If you’ve been wondering why I haven’t posted anything for a while, it’s because a) I’ve been super busy with Rezgo and 2) I haven’t had anything positive to say about the tour and activity sector for a while.  Since the release of the PhoCusWright report last year, that we helped sponsor, I’ve seen so many new tour and activity start-ups pop up.  But none of them have really impressed me much.  Some of...

One of my favorite things about speaking at conferences and seminars around the World is what I learn while I’m there.  I often find that I learn just as much being at these confernences as the attendees learn from me.  One such experience was at the Creative Lapland Seminar in Rovaniemi, Finland.  The theme of the seminar this year was “The Best Show Cases in the Experience Economy Focused on Tourism”.  My contribution was...

It seems I travel to so many of these conferences now that it is difficult to identify key take-aways from each one.  The thing I enjoy most about these conferences is the collaborating and sharing that comes from an industry that is, in all other cases, extremely competitive.  Here is what I learned from IFITT’s Enter 2009 in Amsterdam: 1. Don’t be afraid to try new things with social media. Many of the sessions, including the DMO...

Well, last year I suggested that the top 5 trends for 2008 would be: Increase in mobile travel. Niche travel social networks would sprout. The big three would not go anywhere (in hindsight, not really a prediction). Start of Intelligent Agents (symantic search) Long tail would shift I would argue that all of these happened in 2008 although perhaps not to the degree that I would have expected.  My predictions for 2009 are based somewhat on the...

I had the chance to participate in the Enter 2008 Conference held in Innsbruck, Austria last week. “Organised by the International Federation for Information Technology and Travel & Tourism (IFITT), ENTER 2008 offers a unique forum for academics, industry and government to present and debate state-of-the-art research and industry case studies on the application of information and communications technologies to tourism and...