It’s important not to ignore digital’s growth, but equally important you don’t write off the channels which made your business successful, says Stuart Parish, managing director of Travel Weekly
It is rare to see a week of news where the march of digital is not championed as the future of travel, and is subsequently debated by those staunchly defending the continuing existence of the travel seller.
One of my own personal bug-bears is the new-to-the-industry ‘tech-guru’ who sits on stage and cites travel technology as being light years behind other sectors, failing to acknowledge that travel is not quite like those other sectors, where selling a book or a box of cereal is a far simpler proposition than selling a three month multi-centre trip of a lifetime.
Sure, in 2002 during my time at Holiday Autos we migrated the lion’s share of our trade bookings online – we had fantastic technology, but ultimately we were also selling a car hire product that was becoming more and more of a commodity.
I firmly believe that the technology to sell a more complex, expensive or personal holiday product with inspiration, excitement, and emotion still doesn’t exist, and I don’t think it ever will. Personally and in business I embrace technology, but I also believe that traditional channels are here to stay.
Just this week, Tui Travel’s results showed a significant year-on-year shift in online bookings from 45% to 51%, while Thomas Cook employed three more gurus to its digital advisory board.
At the Advantage Conference I was lucky enough to attend in Dubai, managing director Julia Lo Bue-Said used the opportunity to launch their own developed web platform, encouraging agents to blog and create bespoke web content to drive their digital strategy.
Even at Travel Weekly we can’t ignore the changing face of our digital proposition. In the last two years we have shown 29% growth in page views to Travelweekly.co.uk, while our ‘On The Move’ portfolio has seen us grow our mobile penetration to almost 22% of pages from just 3% over the same period.
We have over 4,000 downloads of our Travel Weekly news app, and a further 2,000 have downloaded our interactive magazine app since our launch in January.
Yet with that said, our traditional business strength areas are continuing to evolve and show longevity in a publishing marketplace which is often too quick to claim they are no longer relevant.
People are lining up to preach the slow death of print publishing, yet this year our average issue size is 13% bigger than last, and our 108-page issue on March 6 was the largest issue we have produced in approaching five years of owning the business.
At the end of May our new ABC certificate will be published. Our verified audience figures will show that circa. 15,000 agents have requested to keep receiving print copies of Travel Weekly, despite the breadth of our multi-channel approach to our content.
From digital and print, we now look at meetings and events, and there are always figures which suggest improved technology to conference call, Skype, and message are diminishing the need to meet face to face.
Yet at the same time recent easyJet results showed they carried record 12m business travellers in the 12 months to March 31 which bucks the trend that it’s no longer necessary to spend quality face to face time in business.
This year Travel Weekly Group will run 42 face to face events, ranging from the Globes with over 1,200 guests to our exclusive business dinners with just 30 attendees. In total we will host over 6,000 delegates this year, when we acquired the business in 2009 this figure was just 2,400.
Every business has to embrace the future and technological change, but that doesn’t mean they should be neglectful of the products, principles, and ways of doing things that have served them well and brought success in the past.
At Travel Weekly Group we see digital as a pivotal part of our business development, but that doesn’t mean we’re going to forget about the print and events channels that made us the successful business we are today.