Technology WHAT’S ON AT WTM


10.30-11.35AM – WTM TRAVEL PERSPECTIVE SESSION: WHAT SOCIAL MEDIA SUCCESS LOOKS LIKE IN TOURISM Turkish Culture & Tourism Office (EM850)


11-11.55AM –MANAGING OUT THE MIDDLE MEN IN HOTEL ROOM DISTRIBUTION Travel Tech Theatre (TT185)


11.35AM-12.30PM – WTM TRAVEL PERSPECTIVE SESSION: MOBILE VIDEO AND TRAVEL Turkish Culture & Tourism Office (EM850)


12-12.45PM – ASSESSING THE IMPACT OF THE CHANNEL MANAGERS Travel Tech Theatre (TT185)


1.30-2.45PM – WTM TBU SESSION: IS IT POSSIBLE TO EFFECTIVELY MEASURE TRAVEL BLOGGER ROI? Platinum Suite 1


3-4PM –WTM TBU SESSION: SALES AND MARKETING TOOLS FOR TRAVEL BLOGGERS Platinum Suite 1


And the winners are:


Stress-free family holiday: Beaches Fort Myers & Sanibel, Florida


Honeymoon destination: The Sarojin, Khao Lak, Thailand


City break on a budget: Lisbon Blow the budget: Quark Expeditions


Cruise destination: Jamaica Tourist Board


Adrenaline junkies: Tongabezi Lodge, Victoria Falls, Zambia


Best destination for accessible travel: Visit Flanders


Authentic travel: Wilderness Safaris’ Desert Rhino Camp, Namibia


Two hours to spare on a business trip: Hong Kong Tourist Board


Room with a view: The Aurora Zone, for The Aurora Bubble, Finland


One of the categories covers accessible travel 24 07.11.2013


Travel as it happens


The Amadeus and WTM Travel Experience Awards are a new venture at WTM 2013. Matthew Parsons finds out more about the concept from Amadeus’s director of marketing, Rob Sinclair-Barnes, and why it’s crucial for travel sellers to learn more about the ‘21st-century traveller’


How did the idea for the new Travel Experience Awards come about?


Our goal is to stimulate debate. As an industry, we don’t invest enough in understanding the traveller. When WTM was putting together the technology theatre, we thought it would be the ideal time to look at the leisure sector, to better understand the leisure traveller, following our 21st Century Business Travellerreport earlier this year. We thought: how can we replicate that? So we came up with these awards. That’s where the seed was planted.


Who did you open the awards to? We invited submissions from across the travel industry – suppliers, tourist boards, travel agents and so on. We also invited multiple submissions, for example if there were any operators that were doing something in partnership with a tourist board. We had a significant amount of entries – and I was blown away by them. There was a lot of heated debate. Some of the winners were not at all what we were expecting.


How were the awards judged? Entry was by self-nomination, and each


such as Julia Lo Bue-Said, managing director of Advantage Travel Centres, and photographer Steve Dunlop, who helped judge the Room with a View category.


Any categories close to your heart? Yes, the Two Hours to Spare on a Business Trip category. I hate the airport, taxi, hotel, back to the airport and home routine when travelling on business. People ask “How was Prague?”, and you can only say: “I don’t know!”


Sinclair-Barnes: “We want to define experiences”


nominee had to submit a short description, supported by testimonials, images and video. The nominations were judged during September by a panel of industry experts as well as guest judges for certain categories,


How do these awards benefit Amadeus? Being an IT company and a solutions provider, the more we know about the trends, the smarter we can be when developing our systems. With computer interfaces, at the point of selling there’s sometimes too much choice on offer. We want to help define


experiences, because the emerging goal of the travel agent, or tour operator, is to be able to provide more advice to customers – not just accessibility to the product.


And what’s in it for the winners?


Each winner has the choice of hosting a press visit by the WTM official video crew to film, edit and create a vlog (video blog) for use on the WTM website, social media and via WTM Media Partners. The winner will also be provided with the vlog for their own use.


Do you have plans to develop the awards? From January to October, we will dedicate one month to each category, and continue to debate what customers want. We’ll also be growing these awards into different segments – so we’ll have them for other WTM events, such as World Travel Market Latin America.


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