“Travel 2.0 is mainstream” according to PhocusWright’s CEO Philip Wolf

I attended the Caribbean Summit during Caribbean Week, which is the Caribbean Tourism Organization’s largest event of the year, bringing together all of the tourism ministers from across the Caribbean together in one place.  The first half of the week was focused on policy in Washington DC and the second half was focused on marketing in New York.

The most interesting part of the Summit, in my opinion, was CEO of PhocusWright Philip Wolf’s talk about travel trends.  If you know anything about PhocusWright, they are the premier thought leader on travel.  Without going into great detail, the highlights of Wolf’s talk are as follows:

1) Travel 2.0 is mainstream. You either adopt now, spend  a lot of money to catch up later, or render your company obsolete.  Surprisingly when Wolf surveyed the room about how many people (from the Caribbean or covering the Caribbean) in the room were on social networks, there were less than 10 people who raised their hands.  And this was out of a room of over 100 people.  The room was in awe and shock as to Wolf’s assertions.  And the general consensus was that people felt that social media wasn’t worth their time because no one was making money from it yet.

2) The size of your reputation matters more than your marketing budget. Wolf provided the example of a 20-room hotel in Paris that used reviews and the Internet to drive traffic to its hotel, which is consistently full due to its reputation for great service.

Wolf made a lot of assertions that validate what we are doing here at Viscape.  We enable the little guy to establish their reputation through destination and property reviews and provide content via destination sponsorships that enables their clients to make renting and buying decisions.

While I agree that everyone needs to jump on the social media bandwagon today, the biggest issue with social media is that it feels an awful lot like “spray advertising.”  The reason why people don’t view social media as generating revenues is because its still very challenging to reach targeted groups.

For the vacation second homes market, the demographic is the very formal 50+ age group, who are generally less engaged in social media networks.  While this group has more financial resources to rent and buy vacation homes, they are generally suspicious of social networks.  They do not want to be overly exposed online.  If they engage at all, they limit the information they share online to the bare minimum.  Unless their career (recruiter, realtor, social media guru, journalist, etc.) requires them to share more information, the 50+ age group generally minimizes the information they share online.

If social media outreach can be more targeted to reach the right people that represent your demographic group, then social media will return a much better ROI.  Otherwise, Wolf is right on with everything he’s said.

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