Crying
24 Jan
2022

Let’s Get Emotional

 There are very few other products being sold online that have as much emotional pulling power as a holiday. A vacation is the stuff of dreams, but also of detailed ongoing research and of high capital outlay. For many families, the most they will spend on a single item in a typical year is the purchase of their annual holiday.
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Portugal Beach
14 Jun
2021

The travel industry is in Government induced turmoil

 There was light at the end of the tunnel. The “traffic light” system that categorised destinations as Green, Amber or Red seemed to make sense. Here was a way that destinations could slowly but surely be brought back online as viable, convenient, holiday hotspots.
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Monarch
25 Sep
2019

Thomas Cook and Butterflies

 It’s about two years ago that my Monarch Airlines tickets became worthless when the Monarch Travel Group collapsed. I wasn’t too badly off.
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The Disloyal Customer
17 Dec
2018

The Disloyal Customer

 I was at a conference the other day and, whilst awaiting the first speaker’s presentation, I was chatting with the lady next to me. I am not sure how it came up in conversation, but the subject we started talking about was customer loyalty programmes and their associated loyalty cards.
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Multi Modal
28 Oct
2018

Is Multi-Modal the next big thing?

 Quite a few years ago (pre-Internet) I was commissioned to carry out a feasibility study for a large telecommunications organisation. The idea was to test the concept of an electronic transport marketplace (ETM) covering the whole of mainland United Kingdom.
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Messages
23 Jul
2018

Getting the Message

 The news that Etihad passengers will be able communicate with the airline via WhatsApp got me thinking about my own messaging apps. I use quite a few. On my mobile I have Whatsapp, Facebook Messenger, Skype, LinkedIn, Snapchat, Viber and good old SMS. Apart from SMS, they all provide global communication for free.
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Smart Tourism
17 Apr
2018

Smart Tourism 2020

 One of the seminar sessions I am running at this year’s Arabian Travel Market is called Smart Tourism 2020.
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Package Holidays
22 Jan
2018

The Package Holiday is Alive and Well

 Expedia has carried out a research study in partnership with The Center for Generational Kinetics. The study is called “Generations on the Move - A deep dive into multi-generational travel trends and how their habits will impact the future of the industry.” It is a U.S. centric study, interviewing 1,000 adults age 18 to 65 but I do think that the results have global applicability.
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Emotipiechart
14 Aug
2017

What’s love got to do with it?

 In the last month I was invited by an airline to contribute to a strategy day, an away day for their senior executives to ponder the bigger picture and how they might take their airline forward in the next few years. A few external experts such as me had been invited along to the strategy day. Our purpose was to provide some food for thought to catalyse discussion amongst the executives present.
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12 Jun
2017

The lesson we can learn from BA

 There are plenty of opinions to be heard about the tech problems that British Airways suffered and the way the downtime was handled. It surely has to rank as one of the worst public relations disasters in the airline’s history.
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