Trending Topics from World Travel Market 2009. By Andy Hayes Saturday, 21st November 2009

I’ve had the (dubious?) pleasure of attending World Travel Market this year down in London -

If you aren’t familiar with it, it’s the travel industry’s mega-event and an immense gathering of press, tourism organisations, suppliers, and everything in between. 

It is a great way to get a good feel for the hot topics and trends of tourism around the world, but it’s not necessarily a fantastic place for small business (I actually have seen several comments on Twitter during the week that agreed), but the overall topics were important so I’d like to share with you the top five trends I heard this week.

Mobile

If there was any one word that I hear most often this week, it was mobile.  It was in conversations with tour operators, with tourist boards, in seminars and sessions, in networking sessions and offline meetings.  In travel, there was a perception that mobile was too clunky and too complex to support travel research and transactions, but today’s consumers who are growing up with mobiles are proving this preconceived notion wrong.   If there’s anything in online travel that’s going to be BIG, it’s mobile.

What You Should Be Doing:  Have you checked your website in a mobile phone browser?  Check yours or grab a friend’s iPhone and  have a look.  If it’s a mess, is there something you can easily do to fix it?    Be sure your site loads ok before you go off designing the next big iPhone app.

Twitter

Anyone who knows me will know that I am a huge Twitter advocate.  It’s been good for business, great for networking and an invaluable research resource.  For small business in travel, it’s an unbelievable source of great feedback and for listening to the conversation.  And Twitter was in full force at World Travel Market – you can see from searching Twitter that lots of folk were connecting and discussing the event live.  It seems Twitter is still a trending topic because, even though those of us already on Twitter think it is “the in” thing, many others are still just finding their feet.

A lot of discussion circled around companies offering customer service on Twitter.  While everyone agreed this was great, everyone also agreed that it should be a channel into your existing processes, otherwise it quickly gets overwhelming.

What You Should Be Doing:  If you aren’t on Twitter, I encourage you to go to search.twitter.com and do some searches on your keywords, niche, or destination.  I think you’ll be intrigued by what you find.  You can search without having an account, but you’ll need a login to join the discussions.

Google Social Search

There was lots of WTM discussion about the continual evolution of social media, and one way this evolution is moving forward is how Google is slowly integrating our social networks into our commonplace web tasks.  Thus there was lots and lots of thoughts and consideration about Google Social Search – a new feature in trial by Google to show additional search results from your Google query based on information found in your social network. 

For example, here’s what it showed under ’social search’  when I Google’d world travel market:

(I’ve clicked on “Social” in the left-hand column to only show results from the social.  Normally they appear at the bottom of your results.)

What You Should Be Doing:  If you use Google anyway, why not use this new feature and see how it works?  It’s still in “beta”, so you’ll need to activate it on Google Labs – this means you need a Google account.  (If you’ve got Gmail, Google Analytics, or any of the other Google apps, your existing login works for this.) 

If you use a regional site like google.co.uk, you’ll have to switch to the .com site to see social search results.  Try it out – it’s quite interesting.

Economic Recovery

I spoke to tourist boards and exhibitors in pretty much every region at WTM, and all agreed that economic recovery was looking quite promising, which was great to hear.  I heard from several attendees who attend this event every year that the place was bustling. 

Everywhere I went, the attitude was upbeat and positive, so it felt like the travel industry seems to have put a lot of the recent problems behind them.  There’s still some trouble spots and lingering worries but when isn’t there?  Let’s hope that with WTM 2009’s success that as an industry we’re putting our best foot forward.

What You Should Be Doing:  You’ve probably experienced the downturn in your own unique way.  But are you keeping an eye on the upward trend so you’re ready to take advantage?  Now’s the time to prep some fresh marketing plans and review your products & services.

Concierge Services

Whenever a customer comes to us with a marketing issue, invariably the discussion comes around to niche.  Niche was high on the WTM agenda with many people I spoke to, but mostly in terms going into a more narrow niche. 

Many brands are looking at introducing concierge services – a trend we spotted earlier in the year and in response launched a travel concierge product on our consumer brand site.  It is no surprise:  consumers are swamped with more and more information, more and more spam, and a great way to cut through the fluff and the stress is to head for an expert.

What You Should Be Doing:  For you, a concierge might not be a good choice.  But the concepts behind the principle are solid.  What are you doing to combat the information overload that your customers are encountering?  Are your products easy to find, easy to understand (particularly why they’re different/better than your competitors), and easy for a customer to choose what one is right for them (or get help in doing so)?

Andy Hayes is the Managing Partner of Travel Online Partners (TOP), a company focused on helping for small businesses in travel and tourism with online technology. 

To find out more about their do-it-yourself guides, coaching and consulting, visit the website www.travelonlinepartners.com