Blog homeYikes - Travolution magazine has arrived.
This issue, number 11.0 (what is this numbering scheme anyway?), is packed with articles and features relating to issues with online travel / travel ecommerce. I have taken a brief look and have had to put the magazine aside as I don’t have time to read it all. It is just too meaty! There is too much good stuff.
The same problem has been mentioned about this blog…. when I was posting twice a day - some readers said that it was too hard to keep up. Now I post 3-5 times a week it is much easier (and easier for me as well!)
TravelWeekly, on the other hand, is at the other end of the scale. I am often visiting travel company clients - and I tend to see mountains of Travel Weekly / Travel Trade Gazette magazines lying around the place - unloved, unopened and unread.
It is now time for TravelWeekly / Travel Trade Gazette to publish less often and Travolution to publish more often, in line with the travel business going online….. the tipping point has been reached.
I fear I am going to get some grief for this point of view.
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Alex: Thanks for your kind words. We are incredibly pleased with the entire edition - a labour of love to put together (coordinating three pieces of research is quite a job for one person) but worth it in the end.
Blatant linking here, but all the content is on our website for those who do not have a free subscription:
http://travolution.co.uk/Articles/2007/09/20/1062/Travolution+Generations.html
To your other point, there is a place for a weekly title for frontline agents, who love their digest of news, pictures, features and - crucially - jobs.
I hazard a guess that the offices you visit are for reasonably senior meetings, rather than to visit agents.
But for any B2B publisher there is a interesting dilemma ahead, as loyal fans of print brands continue to change their reading habits to online, especially for news content. This is slowly being realised in the travel B2B media.
Travel Weekly is in fact produced by the same publishing house as Travolution, so I would argue that as a group we are in a strong position - with our sister online information portal Gazetteers - to reach a far wider section of the travel trade than some of our offline and online rivals.
Donning my corporate hat there for a second.
The mag was poking out of my tiny mailbox, thank god no one thieved it.
It’s a great issue though, and I found the section of consumers who used different ways of booking their holiday very interesting.
I must admit that of recent weeks I have been slow to read RSS feeds, but there’s some bloody great content out there on blogs.
Oh, okay. I’ll bite for Travel Weekly.
First of all, of course you won’t often see agents reading TW or TTG during the working day - they’re too busy, and it’s bad form to flick through stuff in front of customers.
More importantly, for TW to go monthly and Travo to go weekly the market would have to have reached a stage where its overriding information need is for technology and online issues aimed at management-and-above level staff. I don’t think that stands up to much scrutiny.
The move online doesn’t remove the need for coverage of, say, specialist cruise or aviation news; bonding, regulatory and legal issues; exceptional bookings by individual agents; or the debate around sustainable tourism. And as my colleague Mr May says, what about jobs?
Obviously Travo isn’t going to take those things on, because it would lose focus - and as you say, it’s big enough already…
I do think it’s an interesting point of view though. Thanks for keeping us on our toes