Trend Watch
Trend Alert: Pinterest for Brands
May 10, 2012
By Nicole Petrak, ATTA Special Projects & Assistant Editor to AdventureTravelNews You’ve likely heard of Pinterest by now — the two-year-old photo bookmarking site is being hailed as the hottest site of 2012 all over trade and mainstream media. Pinterest allows users to “pin” images and video content they like directly from the web or from other people’s Pinterest accounts and organize them via themed pinboards (note that Facebook currently does not allow people to pin photos from the site). People can create as many boards as they like, search others’ pinboards to find topics of interest to them, and “follow” any boards or pinners they want; there’s no option to create private pinboards but people can choose to allow or limit who comments on their boards. Infographic from Mashable The result: a cascading, online stream of visually-rich content that tends to spread like wildfire through active pinners — a demographic group that is skewed towards retail-conscious... Read More →
Trend Watch
Brazil Tourism: Forget the Gringos
April 15, 2012
According to a recent beyondbric blog post in the Financial Times website, Brazil’s tourism industry is the world’s least international, with 95 percent of tourism income coming from locals traveling domestically: “Around the world, the rough average is two thirds domestic spending and one third foreign,” says David Scowscill, CEO of the WTTC. “The outliers are the BRIC [Brazil, Russia, India & China] countries, especially Brazil and China, where members of the new middle classes are starting to travel for the first time, mostly within their own countries,” he says. For more detailed info and analysis, read the entire article. Read More →
Trend Watch
Can Social Media Lift Travel? Two Takes
April 12, 2012
Two articles recently discussed the large but often unquantifiable role social media plays in booking travel, as well as innovations headed our way. Reuters quoted the 2011 Euromonitor Report, saying “Measuring the impact of social media advertising is difficult due to the impossibility to identify the impact of the different factors, and evaluation is often of a rather qualitative nature.” Most subjects interviewed in the article hailed social media as an engagement tool but admitted it has yet to translate directly to bookings. A new spate of social travel planning start-ups has been attempting to bridge this gap, by using social graphs to encourage people to plan trips through both their freinds’ and strangers’ online content and reviews: According to Adam Medros, VP global product, TripAdvisor, “The wisdom of crowds remains invaluable but your friends’ advice is an additional layer of highly personalised, relevant and trusted advice, and we think... Read More →
Trend Watch
European Tourism in 2011 – Trends & Prospects (Q4/2011)
January 31, 2012
Brussels – The European Travel Commission (ETC) has just published its fourth quarterly report on European Tourism in 2011 – Trends & Prospects. The following gives a brief overview of the report for the fourth quarter of 2011. The full report can be downloaded from ETC’s corporate website under the link below. • Travel to European destinations in 2011 has exceeded the prior peak set in 2008. • Impressively, 22 of 23 reporting countries show international visitor growth in 2011, ranging from 3% in the UK to more than 20% in Latvia and Lithuania. And 24 of 26 countries show gains in hotel occupancy in 2011. • Total international visits are estimated to have surged 6% last year, while hotel occupancy rates rose 3.2%, indicating that domestic demand lagged behind international demand. • While the travel recovery has been quite robust, signs of eroding gains began to appear, as expected, in the second half of 2011. • Data on visitation and nights from TourMIS (http://www.tourmis.info/index_e.html)... Read More →
Featured Article Trend Watch
2012 At a Glance: Travel Trends by Region
January 18, 2012
By Nicole Petrak, Assistant Editor to AdventureTravelNews & Special Projects to ATTA Note: AdventureTravelNews offers the following piece as a general geographic overview of global tourism trends as we begin 2012. The trends and themes mentioned here will be covered in more detailed reports in the coming months, along with new topics of interest as they arise. Please submit to editor@adventuretravel.biz relevant trend ideas, resources, reports and other information you believe the ATTA should consider to better inform the adventure tourism industry. Credit: Flickr user M4D GROUP 2011 was a turbulent year for the world, and thus for travel. Disruptions in weather, politics, economics, fuel prices and technologies stole the scene. While economic recovery appeared to steady itself early in the year, since then, the far-reaching, European debt crisis and financial stagnation in the U.S. economy continues to cast shadows and uncertainty. The World Travel Market (WTM) 2011 Global Trends... Read More →
Trend WatchMarketing: Ten Consumer Trends for 2012 in Two Minutes
December 21, 2011
Assistant Editor’s Note: We are sharing this brief video on consumer trends (for the United States and the United Kingdom) for 2012 as it is relevant to how our members will need to think about marketing to these potential customers in the coming year. It was created by JWT Intelligence, a marketing communications brand with major corporate clients. The video is an abbreviated overview of a larger survey that can be purchased from the company for more detailed information. Read More →
Trend Watch
The Prophet of the Coming Aging Boom
December 21, 2011
A recent article from the November 2011 issue of Forbes magazine profiles consultant and author Ken Dychtwald, founder of the Age Wave, who urges businesses to understand and proactively market to the tidal wave of aging American baby boomers – those born between 1946 and 1964, a number that reaches 78 million people and, according to Dychtwald, is responsible for 80 percent of the growth of the United States population. Dychtwald, whose has consulted on boomer products for clients such as Centrum, Johnson & Johnson and Anheuser-Busch, also sees massive financial opportunity for brands and businesses where others only see the downsides to an aging population, as this group creates a “vast market for a potential explosion of products and services, from new dating websites to longevity insurance to new kinds of food.” The later years are becoming a time for reinvention, experimentation and consumption. In a poll he did for financial services firm SunAmerica this year,... Read More →
Featured Article Trend Watch
Gamification – Coming Soon to an Adventure Near You?
December 14, 2011
No longer the dominion of geeky young men, gaming has hit the mainstream with people of all ages playing on smartphones, tablets, Wii’s and more. How airlines, hotels, tour operators and more are turning players into customers. Editor’s Note: The following “gamification” trend piece is offered for awareness building versus an explicit recommendation to pursue the concept. Future ATN articles are expected to provide more background and examples about how gamification is and/or might be applied in the adventure tourism sector. By Nicole Petrak, Assistant Editor & Special Projects to ATTA The buzz around ‘gamification’ has been building for awhile, with research and strategic consulting firms like Gartner (technology specialization) and M2 Research (gaming specialization) predicting the trend will soon become widely popular across most major industries. The term ‘gamification’ means taking gaming dynamics and applying them to other areas – business,... Read More →
Business Insights By the Numbers Social Media Trend Watch
Social Media Round-up: Why Facebook Is Now Your Most Important Tool (or Not) and How to Use it (Or Not)
October 12, 2011
by Nicole Petrak, Assistant Editor and ATTA Special Projects Unless you have been out in the field for the last few weeks (with your head buried in the sand), you’ve seen the buzz around the new Facebook changes, which have drawn everything from near rapturous reviews from techie press to renewed public outcry around privacy issues. Whatever your take, its clear these updates are going to continue, and as they develop, likely translate into big opportunities for businesses and brands to extend their reach to consumers – check out a more in-depth analysis of these shifts here. Facebook is moving full steam ahead in their attempt to become the global interface for people to connect, share, and increasingly research, influence, shop and purchase. According to The L2 Digital IQ Index®: Travel, a study by digital research & consulting organization L2 Think Tank, Facebook already dominates the social web when it comes to the travel industry (a key section in their report is titled... Read More →
Must Read/View Trend Watch
Google, Facebook and TripAdvisor Weigh in on Upcoming Travel Trends
September 16, 2011
In a recent guest article on Tnooz, Marco Saio, Director of Global Research and Projects at EyeforTravel, polled key people from Google, TripAdvisor and Facebook to see what they think will be the next major trends in travel, given the current disruptive trends (flash deals and tablets, anyone?) and the quickly changing landscape of both travel tech and consumer preferences and behavior. Some of their key takeaways are excerpted below. For Rohit Dhawan, the Lead Product Manager at Facebook, it is the very nature of the web which is shifting to social, not just individual sites and services, meaning that (real) people are at the center of marketing like never before. The era of the “on-going, two-way dialogue between brands and their customers” is truly here: Because of this connection, we’re seeing that businesses can now achieve effective word-of-mouth marketing at scale for the first time. We’ve always known that the best recommendations come from your own friends... Read More →
