Travel Inspirers. New “cooperative” of travel bloggers

Yesterday I was invited to the launch event of an interesting new initiative from a group of 12 of the most professional travel bloggers in Spain. The influence these guys have on the sector is evident from the number of tourist boards, communications agencies, airlines, hoteliers, etc. that accepted their invitation to attend the event (taking a whole morning away from the office).

I have been following the development in the relationship between bloggers and destinations with a close professional interest as they are already excellent allies in the promotion of outbound tourism to the Spanish market and potentially they could become the main influencers and opinion formers. I admit that I also have a personal interest in seeing this happen because many of those now writing about destinations in blogs have for years been working with destinations offline and have become personal friends with whom I have shared travels and tribulations. I was therefore delighted, and almost proud, to see a highly professional presentation from a highly motivated and organized group of professionals.

Indeed “professional” is probably the key word here as ultimately what we are witnessing is the professionalization of the travel blogger. To some of you this might represent a conflict in terms, “were travel blogs not supposed to be more credible precisely because they were not written for money?”, well in my view the answer is “no”. Blogs are credible because they are written by people with first hand experience of the place they are writing about and because they are independent and unique in their criteria and way of communicating that experience. If the owner of the blog happens to be a professional writer or photographer or a professional traveller and story teller then this should improve the experience for the reader/follower of the blog and thus the influence of the blog. I agree that one of the great things about social media is that anyone can share anything with anyone and that peer-to-peer or friend-to-friend recommendations are incredibly value for tourism destinations but I also believe that anyone has the right to make a career out of a passion…specially if that passion is for sharing something as time-consuming and expensive as traveling around the world.

For a couple of years now some of the more conscientious bloggers (not to say professional as technically they are not professionals until they make a living out of their blog), have been talking about how they can make some money, if not a living, from their blogs. This debate got off to the worst possible start as bloggers started, in my opinion, by barking up the wrong tree and attacking tourist boards and destinations for not paying them to write about their destinations. Bloggers didn’t understand the reality of destination marketing organizations (and to be fair, many destinations didn’t understand the reality of the bloggers but for now bloggers need the support of the destinations more than the destinations need the bloggers). Destinations simply couldn’t understand how a blogger could expect them not only to invite them, all expenses paid, to experience the destination but also pay them to write about it in their blog. For years, reasoned the NTOs, national newspapers and TV crews have never asked for a penny so who do these bloggers think they are. The frustration and friction grew as bloggers started talking amongst themselves online, particularly on Twitter and Facebook and unchecked by the destinations (who chose not to join the debate or never realized it was going on) they stirred themselves into a frenzy of self importance and radicalism. The hardcore stirrers became known by tourist boards, communication agents and moderate or amateur bloggers as “the Taliban”. This conversation was going nowhere as everyone was talking, with or without criteria, and no-one was listening. Worse still bloggers started to realize that they ran the risk of biting of the hand that admittedly might not be feeding them but was at least the only helping hand offering any support at all. Meanwhile there were a couple of incidents where inexperienced tourist boards tried to organize blog-trips without understanding that the needs of bloggers are different to those of traditional media trips and the bloggers aired their criticism of the organization online. A single post criticizing a tourist board or their PR agency is to hungry bloggers like a fat cow to a river full of hungry piranhas, in seconds they appear from nowhere and start taking vicious little bites at anything. Each little piranha bite would be relatively harmless but in a frenzy they could soon rip a destination’s image apart.

The whole panorama was getting a little scary and totally out of hand.

It was about this stage that we decided to try to help the bloggers (those that wanted to) make an income out of their blog and work with the destinations to help them make money without necessarily being the ones to pay them. If a destination hosts a blogger and helps them travel they are essentially paying for the raw material from which they can craft something that someone will be prepared to buy (and the main commodity online is influence). We organized a small event in our office where we invited interested bloggers to a think tank about social travel which we called the Social Travel Lab and one of the main conclusions of this event was that bloggers needed to band together in order to offer possible sponsors (be they destinations or others) with interesting metrics that can prove without doubt the return on investment of any potential patron.

This is exactly what the bloggers who stood up today and with justified pride proclaimed “soy Travel Inspirer” are doing and I think they are, at last, on the right track towards the future of online destination influence. The presentation was impeccable. Video, photos, clear arguments supported by independent quotes and statistics, case studies and hard facts. There is a tremendous charm about the amateur blogger and I sincerely hope there will always be vocational travelers to share their experiences for the pure satisfaction of sharing but as a professional destination marketer it will be a lot easier to do business with business minded professionals and Travel Inspirers look like they are just that. Social media marketing is about listening to your clients to understand and empathize before you engage and it is ironic that as social media experts, travel bloggers jumped straight into the engagement stage. Today I am delighted to say that these 12 professionals have listened to the destinations, have put themselves in their shoes and have given them what they need.

I’ll no doubt write more about Travel Inspirers as it is very early days and they themselves say the project is and experiment and very much work in progress but for now I can only commend them all on their initiative and offer my support as we learn together.

Courtesy of http://www.viajablog.com

Travel Bloggers Meeting Malaga

Some time ago I wrote about the Travel Bloggers Meeting organized by my colleague Eddy Lara Brito and fellow blogging professional Vitoria Rodriguez. Here is a video they have done to summarize the event.

Spanish Economy explained

At last good news relating to Spanish economics. (Well I bet that’s got your attention!). Yes the good news is that there is a real expert who understands the Spanish economy and can explain it to you for free, (no, it’s not me I’m afraid!), the bad news is he is not in government.

If you’ve stumbled across this blog using google it is quite likely that you are in one of four situations:

1.You are considering investing in promoting your destination or tourism product in Spain

2. You are already here in some form or other and are looking for data, tips on the ground insight that might help you grow your business and thus prove you made the right decision.

3. You are lost

4. You are a competitor of mine (in which case please get to point 3 above!)

In either case 1 or 2 you will need to know exactly what is going on in Spain’s turbulent economy and how this will effect outbound travel. I’ll do my best to help with the second part of the question but frankly I am completely out of my depth for the first (but then, so too are the vast majority of the Spanish population and apparently the totality of Spanish politicians). For a real understanding of Spain’s economy I suggest you, like I, follow EDWARD HUGH‘s excellent blog on the subject SPAIN ECONOMY WATCH. Based in Barcelona, Edward goes beyond the numbers and stats to explain better than anyone else I have found, online or off, not only what is going on but also why it is happening and he even has a shot at predicting what will happen in the future. Edward Hugh’s understands the politics and the economics of  Spain and has a clear and candid style (sometimes alarmingly so) when painting the big picture.

Definitely recommended reading therefore but not for the feint of heart. I recommend Edward’s blog with some trepidation as it might completely put you off this growing (yes Edward it really is growing!) and potentially profitable outbound tourism market. So do follow Spain Economy Watch but please promise to come back here for the second part of the story…the stormy but less depressing business climate for the outbound tourist market from Spain.

Barcelona Airport Launch Blog

Barcelona Airport  have just launched their new blog IN ENGLISH! Obviously the objective is to support their efforts to position Barcelona’s El Prat airport as the incoming airport of choice but on the understanding the “what flies in must fly out” there is bound to be some useful departure data too. www.flytobarcelona.org