Blog homeThis week people kept telling me about awards.
I am not sure whether to get excited or not by awards – some I respect and are worth winning – some are not. I haven’t made up my mind which are which though. Overall I am confused. Perhaps you can help by commenting below….
On the Travelocity single screen review post, one comment said that both of iHotelier’s checkout systems are award winning. Well yes, the designs are nice – but award winning – what does that mean exactly? Should I think better of them because they have won awards – or should I use my own judgement to decide if they are good or not?
One client this week described the web design agency they are using as “award winning”. Yeah. Most agencies have won awards so a more informative comment would be if they had never won an award – but who is going to say that!?
Then I received an email from the Webby Awards PR team. They wanted to tell me that entries are now open for next years event – with 3 travel categories (including a new video one):
- Best travel website – Sites that provide travel services and information. These include online agents for purchasing tickets, hotel rooms, rental cars, vacation packages and other travel services. Includes online travel guides, travel writing, and travel tools
- Best tourism website – Sites that promote travel and tourism destinations, specific travel activities or promotional and informational tourism websites. Includes city, country or regional sites, tourist attractions, and chamber of commerce sites.
- Best travel video – Original online content that providing travel information. This includes travel agent content, hotel and airline promotional videos, travel reviews, video travel guides, and travel tools. Individual episodes or entire series may be entered.
The Webby awards are worth winning. I would be very excited to win one of those. But I am not entering which I guess excludes me. The Webby awards are famous because your acceptance speech has to be limited to 5 words.
In the UK we have our fair share of travel web awards…. for example the TravelMole.com web awards – which I helped judge in 2003… I would be pleased to win these however they seem to have become “taken over” by the PR agencies of UK travel companies…. I guess that happens to all awards that are worth winning.
Then there are the Travolution awards. Yes – they would be nice to win too.
However I have never won any of those awards (nor entered)….but I have won others:
- New Media Age website of the week: August 2000 – at the height of the VC backed dot com boom – for a travel website for a small tour operator where I was Managing Director.. Very pleased about that award because we had only spent £3000 on the website (6000 USD) – and we were up against lots of big budget websites that week and I had done 80% of the website construction.
- BIMA (British Interactive Media Association) – Travel category – 2004…. which are the awards that all London based web design agencies want to win… and really do mean something of value in that community. I don’t take any credit for the design, but I was the project manager for EuroRSCG for the flybmi.com (BMI airline) website redesign.
More recently, I created a web application that helps serialise RSS feeds (such as for repeating podcasts or training delivered via RSS - where each subscriber needs to start at day #1). Michael Arrington from Techcrunch called it smart. Now that is as good as an award (especially as it only took 2 weekends).
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Alex, I’d like to see more blog categories in these awards.
As a part-time travel blogger, it would be a great achievement to win one of these awards.
OMG, I have to pay $225.00 to be entered into the Webby Awards?
Why?!
Oops – forgot to mention technology alongside web awards….
TravelMole currently have their 2007 technology awards open for business…
http://www.travelmole.com/technologyawards_2007.php
Best use of Video on a web site on a Travel trade web site
Best use of social media within travel
Best web integration of hotel/airline content on 3rd party site
Innovation in Mobile Technology
Best Corporate on-line booking system
Web Based self booking tools for consumers
Most innovative online sales/marketing campaign
Meta search tool within Travel
Online education for Travel Trade
Best exhibition stand and preshow campaign within World Travel Market Technology section
Well Darren, you would be in the running to win – so of course you would want more blogging categories !
‘for example the TravelMole.com web awards – which I helped judge in 2003… I would be pleased to win these however they seem to have become “taken over” by the PR agencies of UK travel companies…’
Alex what evidence do you have for this ? Our web awards did not have one judge related to PR. They were made up of academics with a deep understanding and knowledge of the industry, industry practitioners who were not related to the winners or categories and thats it.
Who nominates the sites is not under our control but who wins is under the control of our INDEPENDENT judges.
regards
Graham
Hi Graham,
Thank you for your comment. I don’t mean that the judging has been taken over by PR…. I am sure it is independent as you say. Hopefully this comment serves as a clarification.
OK – so its not the strongest of evidence – but I was once close with a well known PR company – who were writing all the submission texts for their clients….. that is kind of what I meant. But they only do this because your awards are worth winning and respected – and their clients want to win. I have no idea if they are still doing that because this was a couple of years back and there have been some staff changes since then (and client changes no doubt!)
I guess the question is to what extent does the submission text sway the judges (not a question about your awards specifically, but about submission text generally). I suggest that it has quite a strong bearing on the short listing process – but that the final “winner” will be determined on the merits of the website in question.
So my comment was really whether the awards system you have created is “fair” between small companies (who don’t have PR agencies writing their submissions) – and those large ones that come with submissions that use all the buzzwords and hooks that judges may be looking for that year.
Any thoughts?
The Travolution Awards in April 2007 – due to be repeated in April 2008 – were judged by around 20 of the great and the good of the industry.
I felt that as a brand aimed at senior executives in the online travel industry, companies shortlisted for an award would appreciate a gong more if it was judged on merit, by their peers.
We went through a rigorous and transparent judging process. I chaired every single judging panel in early-April.
The feedback we received from the winners, sponsors and many of the losers – bizarrely – was overwhelmingly good.
We feel we have a very good awards programme and look forward to hosting another big night next year, following our conference, where we will be partnering with PhoCusWright for the first time.
Kevin and Graham
On a side note, the concept of awards works because people want to feel “part of a group” – and winning an award is the ultimate “you are one of us” type badges. That is why everyone wants to win. So do I.
However many smaller companies (by small I mean those who are really small) don’t feel part of the “travel industry group” (they may have 5 employees or even less). I would love to see an award that targets those companies. Or several awards.
For example many small tour operators do their own websites without external help. Some are really good – considering they are done by people with limited web skills (as they tend to be product / commercial people). But they are not going to compete with the big brand tour operators with websites designed by leading UK web design agencies or dedicated inhouse teams.
Can you guys look into adding some categories for these very small travel companies?
i can point you in the direction of an award for the little guy: our Sm@rt Agent awards, dished out every edition of the magazine and an overall winner once a year.
http://travolution.co.uk/Articles/Search.aspx?ContentType=30169
The TravelMole Web Award judges are not privy to any ‘PR’ spin despite the fact that we receive a lot.
Next year will be our 5th year and each year it grows stronger in terms of numbers of nominations, geographical spread and I believe quality of work. If you study the history of the winners you will see that it bears no relation whatsoever to advertising spend with us or indeed size of company. It is entirely down to the judges opinions and each one of them judge in isolation not as a group.
I welcome any constructive suggestion as to how we can improve the awards. Last Year we received a number of sarcastic comments on the site as to the quality of the winners and the reasons behind their success. I invited all of these critics to pass me their details so that they could be considered for the panel in 2008. Without failure each one declined to reply !!!