

Thoughts from the San Francisco eMetrics Marketing Optimization Summit

With my jet lag subsiding a little and my brain still buzzing with ideas overload, I thought I’d share with you some of the insights that I took out of last week’s eMetrics Summit, the world’s foremost gathering of people working in online measurement and optimisation.

This was the year that qualitative research came to the San Francisco conference - a clear signal that businesses are beginning to try and understand the hearts and minds of their customers as they optimize their online channel, as well as their click tracks.

For me, this was an exciting and overdue development, as I think it signals that the online sector is maturing to the point that it is starting to look at 360 degree view of the customer experience - and the business implications of this.

Tom Davenport, the conference’s first keynote speaker and author of “Competing on Analytics: The New Science of Winning” , demonstrated how the highest performing enterprises are building their competitive strategies around data-driven insights. He cited the travel and leisure examples of Marriott and Harrah’s Casinos who are using analytics, data modelling and deep research to identify their most profitable customers, build innovative pricing models, manage customer experience and identify the true drivers of financial performance.

And as conference chair Jim Sterne explained in his wrap up, we’re passing the point of having to persuade the leading businesses why to measure their effectiveness online, because these firms are now using analytics more smartly than ever before and are “looking over the horizon at real competitive advantage”.

My top three picks

My top three practical insights from eMetrics were all qualitative in flavour and all different, but obtainable, examples of how so companies are tackling those fuzzy questions of “Why?” and “How do people think/feel..?”

1. Jakob Nielsen, paying attention to user behaviour in the moment

It was terrific to finally see usability guru Jakob Nielsen speak. I’m a great fan of his articles (you can read more at useit.com) and he inspired the user research approach we use in Highland Business Research (as described in this earlier Tracking Tourism post).

In his presentation Jakob made great use of video of accompanied surfs/user testing interviews to demonstrate the frustration and confusion people encounter as they negotiate their way through websites. He highlighted the importance when conducting user research of paying more attention to what visitors are doing, than what they’re saying - as users missed error messages, failed to find key information and physically recoiled from unexpected music and unskippable videos.

He made the observation that people may think they’ve successfully completed their task, even when they’ve failed (for example, by paying the wrong bill, failing to complete a transaction, missing an error message) - which is why seeing people’s behaviour in the moment has more practical value than self-reported data.

Another critical point from his presentation was the important of starting your visitor insight/user testing process with no preconceptions about the nature of the problems - because “the thing where people think the problem is, is often not where it is at all”. Instead of diving into what you think the problem is, simply get users to undertake the top five tasks on your site.

Just how relevant is this to travel and tourism businesses? Personally, if I could only do one type of online research with clients websites, I’d choose these accompanied surfs that Jakob demonstrated in his videos. The following quote is an excerpt from a research session in which a user booked a flight using his preferred airline, then some competitor sites - I hope you see what I mean:

“Southwest airlines? Best website ever. Other airlines just don’t get it…I quit taking other flights from other airlines because these guys get it right.
[Goes to another airline site]
Do I want to choose on price, flexible dates, schedule? They can just $*!*? off with that… They want to know where San Diego is? That’s just $*!*?… There are too many choices, I haven’t used this airlines site in years but it is still remarkably poor - who has the time for that? I won’t fly this airline, its web site is junk!”

Jakob’s presentation was packed with clear evidence that people aren’t going to work round a bad website, they’re simply going to take their business elsewhere!

2. Ebay, making themselves at home in your home

Elissa Darnell, Director of User Experience Research at ebay, did a great presentation on how they use a blend of offline and online research techniques to go back to the basics of who the user is, what they do and how ebay can deliver them the best possible experience.

Elissa talked in depth about a number of the techniques they use to get closer to customers and optimize their site experience accordingly, but I’ll just highlight two:

Follow homes - just like some offline firms have done for years, ebay are following their customers into their homes to observe them using the site in their normal way and in their normal environment (with all the distractions that come with that). Using a video camera and taking notes, they gain valuable directional, qualitative information that they can combine with their number based information sources.

Its not just the research team that take part, staff from right across the company - from CFO & CEO to developers and service reps - are taken into their customer’s own context, to learn for themselves that critical lesson of “we are not our customer.” The insights they glean from this regular follow home process means they learn things about their user’s needs and behaviours that they would not otherwise even think to ask about. They also gain direction on where they made need to focus further testing and development.

Cheap paper based user testing - before pages are even developed, ebay conduct quick and dirty user testing based on rough paper mock-ups of what the page might be like. The tester is asked to use their finger as the mouse and indicate where they might go on the page and what information they might expect to find as a result.

They can quickly go through rapid generations of the paper tests, quickly and cheaply, before ever spending money on software engineering. Jakob Nielson described the cost savings of this approach as being around 100 times cheaper than testing actual pages. So clearly ebay are using tactical pre-development testing make sure they get maximum user focus for their money.

3. Pay Pal, quantifying the qualitative

Pay Pal, the online payments provider, receives thousands of open comments each week from its user feedback pages. More than one person can manually react to and keep in their head at any time.

So their challenge (one I think many tourism businesses can relate to) is how do you quantify and semi-automate the process of analysing these open comments, so that you wring maximum value out of the feedback?

Step one, is they have applied a Google search engine tool to the data and made it available to internal staff to search through as they wish. This means that managers can at least get an overview of what is being said about specific interests (and in what volume) on a regular basis. The advantage is no training burden and no resourcing of the data analysis.

Step two, they have also semi-automated the process of categorising their comments, by bundling like comment types (through an in-house natural n-gram language statistical process). Once bundled into like themes (without needing to pre-develop a naming structure) they can get the comments out to all the right people to read, on a two weekly basis.

Step 3, now they are working out a system that automatically triggers alerts as new bundles of comment types emerge, or certain types of comments exceed their acceptable threshold.

It may sound complicated, but essentially with the help of a good statistician, they have built a simple system in-house that achieves most of their needs, but avoids using a highly expensive Meaning Based Computing system like Autonomy.

And finally…

As a final conference highlight (at least from my perspective!) - both Stephen & I were pleased to present at eMetrics this year (a kind of Highland Business Research double bill).

I was also honoured to be elected to join Web Analytics Association board of directors. So thank you very much to those WAA members that voted for me and I look forward to helping drive the organisation forward for the benefit of members and the web analytics industry worldwide.

It has been said again and again. Your competition is not the business next door. Your competition is not the next town or the next region. Your direct competition is are the other destinations (and other distractions) all over the world that could cause your prospective visitor to never even arrive on your shores, yet alone at your doors.

But sometimes, pictures speak louder than words.

This week at ITB the world’s tourism destinations were on display. An attractive, dizzying whirl of infinite travel possibilities, all chasing a finite visitor spend.

So take a glimpse at your competition.

Which destinations really stood out?

India was again incredibly impressive. I have previously posted here about the Incredible India campaign and I am a big fan of the marketing and strategic efforts being made by India to dramatically grow its inbound tourism. Those efforts were in full flow at ITB and business was clearly being done.

The efforts seem to be paying off - compared to 2006, foreign tourists earnings grew 33.8%, with 2006 having previously registered a growth of 19.2% over 2005 (more facts and figures here). As hosts of the 2010 Commonwealth Games and with an aggressive tourism growth strategy in place, it seems likely that growth will continue.

Poland – not surprisingly given its geographic proximity to Germany, Poland’s presence at ITB was extensive and compelling. With dramatic landscapes, historic buildings and deep culture it represents an interesting potential competitor to Scotland. Poland also now has an extensive expatriate population working across the EU and beyond, who are effectively prospective return visitors (just as the Scottish and Indian Diaspora represent prime targets in their “home” markets).

Euromonitor predicts the hosting of Euro 2012 will be a significant development factor for Poland’s tourism industry: “This third largest sports competition in the world will intensively impact the development of such sectors as hotels, foodservice and transportation. Rough estimates are that about EUR50 billion will be spent in the coming years to ensure that the complete infrastructure is in place for this large event.”

The Faroe Islands – now with a direct flight from London’s Stansted Airport, Faroe is in its own words “bypassing Shetland” where the visitors from London previously used to land. Like Shetland, its remoteness is an attraction, but it comes at the price of high transportation costs (though it does not regard itself as being as expensive as Iceland, for example). Also like Scotland’s Northern Isles, the Faroe Islands lead on the natural environment and historic culture and it is focussing product development on areas like cycling, hiking, seabirds, diving and fishing.

Scandinavia – sited right next to the UK stand (embracing an individual presence for Scotland, Wales, England and London) was the united front of Scandinavia. Featuring Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden, the Scandinavian group has some of the strongest destinations for natural beauty, environmental and eco-tourism. Most of the group are experiencing fairly consistent tourism growth.

Like parts of Scotland, some of Scandinavia suffers from extreme seasonality in its tourism, with summer the most popular time to visit. Iceland, according to Euromonitor, has managed to curtail this somewhat in the past few years with strategies to attract convention and incentive travellers as well as those looking for a city break. Evidence suggests it is en route to becoming a major destination.

So, how does a destination compete with the rest of the world?

To get insight into this I’d recommend checking out the Country Brand Index research by FutureBrand. This highly useful and in-depth annual research ranks key tourism destinations according to factors such as assets, reputation, experiences and perceptions.

Australia leads the overall country brand index. India was number 1 for authenticity in the 2006 country brand index, with New Zealand leading in 2007 (all extremely strongly marketed destinations). Sweden topped the environmental rankings in 2007, with Croatia named as rising star. (Poland also appears in the top 10 places on their way to becoming major destinations).

In their 2006 report, FutureBrand explained:

“A country’s ability to be authentic, deliver authentic and communicate authentic is probably one of its biggest destination advantages today.”

“People want to experience the true essence of a different place. This is the magic of a country brand.”

But in such a competitive market, destinations are struggling.

“Within the sea of print collateral, few country brands stand out. In addition to having similar language and tone, many ads and brochures share a similar look and feel. In fear of narrow-casting or focusing on one core asset, many countries go in the reverse direction and link to sweeping and generic words like “truly” or “amazing.” They feature hero shots of sky, beach and other stereotypical images of “paradise” and “culture,” employing a wide palette of bold colors. This attempt to grab consumers and invite them to think about vacationing as the realization of dream, discovery and relaxation has become undifferentiated in a saturated marketplace.”

The destinations I highlighted above have not made this mistake (nor do other leading destinations, including in my opinion Scotland). They have a strong sense of identity and authenticity and they focus on the core values at the heart of the brand.

Many of Euromonitor’s top 150 city destinations worldwide, which account for 27% of the global inbound tourism in terms of arrivals, also demonstrate these same features. This suggests that authenticity and a focus on unique, defining character is a far more potent strategy than attempting to promote a destination as a generalist “something for everyone”.

Do you agree? What country destinations do you think the competition should be aware of?

Maybe it was the unexpected snow. Or perhaps the transport strike. But when Philip Wolf, CEO of travel industry analyst firm PhoCusWright, addressed the bloggers summit at ITB Berlin yesterday, he was putting his neck on the line and predicting big storms on the travel industry horizon.

A perfect storm in fact.

Not the kind featuring a wet George Clooney in a fishingboat, but a convergence of three separate stands of online behaviour and technology that look set to impact travel purchase both dramatically and profoundly.

Philip is predicting a perfect storm of search, shop and buy.

But what does he mean?

“A perfect storm is born when several events occur simultaneously which if occurring separately would be far less powerful. What we’ve identified is that the advance of search technology, online shopping and buying will lead to a whole technological revolution.”

What are these converging fronts? Search technology now means that people can find needle in haystack online. Search and user generated content are used together (and also in conjunction with other media) - people have access to so much information they can make the right travel choice accordingly.

Additionally, in a longtail environment of unlimited travel choice online, it can also now be economically viable to be the niche seller of a needle in haystack. From an Online Travel Agent, to a single small business operator - technology allows you to connect your niche, personalised product with its dream purchaser on the otherside of the world.

Purchasing habits are evolving too. While the “research online, purchase offline” is still an important search behaviour, online travel purchase has become mainstream to the extent that it no longer just represents flight and hotel sales, but also everything including costly luxury packages. More and more people contain to come online and to buy travel online - the US has already surpassed the 50% mark for online bookings and in emerging markets like India, travel is the “killer” e-commerce application.

Social media have also shifted power to the consumer. There is now a closer blurring of search, shop and buy. The process of conversing about travel, watching travel images and video, reading user reviews and sharing knowledge drives the sale process. It inspires travel decisions and influences the purchase specifics. In his presentation this morning, Tom Klein, Group President of Sabre Travel Network used the (unattributed) statistic that 75% of shoppers spend more on online travel after consulting reviews.

What does this perfect storm mean for travel and tourism businesses? Philip explains that:

“Unlike the metrological kind, this digital kind of perfect storm provides perfect opportunity. That will be provided to travel companies that exploit new technology and the momentum and they stop worrying about business model preservation. When you concentrate on trying to preserve business models instead of preserving customers, sometimes really scary things can happen.”

He predicts that as with earlier industry transformations, there will be new agents of change, new winners and losers. That may mean that the new generation of online travel firms that ousted the establishment a decade ago, will themselves then be ousted by a newer generation of firms if they fail to respond to converging customer needs with further technical innovation.

Philip adds that in these times of upheaval, it is more important than ever before to trust your instruments and consult your intelligence, but that the stage remains set to exploit opportunity everywhere is this online perfect storm.

Good news for researchers and industry analysts then?

Post Summary

Does increased choice, perversly, decrease choice? Does the Long Tail indulge our preconceived desires to the exclusion of chance, serendipity and, more importantly, having a really great travel experience?

Can the long tail narrow choice instead of enhancing it?

When I’m not following trends in tourism, I’m a keen follower of UK politics and, even more geekishly, American politics . In this capacity, I regulalry listen to the interviews on the www.bloggingheads.tv as this is an excellent environment in which ideas can be nurtured, discussed, grown or discarded between two knowledgable people in a time frame that allows the debate to mature.

Usually, my politics and tourism interests don’t collide but this excerpt in a recent post made my ears prick up.

The speaker is Cass Sunstein of the University of Chicago Law School who, in terms of the public political dialogue, wonders whether the internet communities are all their cracked up to be. His argument can be paraphrased that, in terms of politic discourse, people tend to congregate with like-minded people who then reinforce their views (and indeed often make them more extreme). This effect is known as the ‘echo chamber’ and it has the effect of making the participants hear what they only want to hear or, in other cases, to work them up into a righteous frenzy that previously didn’t exist.

But Cass sees value in experiences that go beyond the categories imposed by such closed groups as these experiences give an individual both competing views of the world as well as delivering insight into things that they might not previously considered. One example he uses is that of a traditional newspaper where, although you might only be interested in sport, the chances are that you will also read about politics, regional affairs etc - things beyond your narrow interest. He also uses the (borrowed) metaphor of walking through a city, seeing something you have never encountered before and thinking, “Hey, that looks cool, I would like to do that!”

Essentially, Cass is saying that serendipity is a good thing and your life is less without it.

So…what the heck has this to do with tourism?

Well, it made me wonder whether blindly serving the tourism ‘long tail’ niches could be the equivalent of the narrow interest groups where you get exactly what you want…and then miss out something you really would have enjoyed because it has simply been filtered from your view. In other words, we become so niche and exact in our demands for experiences that we miss out on the fuzzy elements that can make a trip really enjoyable.

I don’t have a definitive answer to whether this is the case but I thought I would look for clues at ITB in Berlin and the PhocusWright summit. From what I’ve seen so far, my fear that tourism could be getting too fixated on answering every known traveller’s desire (and in doing so are leaving no room for the enjoyable other serendipitous experiences) is something that some industry leaders are keen to avoid. At the bloggers press meeting this morning, we were given the chance to interview Hugo Burge of hereorthere.com. One of the key aspects of the hereorthere.com seems to be a desire to ‘inspire’ travellers at a stage when they have not yet selected the destination or the form that their travel might take - an area of the travel purchasing process Hugo believes has so far been underserved online. Which to my mind leaves open the possibility that even in a niche environment, potential travel bookers can be exposed to ideas that they might not originally have sought.

I suppose what I am moving toward here is the need for ’slightly imperfect’ information flows for customers that can give them clues about what there is on offer beyond their intended search parameters but which are not so wild as to be meaningless. Amazon.com of course do it in their recommendations lists (”Readers who bought this also bought this…”) and their ability to serve up interesting but not-quite-right recommendations can sometimes lead to more profitable avenues of exploration and enagagement.

Like Mr Rumsfeld said, their are ‘unknown knowns’ and tapping into the potential of a persons full spectrum of travel desires (however seemingly unknown they may be to that individual) is, I believe, key in a really excellent holiday experience.

Lets see what the other participants at the conference tomorrow have to say about this…!

Well, while Vicky was blogging at Tourism Innovation Day, I was doing the hard work out front…

Actually, it wasn’t hard work at all as my role was to interview Malcolm Roughead of VisitScotland about how they use research - the only hard part was making the session sound fresh four times in succession but I think we managed it well! I’d spoken to Malcolm a few times in advance of the event but I found that, even in the sessions, there were new insights coming out and I thought I would use this post to share with you the ones that most struck me.

• As a researcher, you often get excited by the insight that your data is revealing - its the sexy part of the job and the one that you think will most please the client. However, the savvy client is looking at the data from a slightly different perspective - to minimize risk. This reminded me of a similar insight I came across recently - good research enables you to gamble more effectively.
• Malcolm also mentioned the ‘Six ‘i’s’ they use in the research process:

1. What’s the Issue?
2. What Information do we already have about it? (This stage could reveal that there is no useful data and so new data needs to be collected)
3. Does this information contain any Insight - anything we didn’t know already?
4. What are the Implications of it? How does this affect our business?
5. Implementation - what am I going to change in the business to turn this research into activities?
6. What was the Impact? (Essentially this is evaluating what has just happened)

Other interesting conclusions were that customer research doesn’t need to be high-tech in order to be successful - a pen-written record of individual customer characteristics can be as powerful for a small operator in driving repeat business through personalized direct-mail as intense statistical analysis can be for large multinationals.

My feeling from Tourism Innovation Day though is that although research is seen as a necessary activity by tourism operators, I still feel that there is considerable scope to take it forward to the next level and integrate it into smarter sales strategies. I don’t mean by this simply identifying profitable market segments but also issues such as yield management and making points of interaction (such as booking systems) more meaningful or simple for the customer.

Being an interview host, as I say, limits your interaction with the other sessions at the conference. So if you were at TiD and think my thoughts in the last paragraph were actually covered in other sessions, do use the comments section to let me know!

Ben Vinod, Chief Scientist at Sabre Holdings (the global powerhouse Travelocity and the Sabre Travel Network) today informed the tourism industry businesses attending Scotland’s Tourism Innovation Day that user generated content is now a fact of life.

He explained that 2008 is the year that user generated content has become mainstream to travel consumers. Mainstream to the extent that many consumers now demand and expect to consult the opinions and reviews of other users and are looking to businesses to be prepared to share that information.

What does that mean for tourism businesses? As we have already discussed on the blog (for example here and here) consumers are already having conversations about your business online. The challenge is how do you use that for competitive advantage?

Sabre Holdings itself is addressing this question on many levels, because they are determined maintain their position as undisputed leader in travel and transportation and recognise that a culture of innovation is critical to that.

Ben explains: “Innovation is not an event, it needs to be in your mind at all times - you need to out-think the competition”

Looking for keywords in Haystacks

Sabre is now intensively mining consumer generated content - included that generated in their community igougo - to spot the words and themes that people use. Afterall, the community aspect is critical to travel planning and user generated content and destination/product selection is critically connected. What is being said in those communities clearly has the power to convert into travel purchases.

So Sabre Holdings is using technology to mine this content. They then use what they find to inform their key word bidding optimisation strategy. By understanding which words people use and respond to, they can match this buy buying paid search on terms that will deliver a good return at the best price.

Their whole premise behind user generated content is that you want to intercept the potential customer well ahead of the purchase chain. Ben comments “What Tripadvisor does for Expedia is drive site traffic, where Expedia can then convert that into bookings. Consumer generated media has become expected”. Integrated effectively into the shopping process.

Ben’s key reminder to businesses large and small?

“The most important thing we have to do is remain competitive in the marketplace and the landscape is changing on a daily basis”.

Innovation, technology and the themes covered today at the Tourism Innovation Day are a critical, not an optional, part of that.

Scotland’s tourism industry is gathered here at Hampden Park stadium today to take part in a technology themed Tourism Innovation Day.

Tracking Tourism is both live blogging from and participating in the day and I’m hoping to share some of the insights as they emerge, while minimising typos!

The goal of the day is help tourism businesses discover, learn and apply new technology to boost productivity and improve visitor experience. As host Muriel Gray explain “technology is nothing to be afraid of at all. Today is about making sure you’re not baffled, but inspired. To show how technology can be relevant whether your business is large or small.”

Julie Franchetti of Scottish Enterprise talked this morning about the characteristics that innovative tourisms businesses share:

1) They understand their customers. They listen, they analyse, they then adapt based on what they learn from those customers.

2) They work collaboratively with other business in order to implement that innovation

3) By implenting on innovation, they actively do something about adapting and improving, thereby delivering on the promise of the key tourism assets.

She raised the critical point that the relationship between visitors and businesses has changed for ever. Successful businesses are using technology to run their business more profitably, win new customers, deliver improved experience and communicate with customers on an ongoing basis.

Julie was followed by Chief Scientist from Sabre Holdings, Dr Ben Vinod. Sabre are the people behind Travelocity, igougo, Lastminute.com and the Sabre Travel Network. Ben’s presentation warrents a post of its own - which will follow - but with Sabre processing 2 billion travel transactions a day and touching 80% of 2006 travellers, he knows what he’s talking about when it comes to travel technology.

Interestingly, Ben reckons 2008 is the year that consumer generated content has become mainstream, that consumers have reached a point when they are demanding businesses support their desire to see what other trustworthy users think.

As a participant in the feedback session I must earn my keep now and post again shortly!

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)

1. Robin Worsnop, Chairman of the Tourism Innovation Group, on why the Tourism Innovation Day is a must

2. Tourism Innovation Day host Stephen Budd talks about why customer feedback is important for tourism businesses
3. TrackingTourism’s Stephen Budd talks about the Feedback and Research workshop sessions he will be hosting, featuring speaker Malcolm Roughead.
4. Tourism Innovation Day exemplar, Gilbert Summers of ExtramileScotland talks about positive user reviews

Good business tourism requires the same commitment to good practice as private tourism but a recent visit to the Scottish Enterprise Business Tourism Conference in Glasgow revealed some of the specific issues of access, pain points and how the right approach can yield dividends.

Well…it’s been one of those typical fortnights that seem to occur around this time of year when your feet just don’t seem to touch the ground on account of the workload. So we’ve got a bit of making up to do in terms of this blog and I thought I would start by giving my impressions of the recent Business Tourism Conference held in Glasgow.

It seems that Business Tourism is often seen as the ‘ugly sister’ of tourism, possibly conjuring up images of exhausted businessmen in motorway hotels. Obviously, the truth is far removed - it’s a fast moving, exciting and multi-billion dollar sector with its own unique set of demands and challenges. It’s difficult to pin-point one overall theme that came out of the conference but I thought I would use this post to touch on some examples of ‘Access’ within business tourism.

What I mean by Access is making it easy for the customer to buy from and use you and the following observations/anecdotes illustrate this point.

“Don’t make it difficult for me!”

Gripes included:

Scotland was identified as lacking in the highest quality establishments for senior level corporate away days. Part of the problem is its lack of air connectivity to important global centres - establishments need to be near good international airports to capture this kind of trade.

Hotel facilities (not just in Scotland) often don’t think through from the guest’s or organizer’s perspective. Allowing the Audio Visual team to set up the day before, making sure that tea and coffee could be had next door to the conference room and not at the other end of the hotel, and making sure the business centre was similarly close were cited as example areas were improvements could be made. In other words, making life smoother for the organizer and guests.

One speaker from a corporate events team noted, “If your website is easy to use, then I’ll pass it on to my guests - why do I need to repeat what it says when it is there so well already.” In other words, good website a) makes it easy for the organizer to make a decision about the suitability of the venue and b) they will act as an evangelist and push your information directly under the noses of valuable guests. The same speaker warned that it was very important to be upfront with them if the hotel was experiencing building works or some such matter - honesty is always preferred to an unpleasant surprise!

Local knowledge is important for a venue - top level business meetings often wish to spend time way from the hotel and so a solid recommendation to a good restaurant (or shops for spouses!) is greatly appreciated. Again, an example of making the experience smoother that it might otherwise be.

Why access makes profound business sense

At the other end of the spectrum, Rick Antonson of Tourism Vancouver observed how pleased Vancouver was to secure the 2010 Paralympics alongside the ‘regular’ Winter Olympics. This is important to Vancouver not only from the point of view of general prestige and income from the Games but also because it means the city’s infrastructure will be geared to allow for access to less able-bodied members of society. And when Western society is graying and a powerful economic segment of consumers becomes less agile, this is going to be vital to ensuring that Vancouver is ahead of the game is making their guests feel as welcome as possible.

Some of these points of course are not just confined to Business Tourism and there were a number of significant contributions in other sessions that I’m going to raise in future posts . . . starting with whether a bed tax is actually a good idea . . .