REPORT: AITO Overseas Conference
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Jon Garnham from Beaver Travel shares his views on the AITO overseas conference in Prague held earlier this month.
“As I’m new to the travel sector with a background in marketing, I was really interested to see how the AITO Agents overseas conference in Prague dealt with the challenges affecting the industry.
The structure of the conference was extremely good. I was especially interested to see how all the delegates treated the conference as a way of airing their opinions and talking through mutual issues and challenges.
The first speaker of the weekend, Charles Reid (director at Carat), talked to us about digital media and how best to use it in order to promote your business. What I found most useful from Charles’ talk, was his advice about focusing on one or two forms of social media, rather than attempting all platforms.
The second speaker, Karen Willey from The Music Concierge, talked about the huge importance of music for businesses and how it can truly differentiate your company from others. I thought Karen’s talk was extremely interesting and it really got me thinking about how customers must perceive us when visiting the shop!
The two roundtable discussions were also very useful and I thought the input from all the travel agents, tour operators and affiliates lead to some good debates and thought-provoking ideas. I could have seen these discussions going on for hours.
The Marketplace was very effective, with the travel agents sitting down and the operators moving around each time. Having the opportunity to meet roughly 30 different companies in such a short period of time gave me the perfect taster of each one – I could then talk to the relevant people in detail later in the evening.
As an overall experience, I found the AITO Agents conference very rewarding – the companies who attended were really impressive and I gained a huge amount of knowledge and understanding. I look forward to the next one!
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