Online Revealed

Bob Mowat of the Canadian Travel Press offered a summary of a lively panel discussion from last week’s Hotel Association Conference in Tuesday’s CTC Tourism Daily. Patricia Brusha, Co-Founder of A Couple of Chicks e-Marketing and Co-chair of Online Revealed was joined by Tom Price of the Ottawa Convention and Visitors Bureau, Sean Shannon of Expedica.ca and Ron Andruff of Tralliance Corporation to discuss hot topics in online marketing. 

The session asked the panelists how the web and the hotel web site can be used as an integral part of the marketing and sales strategy, whether or not investing in web design really makes a difference, and how exposure be maximized on travel intermediary sites such as Hotels.ca and Expedia?  That was a lot to cover in an hour!

Check out Bob Mowat’s full report here.

At last week’s annual B.C. Tourism Industry Conference in Victoria (a great event in an amazing Canadian city!) I met many of you who are hungry for the “back to basics “got to do’s” in online marketing for 2007.  Although I hear this quite often, I don’t believe that the same “got to do’s” apply to every tourism business.  This is why we have broken the Online Revealed workshop sessions into 4 unique tracks.  SEO will always be a hot topic, but once you are beyond basics of online distribution – there is a world wide web of opportunities out there to explore!  Using intermediaries properly, understanding the true cost per acquisition of those channels compared with more direct-to-consumer channels like Pay per Click.  What is this new “social media” everyone is talking about?  How do we use this new online space to interact with customers?  Do we even want to interact at this level with our customers?  Do we have a choice?  Will embracing new media like Blogs and online social forums improve your conversion rates or should you fear having your consumers talk about your brand?

This year’s Online Revealed event will tackle these issues and more.  We might need more than two days!