It seems like the industry has matured since I was last active and speaking to online travel providers -  both technically and fundamentally.  There were many companies who now have well established sites and have been activly engaging in ppc and seo campaigns.  Their sites (sometimes a second site after a poor first revision) were generally rather good – there was a surprising amount of people there also who had recently launched new websites.  Usability and optimisation of on-site elements such as booking processes and search facilites was just beginning to enter the picture for a lot of comapnies – most of them had minor projects they were working on but were looking to run some for of optimisitation on their sites over the next 8-12 months.

It is still a less digitally mature industry than retail, but is is slowly catching up and it’s advanced far from where it was a year from now.

Overall though, very productive and insightful!

I’ll be exhibiting at the Travel Distribution Summit 2009 for the next two days (over Tuesday & Wednesday).  I’ll be going over Travel website optimisations we’ve done in the past, looking at some new sites, and hopefully helping a lot of travel companies convert more customers online.  We’ll also be covering SEM, SEO, etc, the whole online marketing mix.

I find travel to be an interesting industry to have moved online.  It’s seems like finding your own holiday, doing the research, reading the reviews, finding the ideal time to go at the ideal price can all be fun, and lots of people now enjoy doing all this part themselves.  The problem frequently comes when going to make the booking.

Too many travel companies simply seemed to just upload their entire booking system to the web when they started out online and expect their customers to know how to use it.  And some of them, quite frankly, are just awful.  Over the years, things may have been changed or bolted on, and some of them have got this right, others still have a way to go.  It’s fundamentals are still similar to retail, and I’ve found that experience across these two sectors really can mirror each other sometimes.  Website optimisation works really well for travel – it’s usually one area where looking after customers pays off dividends, as service is a large factor in a considered purchase of such high value.

It’s located at the Business Design Centre, London.  For further details check out the website.  We’ll be exhibiting at Stand 42.

It seems more noticable this year (maybe because I havn’t been down for about 16 months) but the marketplace seemed much more mature.  Almost everyone I spoke to knew what PPC was, knew what SEO was, was aware of the rise in social networking and was generally more informed about the industry – a drastic change from 2 years or so ago when these were all new technologies.  It made talking about marketing strategy easier, as many more people were on the same level.

The competition seemed stronger, many new and old companies present.  Two of these caught my eye, claiming to be the ‘conversion management experts’ and the ‘conversion optimisation experts’ which I thought was quite interesting, as well as one company claiming to be the ‘No 1 SEO experts’ – All seemed to be borrowing a little bit of our branding!

I might be down in London in a few weeks for our next show, though it’s not been confirmed yet.

I’ll be attending Internet World 2009 this year which starts next week – but better than that, I’ll be exhibiting! Feel free to come over for a chat, I’ll be around on the Tuesday & Wednesday (28th & 29th April).

If you’ve got any spare time and an interest in anything website related I recommend you come down.  It covers pretty much everything you could ever want to know about the Internet and websites, with a host of free seminars by some of the experts in the business – and it’s all totally free to attend.

I’ll be discussing anything and everything marketing related, right from Analytics through to Zearch

Feel free to come down for a chat about anything – problems with site performance, help with advertising, new developments in the industry or just a catch up – you can find me at stand E7082.

See you there!