WTM Travel Perspective Day 2 sessions
WTM Travel Perspective Day 2 sessions
Steve Keenan
November 5, 20143.15pm: It’s our final session of day two, looking at shifting up a gear – how to move from a start-up to an established business.
Alex Bainbridge of TourCMS says “Attack your inbox. If I don’t get any email, I think we are doing OK.” He has three rules of thumb:
I don’t want to get emails from anyone so you have to kill off any opportunity to send an email.
Never sell time. Develop a product or service.
Know when to fire a customer. I would rather have every customer happy than 80% happy. I would rather get rid of those customers that are not happy.
Sally Davey of Tripbod says “Time is your most previous resource. If you spend ten unit of times fixing something once it is better than spending one unit a time continually.”
Timothy O’Neil Dunne of VaultPAD, “You have to love your qualified customer. When I was on start-up team for Expedia. The Golden Rule for the first six months was that the noisiest wheel got the most attention. The first noisiest wheel – the first bug we ever fixed – is ‘Do you have my reservation?’. Fixing that problem alone saved 50% of our time.”
“Most people are one-hit wonders. They will never scale beyond the first product. Travel industry is littered with the bodies of one-hit wonders. Your customer actually wants different products. A happy customer is going to sell your product better than you,” says Tim.
TourCMS’ Alex Bainbridge says you can’t have a personal relationship with all of your customers at scale.
Sally says we would reach out to qualified customers and ask them for feedback. “It puts a lot of power into the hands of the consumer.”
Tim says of his experience at Expedia in the early day: “When we set up the customer service model, we wanted to get the best people we could. After the first two days, we realised that was a gigantic mistake. The best person to answer that person would be the one who could train that user to help themselves. For early adopters in 1996/97, their big reason was that they hated the experience of dealing with a real travel agency. So we sacked that customer service team.”
2.40pm: Fresh funding (aka: where’s the money?). Paul Smith is still with us, along with fellow panellists Sally Davey (Tripbod, now owned by Tripadvisor); Timothy O’Neil Dunne of T2Impact and Alysia Wanczyk of Seedrs. It’s moderated by Mark Frary.
“Funding is a vehicle to help you realise your ambition, rather than a rite of passage to go through,” says Sally. Family and friends helped her start - “expect to write that off.” How important is personal investment? “Very,” says Timothy. “There are two types of young entrepreneurs: those with expectations who have the magic idea who expects money to fall off the tree. Then those who are prepared to be serious, those who are prepared to suffer. Those who are prepared to risk everything.”
Alysia: “It’s really important for as long as possible to bootstrap your business. Try to make as much headway as you can in that time.” Paul - “There is no problem raising seed money. The issue if investment. It’s consistency of culture, being able to help teams make informed choices.”
So it’s about right decisions on market, model rather than money, he says. “The problem is if you spin off in different directions. Money helps more start-ups not fade away so quickly.” Funding is a multiplier: until that time, you don’t need money.” A start-up is the hardest thing in the world - and if you don’t have the time, I wouldn’t put money into you, says Paul. Sensible words.
Timothy: “Don’t listen to first guy to offer you money. Listen to lots of people and it gives you perspective.” Paul: “Be careful about giving too much away. Then you don;t have experience on board. It’s too much an art because they genuinely don’t know. Go and fin people who have done it and get advice - it’d different for every start-up.”
2pm: Now the first of our WTM Fresh sessions, looking at where to base your start-ups. We are joined by Paul Smith of ignite100, Sabine de Witte of YourAmbassadrice, Nikolaj Astrup Madsen of Workaway and Pru Ashby of London and Partners.
Paul Smith of Ignite – funded largely by private investors – by says the appeal of places like Newcastle are that they don’t have the high costs of London – £150 as opposed to £400. He says he is not seeing enough innovation in travel – “if I see another trip planning start-up then may the sun go supernova,” he says. “The problem with start-ups is that they are the new rock n roll but a lot of rock n roll bands are s**t”.
Paul adds his thoughts on publi money to support start-ups. “If you are successful you need to raise money again. The problem with public money is that you don;t have the knowledge base of investors. When you come to the next round, you have to do it from scratch.”
Sabine de Witte says Barcelona is the capital of mobile while Amsterdam has recently established as a centre for energy start-ups.
What if you have a team in different places? “Remotely you have to deal with jetlag and timezones and there is a lot of wasted time,” says Sabine.
Workaway’s Nikolaj says that location is not that important and has now set up start-up camps in global locations, including Morocco and Russia. Entrepreneurs spend a week there and do not have access to mobiles while they are away. “We see this trend with people freelancing and travelling. Entrepreneurship is about the lifestyle rather than all this talk about funding. The physical location doesn’t matter that much.”
“Is London the centre of start-ups?” we ask London and Partners’ Pru Ashby. “I think we are. We don’t intend to be Silicon Valley. We have our own assets and infrastructure.” “You have access to big companies and decision-makers in London and make things more commercially viable,” says Pru.
What about public funding? Pru says, “If you go somewhere because they are giving you a wodge of cash. That is not sustainable. In the UK, we have adjusted policy to support start-ups. We have the best tax breaks for start-ups. Seed Enterprise Investment Scheme. We have entrepreneur visas. We have R&D tax credits. A lot of what you do in software can be termed as R&D. A start-up I spoke to recently had just got back £40,000 in tax credits.”
She adds that it is not just about public funding either – pointing to the opening up of data by the UK Government.
1.30pm: Olivier Gremillion, European boss of Air BnB is sitting down for a chat show format with Mark Frary. “The goal is to make things easier for our community,” he says, when asked who AirBnB would partner with in future. There’s a business deal in place, another for travellers in Russia. “We look at a lot of relationships for different reasons.”
Geographically, they started in US. Now more than 50% of business is in Europe and region is growing fast. Focussing on Asia and new segments of travel business. “And a lot of things in the pipeline.”
Mark mentions that we have three start-up sessions to follow. What’s Air BnB’s ‘secret sauce?” There is a timing element, says Olivier - the economic crisis helped. Also, the creators were designers which helped. Advice was given to have 100 people who love you, not 1,000 who like you.
One of the founder’s first expenses was a camera - to this day, we are still providing free photography in most cities. This economically, costs originally, but benefitted the site because we have nice pictures. Interesting.
A question from Rob in the audience: which other travel sectors can benefit from sharing in same way AirBnB has? Dining - cooking for other people. Interesting. Bike and car sharing as well.
12.40pm: We are into session two and up now is Aoife Desmond, head of travel EMEA at Twitter. All our sessions this afternoon are on the glorious WTM Global Stage, AS850 at ExCeL’s eastern end.
She says Twitter now has 284 million active users who make half a billion tweets a day. “Imagine the constant travel buzz that travel marketers can tap into,” she says.
Who does she think is doing well in travel on Twitter? She says the airline KLM is one of the pioneers and cites their #happytohelp customer service campaign.
On 25 September, the day of the campaign launch, there were 68 million tweets about KLM. Overall, there were 1.8 billion impressions for KLM in September and October 2014.
She says the real-time listening opportunities offered by Twitter has never been available to brands before and that brands need to listen to both the good and bad.
“Twitter connects brands and consumers in real time like no other platform,” she says.
Now she is turning to Hyatt’s campaign in France. There were 15.4 million promoted trend impressions, 10% engagement for promoted tweets (ten times the average for general promoted tweets) and 72% increase in brand mentions for Hyatt.
“Twitter has always been mobile first since the first tweet was sent by Jack Dorsey in 2006,” she says. “We have made acquisitions, such as Gnip, but we are still mobile focused.”
Mobile commerce is growing, she says. “64% of users are influenced by Twitter when buying a product or service.”
Another statistic for you – 66% of mobile users access Twitter while watching TV in the UK. Whoa! Tourism Ireland is one of the first travel and tourism bodies to use TV targeting. The organised promoted tweets and trends around the television series Game of Thrones, which is filmed in the north of Ireland. It achieved 8.9% engagement and 9.6 million impressions.
“Video is the biggest thing that is going to hit Twitter next year,” she predicts, saying that the destination of Myrtle Beach is one of the first travel brands to work with video advertising on Twitter.
What’s new in terms of e-commerce? The Buy now button (or donate if you are a charity). “You can see the relevance of this for travel brands,” says Aoife. Consumers will be able to buy something they see on Twitter in as few as five clicks.
10.30am: First session of the day is an annual seminar on Silk Road Tourism that we help the UNWTO put on at WTM. This year marks the 20th anniversary since 19 countries along the Silk Road signed a declaration in Samarkand to promote the route. Now, 31 countries have signed up. Come along and hear about progress and a debate with Bradt Guides, Tripadvisor and Minube about how well print travel guides have fared in the past two decades - and their future, too. The seminar goes until noon in South Gallery rooms, 13-14.
Alla Peressolova, Head of the UNWTO Silk Road programme, reveals progress in helping to open up the Silk Road to tourism - for example, Kazakhstan has a new visa free regime for 10 countries including Japan, while Russia has now visa -free entry for cruise tourists calling in at St Petersburg. Two heritage corridors have been developed, from China through Kazakhstan and into Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan > Tajikistan.
Meanwhile, the Mission Routes of the Silk Road is a campaign to involve seven countries along the western stretch of the Silk Road. Read much more about this fascinating project at UNWTO Silk Road Programme.
11am: Developing the theme of corridors, Gai Jorayev, a speaker from the University College of London, talks about the categorisation of Silk Road Tourism potential. It’s very complex, this - protecting a representative selection of monuments for each place, not just the big ones. Those World Heritage properties are then linked by an overall framework.
Referring to the China-Kazakhstan-Kyrgyzstan corridor, he congratulates the three countries for actually getting agreement, no mean feat. Input into sustainable tourism has already started, with several sites along the route used for promoting the idea of the corridor. “There is an urgent need to tourism plans to be put in place to ensure sites are well prepared for an increase in visitors.” Such a route will also help address cross-border visa issues.
11.15am: Right, we’re going to get stuck into a panel debate: is the guide book dead? We’ve got Adrian Phillips, managing editor of Bradt Guides; Helena Egan, director of industry relations at Tripadvisor and Marina Badias, head of strategic partnerships at Minube.
“It’s a bleak picture,” says Adrian, as sales of guide books have dropped by 45%. AA, Time Out are diving. But Lonely Planet is doing well and Bradt has seen growth in past couple of years. “Publishers have to do is have to adapt content they provide in print. No point continuing these template of providing information they can get online.
“But value on what we can offer: expert content curated by somebody who knows what they are talking about, packaged in a form you can carry on a trek that won’t need to be recharged and is easily navigable.
Helena counters: “I love guidebooks and still like a book. Tripadvisor hasn’t killed guidebooks but those who put content on our site (reviews of restaurants, destinations etc.,) are helping to share. We like to work alongside rather than feel we are killing them.”
Marina: “We don’t travel the same way we did five years ago. We have the community of real-life travellers that encourage others to make guides. On Silk Road, people look for wifi spots so they can connect and we try to answer all those questions, have real life conversations and answer them.”
It all seems very complementary. But, as Adrian says, live and on-the-road is fine but collated should be done by an expert. Like his authors. “I cannot see where crowd source information replaces good background, etiquette information. That should be an expert, not a faceless person on social media.”
Helena of Tripadvisor rebuts the ‘faceless’ accusation: “From the beginning, we can see age categories, where they’ve travelled so you see a whole history of them. It’s about personalisation. Faceless is going away online; it’s a thing of the past. There has to be a transparency there so we can see who we’re talking to.” Interesting Tripadvisor fact: There are 170m reviews on Tripadvisor, which means each of their 60m registered reviewers has written three each.
We’ll see what happens, says Marina. Travel bloggers are new evangelists for a particular adventure. “Who knows what’s in store in that sense?”
As moderator Mark Frary points out, people like seeing their name in print and on screen. But Adrian adds: “People will get sick of 200m reviews. You will see shrinking where this novelty runs out. People want the expertise filtered and trust the reviewer. Web has become an unmanageable resource.”
Tripadvisor counters: “That’s where personalisation comes in.” One of 24 companies Tripadvisor owns, Tripbod, does that too - meeting people in cities, showing them around, giving personal info. “But where we go, I’d love to know.”
Jo from the UNWTO swings chat around to Silk Road countries - and what they should do? Adrian: “It’ a huge and complicated area. Difficult to market those countries together. Be imaginative in how you market it. Be specific what you can offer and don’t use platitudes.” Says Helena: “Make sure product is right.” And Marina: “Silk Road route is a dream for any traveller. You need connectivity.”
Last thought: Bradt has had chats with Silk Road Programme about how to cover the route. It’s possible to cut up the route into sections that people can do. But that’s not economic for Bradt. So could be online, with local content and live, personalised information added to. Can combine all three speakers into one project. Interesting…