PR
Samoa skips a day The newspapers today are full of the news that the Pacific nation of Samoa has decided to skip a day by moving to the other side of the International Date Line. The idea is to be in roughly the same time zone as trading partners in Australia and New Zealand, but [...]
Marketing Sheffield and other secondary cities Just before I toddled off to Australia for a couple of weeks in mid-February, I read an interesting interview on Sheffield Blog with Wendy Ulyett, tourism manager for Marketing Sheffield. Among the topics covered were why Sheffield is now being promoted separately from Yorkshire South (and let’s face it, [...]
Continue reading about A destination marketing dilemma: How do you sell a city like Sheffield?
Tomorrow, I am flying to Australia via Taiwan with China Airlines. After booking this, I was prompted to look at what you get when you put “China Airlines” into a Google image search. It is mighty encouraging… But the experience got me thinking. How do other airlines come across in pictures? So I put their [...]
Much ado about Naples On Wednesday morning, I was putting together an article about York. I’d just written that Laterooms.com is a decent place to look for deals on B&Bs when Rotterdam-based travel writer Shaney Hudson said something rather interesting on Twitter. Shaney had spotted a sizable chunk of her article on Naples quoted in [...]
Continue reading about A dubious approach to website content
London visit Over the New Year I was down in London researching a few stories that shall no doubt send readers over the world into uncontrolled rapture in the coming months. I stayed at the Cumberland Hotel near Marble Arch and I wasn’t overly impressed with it. Out of curiosity, I thought I’d have a [...]
Continue reading about The great hotel room lottery: Renovations and reservations
What follows is, roughly, what I said in my presentation at Travel Blog Camp 2010 in London earlier this week. Other aspects of the speech – ‘What blogging and tweeting has done for me’ and ‘Models for monetising blogs’ can be found on separate pages. Outdated labels I’m a firm believer in the need to [...]
Continue reading about What journalists, bloggers and marketers can learn from each other
Travel in newspapers and magazines Despite theoretically making a living by writing for them, I rarely read travel magazines and newspaper travel sections. With the odd noble exception, I find that they just don’t interest me. And there are two possible explanations for this – 1) I’m weird and they just don’t speak to me [...]
Continue reading about What is wrong with travel writing – in microcosm
That sound you just heard was me hefting my considerable weight onto an already creaking bandwagon. But following on from Ewen Bell‘s magnificent video explanation of how to become a travel writer, I thought I’d give a few marketing tips in a visual format as well… I feel that I ought to, at this point, [...]
Ten tips for getting yourself noticed: PART ONE In recent times, I have come across a number of really interesting projects – be they unusual tours, genuinely excellent B&Bs or quirky experiences. And there seem to be some common themes with them. Firstly, they’re small, independent operations run by one or two people without [...]
Targeting high-end travellers A common theme tends to emerge when I speak to tourist board representatives. The new strategy, it seems largely across the board, is to target affluent, high-end travellers. The idea is to look for those who spend fairly big while they’re on holiday rather than go for numbers and appeal to mass-market [...]
Continue reading about Why tourist boards shouldn’t forget about the backpackers