World Travel Market unveils blogging programme

Four seminars featuring top travel bloggers and travel marketing specialists will debate topical issues over two days at World Travel Market.

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Four seminars featuring top travel bloggers and travel marketing specialists will debate topical issues for the blogging and travel sectors over two days at World Travel Market.

The sessions on November 4 and 5 will be moderated by Travel Bloggers Unit founder Oliver Gradwell, who has overseen previous WTM blogging programmes.

The first session, ‘Bloggers & tour operators: A recipe for success?’, sees Gradwell joined by Neil Lapping, founder of walking and cycling holiday specialist Macs Adventure; Lauren Aloise, founder and a tour guide at Madrid Food Tours and Kate Kenward, executive director of the Association of Independent Tour Operators.

It will be followed by an hour-long discussion called ‘Looking beyond travel blogging…’ discussing how brands with a specific niche could work with bloggers outside the travel sector, and features two family bloggers: Sally Whittle and Mark Richards.

They will be joined by Gemma Seager, who blogs about travel and fashion under the name Retro Chick, and Verity Ramsay, representing Tourism Malaysia.

The following day’s blogging programme kicks off with an hour-long session dubbed ‘Real time storytelling: More than just stunning’, providing travel industry marketeers with guidance and examples of how real-time blogger content can be used.

Speakers include blogger Sarah Lee, editor of the Live Share Travel website; Steve Dunne, chairman of travel industry marketing and PR specialist Brighter Group and Martina Jamnig, a press officer with the Austrian National Tourist Office.

The final seminar will be ‘Video blogging and the future of travel content creation’, examining how and why travel marketeers should adopt video blogging as part of their marketing strategy.

Two of the speakers are bloggers who use videos on their websites: Cailin O’Neil of Travel Yourself and Steve Hänisch from Back-Packer.org.

They will be joined by Debbie Hindle, managing director of travel PR and representation experts Four bgb, and Jody Diamond, chief executive and president of Diamond PR, which specialises in travel, tourism and lifestyle.

WTM senior director Simon Press said: “This is the fourth year of WTM’s blogging programme, and it grows each year, reflecting the expansion of this dynamic sector.

“We’re expecting our 2014 programme to be very popular again, especially as we will have plenty of bloggers at WTM for other events, such as our new WTM Bloggers Speed Networking and a session at our Travel Tech Theatre, called ‘Turning Experiences Into Successful Experiments & The Social Travel Summit White Paper’, both of which are on Thursday, November 6.”