After 9 consecutive years visiting the World Travel Market - "WTM" for regular visitors - you can probably imagine that you can get a bit blase and bored by the same old stands and the lack of changes in the massive exhibition that is Excel at Custom House in East London.
The WTM is still divided in regions like Europe, Asia, Africa, America and so on without forgetting the Global Village where I have spent most of the time discussing with hotel providers, technology companies or third parties. The Monday and Tuesday are crowded days when you can't barely find a seat at lunch time to eat your £6 burger from Gourmet Burger Kitchen with your £2 crap coffee from the clueless barista in the middle of the main central alley.
On Thursday, you are fine though. Exhibitors are gone for the day probably doing some shopping in Central London whilst taking advantage of the low Pound / Euro conversion leaving other clueless people looking after late visitors trying to fill their bags with as many brochures as possible. Oh and Thursday is also "Students Day" highly recognizable with their green badge (nothing to do with environmental friendly) and their number one goal: get as many freebies from exhibitors in less than 2 hours. After 2 hours, these students start to feel exhausted and would rather go back to their computer at home and logging in on their Facebook account to tell their peers how not exciting fantastic the day was. What strikes me is to see that the number of kids who want to be a travel agent doesn't seem to be diminishing year after year. In fact, it looks like the number is increasing. Is that a good sign of how school are promoting a certain industry vs. others?
Back to the exhibitors. 2009 vintage is the year where you could really notice big brands skipping this year WTM edition.
Examples: Hilton, Starwood, Accor, Pegasus, Utell Hotels...
I believe there were more hotel representation companies or franchisers than integrated hotel chains. Apparently, they are here to make sure their hotel properties customers feel they could help them to bring more business for next year. But there is a lot of debate these days about how expensive these representative companies can be for independent properties. Some have already planned to pull out from luxury rep companies because they don't see the value they use to get in the good old days of traditional distribution channels.
What was different this year - for me at least - was the Get Funded Show organized by Eye for Travel on the 1st floor in one of those seminar rooms. 18 travel startups were invited to pitch (actually they paid to pitch) in front of angels, VCs and entretpreneurs on the Wednesday and Thursday morning, a group of people voted the best startup in terms of investment, best idea and growth perspectives. But let me write a quick summary of this specific event in a separate post...
So the question remains, will I go to WTM in 2010? Probably yes as long as I see opportunities going there.
Oh did I forget to mention that Danni Minogue was attending WTM 2009 as well. I have missed her actually since she was late on Tuesday coming to Etihad stand...
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