Blog homeThis week a number of people in the travel industry have gone blogging mad. I guess this is to do with the PhoCusWright ITB bloggers summit taking place in Berlin this week.
I really don’t like these self-selecting conferences (although I would have gone if given a free entry!). I mean a blog is just a means to post stuff online in a chronological order, have people subscribe to it - and perhaps have some form of conversation. It doesn’t give anyone who blogs “special powers” - nor should it really be used as a “golden ticket” for conference entries. In the end, taking the technology view, its just a bit of HTML.
Not only has travel industry blogging spawned a conference - but there are now books and several travel blog ranking lists for people to look over and consider. Haven’t we all got better things to do? (OK - the book is nice - but not as useful as a well structured mechanism to find the content that exists in its primary form i.e. on the web)
On a more practical point….. here are 7 forms of travel blogs that you, as a travel provider, could consider running.
CEO blog
A CEO blog is normally where the CEO (or other senior executive from a company) outlines, over a period of time, their vision. It enables them to react to industry or market events and reach out to have conversations with people they wouldn’t normally converse with on a regular basis.
Example: Randy’s Journal - Boeing - by VP marketing Randy Tinseth
Probably only useful for larger companies where understanding the core vision is useful to customers.
Industry blog
A number of blogs are “industry facing”. For example this blog - Musings - is written to reach out to you lot! I know most of my subscribers (about 300 or so) read my daily ramblings. I have no real idea if this is doing damage or helping me commercially - but, speaking personally, I quite enjoy it.
I suppose you know who I am as a result of this blog….. which wasn’t actually my goal really - I would prefer if you knew my products not me!
Product -> Agent blog - the “Fam” topup
If you are based in a destination or focus on a specific activity - and you happen to use agents as a distribution channel - then a blog that is written with the intention of being read by travel agents would probably work for you. Your goal should be to produce an informative blog - not about your products necessarily (although you can slot them in every so often, like I do here!) - but more general information.
A specialist agent (from outside of your destination) may only visit your country every couple of years…. and so your blog focus should be on informing agents of changes that may be necessary for them to know in order to best sell your destination. For example a great new restaurant, the change in times for the cross-harbour ferry service - useful - practical - information that a travel agent will want to subscribe to.
You need to make these very “tight” in terms of focus….. If you happen to sell 5 countries then don’t lump them all into one blog - because it may be unlikely that your agents also sell those same 5 countries. Instead produce 5 blogs (or one blog with 5 RSS feeds)
Consumer facing blog
Many companies are looking to go the direct (non-agent) route. However is a blog the best way of doing this? Not really - the reason is that a blog is intended for long term subscription not necessarily something to “dip into” as part of a product or company pre-purchase evaluation. As a result of this “dipping into” scenario the most important pages on your consumer facing blog are the category or archive pages.
However as a result of having a consumer facing blog you may find improved search engine rankings…. etc - which is all helpful.
Special offer blog / feed
I am not sure about these. There are a couple of scenarios where these maybe helpful:
- Customers who live in City A and have family in City B. They need to take a flight between the two cities and are looking to travel “when the price is right” - but won’t travel otherwise. Maybe these customers will subscribe to an offer feed / blog over the long term
- Where the travel research phase takes an extended period of time - for example - say I want to go skiing next year…. I could subscribe to a special offer feed and be given offers upto the right point in time where decisions have to be made.
Product news blog
Maybe for your top selling products you can produce a blog just for that product. Don’t worry if you only publish every so often - with blog subscriptions people are happy to go several months without anything coming down down the pipe….
For example, I have a blog / RSS feed just for news about our reservation system TourCMS. It only has a few subscribers - but the people who want to know are subscribed - which is fine.
Status blog
Oh dear my IT roots are showing again. In IT everyone likes the concept of status - what is going on right now - is everything OK?
An example status blog or feed maybe for a local ferry. A storm is approaching and the a city based travel agent needs to quickly inform a customer they have on the phone whether the ferry will still be running today. A status blog works wonders here.
In the main the latest post should be a “All running OK” - a simple one line sentence. Then, when you have an event that is out of the ordinary - you can just put that up….. and when that event ceases - put back the single “All running OK” blog post.
Subscribers will learn that your most recent post is the one that they need to be paying attention to.
Conclusion
With many web people saying “you must have a blog” it can be difficult to understand what kind of blog you need. The important point though is to remember that your blog needs to have a focus. Consider what information you know that you could give to someone else. Hopefully it is information they want. If you can drive commercial benefit from your blog then great - but think of the information focus first - then how you are going to commercialise it.
However, please don’t blog just because you want to be part of the “in crowd”.
If you want to be notified next time something is published sign up for email alerts or subscribe to the RSS feed. Thank you for reading!
I’m not at ITB but I don’t think your criticisms work. It’s nothing to do with ‘bloggers having special powers’. Travel industry people are using blogging in a variety of ways (and as your post demonstrates, there are a variety of potentially powerful ways to use it). As a practice it may prove important or it may prove a dead end, but if it is being used it is a perfectly valid topic for discussion.
It’s pretty soft reasoning to reduce something to its mechanics (blogs are just HTML… IT is just machines and code… books are just paper…) and dismiss it because its practitioners ‘don’t have special powers’.
You’ll have to do better than that
Hi Nathan
Thanks for your comment.
Blogs are just websites. They are a tool for conversation (like this one). I know people in the industry who know more about web stuff than I do - but they don’t publish blogs - however they are not well known and have no ability to get their message out to the industry at large.
What I am saying is that just because I say something doesn’t make it right. This post is a case in point! (It is a valid opinion though!)
We “expert bloggers” are a self-selected bunch. I decided to call myself an expert (rather than anyone else calling me that). Well frankly if I call myself an expert am I deluding myself?
The concept of blogging is great - but we are confusing the medium with the message. The medium of blogging is interesting - but not worth getting all excited about. The fact that we are talking about travel industry stuff in an open, conversational, way is much more interesting - but this could be happening in a pub, on a social network, within the pages of the tradepress etc….. just because we are using the blogging medium doesn’t make us special.
Does that make any more sense?
Kind of. It’s not that I totally disagree with your comments about blogs, I just think your analysis of the blogging summit misses the point a bit.
You’re right that setting yourself up as a travel blogger doesn’t automatically make you more insightful about travel. But I don’t think the conference organisers were making that assumption.
They made the (to my mind correct) assumption that setting yourself up as a travel blogger makes you more insightful about *being a travel blogger*, which qualifies you to participate in a session on travel blogging.
I’ll use a John Motson analogy: commentating doesn’t make him a better footballer, but it qualifies him to talk about football commentating…
Hi Nathan
The summit is fine….. Pity I couldn’t go. 31 bloggers made it… but although I asked a month ago they had run out of room. Frankly if you are having a conference with a max of 30 people couldn’t they have got a bigger room?
I just don’t like how we end up forming cliques rather than being inclusive to everyone. I have no problem with a physical blogging summit - although a more inclusive blogging summit would have been held online, for example. I bet more than 30 would have turned up for that.
I worry that people now will be incentivised to become bloggers for all the wrong reasons. Free access to large industry conferences, however welcome, is not a good reason to write a blog.
Sticking to football (soccer for those in the US!) - this is just like saying “I want to become a pro footballer as I want all the spoils”…. you should do it because you are good at playing football and can make a living out of it.
Hi Alex,
I appreciate your feedback and your criticisms are valid. When I came up with the idea for the “Tips from the T-List”, the idea was to give travel industry executives with examples of the quality content offered by industry bloggers. The resulting summits and expert panels are really a reaction to the industry’s realization that bloggers like you and me are out there and providing value to the industry as a whole. It appears now that the industry is recognizing that professionals who blog are influencing the industry and providing the in-depth industry knowledge that can’t be found from traditional media.
To address your concern about cliques. I don’t think we’re creating a clique here, in fact, I think quite the opposite is true. The summit is a brand new concept (i.e. never been done before) and as such PhoCusWright could only offer a small conference room with limited space. If I had my way it would have been bigger and perhaps at future events it will be larger, but the bottom line is that industry practitioners who blog are getting recognized and acknowledge in a way that has not happened before. The first blogger workshop/expert panel support 40 people and had 60 attendants. This one (ITB) supports 180 people and we had 160 attendants, quite a big jump and a significant increase in exposure for industry blogs.
If it is any comfort, the roster was filled within about a week of opening the applications. That in itself is a pretty good indication that this is a good concept. BTW, I did fight to have you added, but, to be fair to all applications, we filled the slots using a strict first come first serve basis.
Keep up the great commentary Alex and I look forward to actually meeting you at some point in the near future.
Hello Nathan and Alex,
As the organizer of the event, and managing editor of the Tips From The T-List book, I have to admit we are still working out all of the administrative kinks for these events. With the nature of blogging, you can imagine the difficulty it is to select ‘qualified’ bloggers for an event like PhoCusWright. We did quantify the number of blog posts of the bloggers, ensured that they commented on other blogs, engaged in the community and had a Travel Industry working history.
Alex, you would have been a great addition to the summit, and I am sure that there will be future events. As far as ’special powers’ of bloggers are concerned, I think that we do have them. Gone are the days where news has to go through centralized news agencies and media publishers, we are now in a time where citizen journalism has proliferated information, opinion and news events. These special powers are shaking the traditional media world. I agree, you could have conversations in a pub with friends, however, with blogs, we can have the conversation with an international group of people who have niche interests, similar to your own.
I agree with Nathan, blogging does not make us an expert on a subject, however experts on subjects are now starting to blog and adding value to the blogosphere. PhoCusWright partnered with the Tips From The T-List to bring this ‘Blogging Phenomenon’ to the front stage, and to ask questions about the validity of the blogging medium. The discussion is still ongoing, but I feel that blogging is here to stay. I hope so any ways.
We are launching an updated version of the Tips From The T-List website soon that will be open to any travel related blogger. I think this avoids any ‘cliques’ and creates a greater community and dialog. I will send you a link to check it out, adding an online conference component is a great idea. You can go to itb2008.tipsfromthetlist.com to see updated info on the conference.
Regards
[…] Parece que es la primera vez que visita este Blog. Este es un sitio sobre Marketing Hotelero, Distribucion, CRM y Revenue Management, si le interesan estos temas le recomiendo Suscribirse. Gracias.Alex Bainbridge en su Blog ha vuelto a poner el dedo en la llaga a raíz de los auto-nombrados expertos en materia turística por el simple hecho de tener un Blog. Todo viene a raíz de las conferencias que PhocusWright está organizando en el marco de la ITB de Berlín. Alex no duda de la capacidad y el nivel de experiencia de los ponentes, pero critica con el sarcasmo habitual en él, el hecho de que por tener un Blog se califique de experto en la materia a alguno. Claroque este artículo llega en un momento en el muchos de los Bloggers Turísticos internacionales (incluyendo buenos amigos míos entre ellos), están sacando pecho por su nueva calidad de ponentes expertos. […]
[…] A raíz de este encuentro parece que se estan generando otra vez algunos comentarios acerca de la capacidad de influencia de los blogs/bloggers y, como comenta Alex Brainbridge, de la validez de dicha influencia y la relación blog=experto. Un tema que también salió a debate en Italia no hace mucho relacionando la influencia de los bloggers con la de los periodistas. De hecho, la conferencia de Karin Schmollgruber en el evento trataba en cierta manera esta cuestión. […]
@Philip @Stephen
Thanks guys! Next time keep a space for me!
For others - these 2 spanish comments are worth a read…. if you can’t read spanish use http://babelfish.altavista.com/
!
Yes they are. Thank you Alex. There is an abstract of that post in my English Blog.
http://www.albertbarra.com/en/blogs/some-concerns-about-blogging-and-the-conversation/
Best Regards,
Albert
Yeah Albert - but that abstract misses out the bit where you call me sarcastic!
That’s true, but I called you sarcastic with affection. I don’t see anything wrong by being sarcastic.
Your right - you don’t need an insight of the travel industry to write a successful travel blog
@ Darren….. well - a consumer facing one perhaps as you are writing from the consumer’s perspective. However, if you are writing an industry blog (like this one) it would probably be quite difficult if I didn’t know what I was talking about!
Funny, it crossed my mind during the summit, that you should have been there Alex! Being one of the better and very interesting travel industry blogs. I found the summit very good and a great way for the bloggers to meet and be able to talk directly to industry leaders and the people from PhocusWright. Next to all the insights that were gained and being spread (live!) by all the individual blogs and the itb2008 blog, it was also very useful discussing with individual bloggers (from around the globe) how they blog, what problems they run into, how their traffic rates are and to share blogging tips and tricks. Working in the travel industry myself, my blog forces me to sharpen my opinions and thus my mind on developments and share it with others. That PhocusWright and the guys from the Tipsfromthetlist stimulate this sharing and give knowledge back has been very inspiring. Next time you’ll probably be there, I guess!