Reading through the tweets that have come along all day, courtesy of various people attending this “high-tech” summit, one has to stifle a bit of a yawn. It’s not that the stuff coming out is not valid, some of it is interesting – the thing is, that it is in the forum of this “thing of tomorrow” summit arena – and what seems to get many excited is stuff that traditional high street agents have known all along.
Take the statement from Frommers about pictures being most important and video not so important. The Director of Frommers, no doubt, felt like he was talking to his Year 6 class. This is why traditional agents liked brochures (I am talking pre-universal-internet, here) – and still do. We have known this all along, that pictures count. We also knew that people rarely, if ever, use videos – or CD’s – as witness the number of dusty video tapes that used to adorn some forgotton backwater of any agents shop. Yet, this information was picked up by nearly all and re-tweeted ad nauseam. We traditional agents knew that, tell us something we don’t know.
Then people ask about the silver market and are people missing out. Well in the on-line world, they may be; here again, the traditional agents sigh: Yes, we know about that – actualy, traditional agents know quite a bit more than that – they pursue all markets – hard (we have to) – if a client has money and an agent can get it off them – he or she will. We have heard it all before, the pink market was another one (late to mid 90’s, I believe).
Then again, the Bing bloke says that 25% of searches go straight to the back button, back to the search page. Reflecting on this, I can only assume that Bing is not very good at producing search results, if people have to have another go …. perhaps what one is looking for, is on page 3.
“41% of cruises were booked by Daily Mail readers”, thunders another. Really? You believe that? Without so much as a by-your-leave, this nugget is picked upon, without any form of verification and tweeted, again ad nauseam. These techy types will believe anything. 41% of Daily Mail readers book cruises, possibly. The Daily Mail advertising sales department really scored a hit, there!
Step forward the Bing Bloke for another nugget: It takes 2-4 weeks of research from first search to purchase. Again, if I was Mr Bing, I think I would be a tad more cautious with bandering my weaknesses. Any self respecting high street agent would be upset if it took longer than 20 to 40 minutes from first encounter to a sale. True, we allow people to take the brochure away, but with some well placed advice and good agent guidance, let’s say that we would see our client back in 2 to 4 days. Internet sales types clearly have an awful lot to learn.
Whilst we are on about “too much information” or rather, being careful with what you share – Lawrence Hunt said that lowcosttravel group is the 20th fastest growing business in the UK. Now, no-one in travel wants to hear that. You see, many of us remember other “fast growing” travel groups – let’s start with Court Line, Intasun, Exchange Travel…. Not to mention Xcel and a few others. We, who are really in travel, don’t want “fast growing”. We want to hear the adjectives such as “sensible”, “well-established”, “prudent” and above all, “reliable” – not “fast-growing”. True, there are some of that ilk that we have lost over time, but there will always be some fall out.
There seems to be an issue with many of the speakers and, I fear, those who are sending out the tweets. They clearly must know a lot about technical stuff, about the web – and about re-inventing the wheel – yet many seem to know naff-all about travel.
