With little understanding of what, exactly, a consumer travel show is, we wandered down to the exhibition hall at Seattle Center. It would never occur to me to go to a travel show to plan my next vacation. I don’t want to join a group, hire a travel agent, stock up on brochures, buy a time share, take a cruise… I am beginning to realize that I am in the minority on this. Even so-called adventure travel is being packaged and bundled in to a neat “purchased for a single price, all meals, transfers from Buenas Aires, skilled and certified guides, airfare from the continental US not included” package. It has never been easier to have an exotic adventure.
Please don’t mistake me for being critical of this mode of travel. I’m absolutely not, but I am acutely aware that it is not for me. The demographics I saw that might explain this. Most everyone present was quite a bit older than we were. There were a very few honeymoon shoppers, a handful of moms with a reluctant teenage daughter in tow, a smattering of suburban families.
Given the hard sell and the soft sell and the instant bargains and the raffles and the packages, who is the travel show for? I had a long chat with an exhibitor from Alaska – not about her service, but about who attends. “People don’t book their vacations here,” she said. “It’s just a day out for them. For many folks, though, they have two weeks vacation a year and they are doing some serious planning. They’ll start the homework for their trip a year, two years in advance. They want everything to be perfectly managed. So they’re here looking for ideas, places to start.” Folks with vague ideas about small trips to Tuscany that focus on food or fantasies about fishing in Alaska or a desire to travel but no idea to where (this is inscrutable to me) will find exactly what they want at the travel show.
At the booths, things shifted a little bit when I mentioned that I was a writer there to look for stories and trends. Sometimes, the person working the booth would ask me what it would take to get me to go one of their trips. It’s not a conversation you want to have right there in a noisy exhibition hall, but we’d exchange business cards and make promises of a follow up. The other thing – and for me, the most interesting – would be that they’d offer up some crazy tidbit of information about something interesting going on in their country that’s tangential to tourism. This is the stuff that made my nose start to itch and wants pursuing. I now have a list of ideas the length of my arm.
One example: I got to talking to the lonely guy in the Korea booth. I admitted that I knew very little about tourism to Korea, what the big sights were, why I’d want to visit there. He was pretty focused on IT – Samsung and LG! Good place to establish your business! – but that’s not what visitor to that trade show is looking for. So I told him that I was a writer and asked him about Korean food. “You know SARS?” he said. “Well, in Korea, we didn’t have problems with SARS. It’s because of the diet there. We eat a lot of Kim Chee – you know Kim Chee, this fermented cabbage? They say that our diet prevented us from have SARS outbreaks in Korea.” He couldn’t give me much background on this, and honestly, the whole thing sounded a little urban legend to me, but it’s an interesting idea.
Whaddaya know, the travel show is actually for me, but not for the stuff that’s on the table. A few well placed questions and leading statements really opened things up. With a head full of new ideas, I’m psyched to learn, once and for all, how to write a damn query letter to the bigger publications. I’m excited to go hunting for stuff related to those new ideas on the web. I’m looking forward to the follow-ups – not with the people at the booth – but with the PR and media contacts for the destinations I’m interested in. My feet were tired but my brain was – is – on fire. What an interesting way to spend a couple of hours.
[tags]Seattle travel show, writing ideas[/tags]
Leave it to you to put a new spin on a consumer travel show. (Now I feel like those few hours I sat through a Senior Expo in Portland when J was backing entertainer Steve Allen would have been better spent roaming the exhibits and figuring out what I could have gleaned from the experience…instead of just parking my butt in a chair, feeling out of place…) I’ve only bought a travel package ONCE…and it was to JazzFest in N.O. But the tour was run by the Santa Monica wife of a British rocker…and it was just the right mix of solo and group time, i.e., very little group time except for fun stuff like a ferry ride to Algiers to go to a funky club for Cajun dance lessons. I let go of my snobbery around travel tours then. Even so, I know myself well enough to know that most group and prepackaged stuff isn’t for me.
Yeah, it’s been a few years since I tried kimchee, but I’m not sure that the fact that it practically blew my nose off with its pungent odor and taste would prevent SARS bugs from getting in there. 🙂
It IS those interesting twists/tidbits that are the most fun.
Well, I’ve been on one tour in my life. Never again. I was a little dubious about doing China on my own but now that I see how easy it would be – the next trip will be self-directed.
When I wanted to start a needlework tour that was an “untour” I was told it would never work, but we’re planning our 6th London experience for stitchers and our return participants rate hovers around 60%. I agree consumer travel shows are a bit much, but I try not to laugh out loud when I get roped into going to one.
Reading about a consumer travel show made my blood run cold. When I started my travel business, Europe a la Carte, as a UK based independent travel consultant, I decided that a good way to launch the business would be to have a stand at the Glasgow Holiday Show. I reasoned that people attending such a show would be looking for something different to the traditional package holiday. The aim of my business was to cater to the needs of the independent travellers who was looking to plan a trip that would give them more of flavour of the real Europe. I couldn’t have been more wrong. People would approach my stand and ask for a brochure and I would say well it’s about tailoring a holiday to your needs so you have to tell me what you want. I spend almost 2000 pounds sterling being an exhibitor at the show and didn’t get one booking from it.
An exhibitor I talked with at the show said basically the same thing – no one books their trip at the show. She does get follow up calls, but folks visiting the show aren’t there to spend money, really. They’re just, um, tourists.
Hmmm, I must be in the minority. I attended the travel show in Los Angeles last year and came home with some exciting travel options that had not been on my radar before.