Our Approach

Affordable Accessible Events in Emerging Markets

Our approach is to develop the sector through lobbying for change in e-commerce and business facility and via direct engagement with the tourism sector via events- including business facilitation conferences and training seminars.

Conferences

We bring together local destination managers, tourism businesses- as well as marketing and technology professionals to raise awareness and demonstrate the power and potential of tourism technology and social media. Into these forums, we bring global leaders from the tourism and technology trade to address the local markets, alongside demonstrations of new products, services and technologies.

These events are engaging, entertaining and challenging, with multimedia presentations from travel businesses and intermediaries, bloggers, social networks, media bodies and online tourism success stories from around the world. These events are designed to be appropriate and beneficial to destination manager, tourism businesses and stakeholders- especially small to medium tourism enterprise (SMEs).

Critically, our conferences provide a business platform for companies looking to enter new emerging markets and to develop relationships, client bases and grow inventory.

Seminars

We also hold seminars that incorporate practical training sessions with broader discussions of distribution, e-commerce, regulation and destination strategies for management and marketing. We tailor make our seminars for each region- using our experience of training and development in other emerging market destinations- to be sure that we provide world class but also extremely appropriate content and training.

Our focus is on the development of practical, locally appropriate solutions that can be implemented immediately- that are realistic, affordable and attainable by a small to medium tourism business with an internet connection and reasonable IT literacy.

Broader sessions address the initial development of a larger Digital Strategy for the destination- focusing on public-private sector partnerships to develop content management capability and database development.

Our approach is always practical, based in real world examples and includes locally available solutions and tools.

Absolutely no jargon is used and all content is appropriate for the audience and does not require any technical knowledge beyond basic computer literacy.

Support for SMEs and Students

We always work with our corporate sponsors and partners to be sure that our events are made available at an affordable rate and in cases of identified and approved SMEs- free of charge.

We encourage participation by the commercial, banking and marketing and IT sectors so that they can identify and take up new challenges, products and services to develop the digital sector locally.

Research

We are piloting a new project to produce market research via a survey system used through membership of the social network Wayn.com who have a membership of 15 Million active independent travellers. We will be conducting research through this network for each region that we operate in and then publishing reports at each event.

Ongoing Support

Beyond our events- we provide ongoing support to the sector. This is achieved by creating support networks through social media by which attendees can communicate to us and to each other. All of our events are held annually, and delegates can return to upgrade and improve their skills and see the latest technologies in action.

Additionally, during our seminars we identify areas of digital development and capacity building within the sector and work to provide support in these areas as the destination community grows online.