Feedback on ITB Berlin 2010

This week, I was attending the giant travel fair ITB in Berlin. It was my 3rd time and I have to say not much has changed since my last attendance in 2005. I still believe this is the biggest travel trade fair in Europe by far. The way the Messe is spread across different buildings on 3 different floors makes the event a rather big maze compared to other trade fairs like BIT in Milano or World Travel Market in London.

For what is worth, this edition of ITB was very productive for me in terms of reaching the right people and a variety of companies related to the hotel industry. This is way better than World Travel Market in my mind. I have spent most of the time in Hall 8.1 and 9 where you could meet all hotel technology companies (Protel, Ideas SAS, HotelRez, TravelClick, Fastbooking, RateTiger...) GDS (Sabre, Amadeus and Travelport were all present this year), hotel groups (Hilton, IHG, Accor, Starwood...) and of course representation companies (Leading Hotels of the World, Design Hotels, Great Hotels of the World, Epoque Hotels...). Some of the stands were really impressive in terms of size and set ups. I was particularly impressed by Design Hotels, Protel, Air Berlin and Oberoi.

In terms of setting up meetings, I found the meeting request feature on the site very helpful if you didn't know the people you wanted to meet. Only one request wasn't taken into account.

Besides the fact I was pretty busy meeting different companies in the last 3 days, I spent a bit of time between appointments to see what was being said at the PhocusWright event and the Bloggers Summit. It looks like the event was well attended (same thing on conferences organized by ITB on the ground floor) and as always attracted keynote speakers who could bring something new on the table. The panel I remember the most is when Guido from HappyHotelier.com was sharing a panel with Yen Lee from Uptake, Detleg Meyer from HeritageConsult and Jonah Sigel from PlanetEye on how Social Media could boost the bottom line. I am still puzzled about why the success story of Guido on his blog hasn't been repeated with other hoteliers around the world. I don't believe every one can be as passionate and funny as Guido and also let's not forget that The Hague hotelier has a fantastic domain name (eg happyhotelier.com). Kevin from Tnooz was asking which department the blogging/social media activity should belong to: marketing, pr, agency...and who should be the voice of the blog. My belief is that is it not of the above but all combined. Depending of the size of the company and also if you have true evangelists about your business within your staff, everything is possible. I don't think everyone in a company can run a blog and be as good as Bill Marriott with the On the Move blog launched some years ago. My advice is to find ambassadors within your team that you can trust 200% that you can let him or her writes about the values of your product, what you are trying to achieve, talk to customers and so on. But let's not forget the rule of a successful corporate blog. Do not just write about your products. Cover also the industry you're in, the issues you are facing. This would capture a much loyal and dedicated audience.

Time is now to come back to London life with plenty of things to follow up with the people I met this week.

Here's a list of bloggers who covered the event as well:

Yen Lee from Uptake

Robert Cole from RockCheetah

Gesa from Escapio

(more to come I am sure...)

Comments

[hotel in chandigarh]

our story is interesting, informative and complete. Nice job, 5 stars.

[Happy Hotelier]

Thanks Guillaume for the thumbs up!

[cheaphotelqueen]

I think the affair was a good way of building bridges for nations to show what they have. I wasn't there but as I searched the net about it is fine with me. I got interested with it because I'm also connected with travel and tourism. Thanks for the post.

[office space manila]

I was so disappointed to hear and know that the event has already passed though I find this story great, I'm still so pissed not being there.

[Guillaume Thevenot]

@Jonah I wish I could have more time to attend more session on Thursday

@Dahl not sure what you mean by together?

@Josiah no worries. I am sure we will meet one day

[Josiah]

I was very disappointed to miss this event, but thanks for putting together this summary!

[Dahl Tours and Safaris]

I was there promoting my Tanzanian Safari company. I think next year I will go together with you guys. What do you think?

[jonah]

great that you enjoyed the chat.

Jonah from Planeteye