Thoughts on the PhoCusWright Bloggers Summit and Conference @ ITB
March 8, 2008
As I’m getting ready to go back home tomorrow, I have had some time to look back and try to summarize the experience of attending the Bloggers Summit and the PhoCusWright Conference @ ITB (as well as ITB itself). The Bloggers Summit brought together several eTourism bloggers from various parts of the world. Unfortunately, the sessions were so busy and bloggers’ schedules in some cases were so tight that I did not have time to meet all the bloggers who attended. However, I did have time to chat at various times with Stephen Joyce of (T4 Tourism Technology Trends) and Phil Caines (Tourism Tide) from Rezgo and get their opinion on my social network Canadamigos (they both liked the potential). I also met Guido Van Den Elshout (Happy Hotelier) in person for the first time and enjoyed our conversations very much. Guido is avery likable guy and very active industry blogger. His blog Happy Hotelier is a very interesting and eclectic collection of post on various eTourism and Tourism topics. Check out his list of Unusual Hotels. I did have a chance to say hello to Jens Thraenhart who has been very busy since leaving his post at the Canadian Tourism Commission (Tourism Internet Marketing) and I also met, for the first time in person, Kevin May from the UK the editor of the excellent eTourism and tourism technology mag Travolution and blogger of the blog by the same name. I highly recommend the magazine to any tourism business interested in maximizing eTourism opportunities. During the couple of days of the event I also chatted a bit with Yeoh Siew Hoon (The Transit Cafe) from Singapore, Claude Benard (Les Explorers) from France, Vicky Brock and Stephen Budd (Tracking Tourism) from Scotland. I barely said hello to Joe Buhler (Travel Marketing in the Age of WEB 2.0 & Beyond) and I met a young blogger Abbas Nokhasteh ( Openvizor) from the UK.
To summarize the conference is a challenge, but I can try. Most of the presentations and talks focused on the technology that drives the revolution that has been taking place in the travel industry worldwide. However, questions arise as to whether companies are making use of the right technologies for the right purpose and whether they are using available technologies correctly. On the user side, as Philip Wolf, CEO of PhoCusWright, mentioned on his remarks to the bloggers during the Bloggers Summit: “consumers took control and went from looking for the cheapest trip (Web 1.0) to looking for the perfect trip (Web 2.0).” This phenomenon disrupted the industry with the advent of social media. February’s Travolution Magazine (Issue 14.0) is dedicated to the User Experience asserting that content is not king anymore, but rather User Experience is. This makes a lot of sense from the travellers’ pont of view. The User Experience is King may summarize the subtext of all the presentations, whether it was about the Reservation System of Tomorrow Today, the Hotelier’s Perspective, Journalists or Bloggers, the OTA’s perspective or about the new eTravel startups (five minutes of fame). Having said all this and listened to all the presentations one must not forget that there is still some ways to go in the space to achieve the perfect user experience. In closing, a key thing for companies to remember, to paraphrase Philip Wolfe, is that “winners will focus on customer preservation rather than on business model preservation.”
See you in Hollywood
Jaime
Feedback on the Blogger’s Summit
March 6, 2008
Both sessions for the workshop went very well. We had over 150 participants in the audience who were, from what I could tell, very engaged with the subject matter.
One issue that came up during the feedback session was whether or not the topics was relevant. One blogger argued that the subject matter of the workshop was not really relevant to the consumer blogger or to the consumer in general. My counter to that argument however is that the subject was originally developed for the travel industry and so it does not necessarily apply to the consumer audience. That said, I think there is a huge opportunity to open up the discussion and conversation to the consumer blogging community, this however would probably be a different conference and a different subject.
An underlying theme that arose from the discussion is that the web is chaos, it cannot be controlled or contained. In order to survive and ultimately succeed, you must be able to sail the ocean of the web. In other words, blogging and user generated is not going to disappear and certain aspects of the blogosphere will become more important while some will disappear into obscurity. The question is how travel blogging and more specific travel industry blogging will affect the industry as a whole. Most agreed that we are at the beginning of the journey and it is better to be guiding the boat then to be left in the wake.
Overall, the feedback was very positive, although there seemed to be some argument about the real value of the morning interview sessions. This was a new addition to the summit (which by the way is also new) and the feedback was appreciate. Thanks to all the bloggers who participated and we are very excited about continuing the conversation into future conferences.
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