Travelblather

I was one of 80 or so journalists, travel agents and tour operators on the Aer Lingus inaugural Gatwick to Faro flight on Sunday. The Irish carrier has big plans for Gatwick. It's using 4 leased A320s to cover 8 routes at the moment: Malaga, Nice, Munich, Vienna, Dublin, Knock and Zurich along with Faro. The investment is significant - somewhere around £100 million.

You have to admire their pluck - launching in the teeth of a huge recessionary downturn. Ryanair attempted to takeover of the company late last year... and was rebuffed by the Irish government on competition grounds, but not before it got quite heated. One of the Aer Lingus' crew in an unguarded bar-moment admitted to me that part of the reason (but clearly not a very big part) for launching these routes - on the low cost model - was to 'give O'Leary the finger'.

Check in is in Zone B - a new area off the back of the main concourse. For us it was quiet and efficient - a far cry from my check in with easyJet the weekend before bound for Prague - which was bedlam. (But that was half term weekend, so not a fair comparison.) That said - this area is uniquely for Aer Lingus - so there will be more control there and big queues at the check-in desks of other carriers won't spill over or get in the way.It's a clear signal of intent and a smart piece of manouevring.

On board the spanking new plane the seats were mock grey leather, with a fairly decent pitch. Perhaps an extra centimetre or so? There were seat back pockets for your books and mags, they reclined(!) and they even had wings on the headrests so there was something to lean your head against if you fancied nodding off. It's funny how the little things start to matter when you don't have them. Not having a seat back pocket with Ryanair drives me nuts! And I was a bit gutted to find that easyJet's seats don't recline either these days on their newer planes.

Crew were friendly and helpful - a tad less fun than easyJet's who are occasionally laugh-out loud funny - and they were much more pleasant than Ryanair. But that's not hard - they seem to loathe the sight of you most of the time.

As you'd expect with flights starting from £9.99 (including taxes during the launch period - clearly a significant loss-leader) you pay for your food and drink with similar fayre and prices to the other low costers. Service was rather slow, but with a 2 hour+ flight this didn't really matter. No exhortations to BUY LOTTO TICKETS on the PA system (like Ryanair)... and the toilets are free. (Seriously... can someone tell me is Ryanair really charging to use the toilets on its planes? One of the other journos assured me he had seen it with his own eyes on a recent Ryanair flight to Rimini. No joke. A pound in the slot...)

Anyway... the Aer Lingus gig - from a customer perspective - looks all good. More competition has to be a healthy thing - particularly when the product is better.

Returning from Faro yesterday evening I checked the monitors at the airport. Flights from Faro to Gatwick on the board:

• Easyjet: 20.05
• Aer Lingus: 20.45
• BA: 21.15
• Easyjet: 21.55

Yep. Four flights all within a couple of hours of each other all flying the same route. I can't believe this is sustainable. (And that doesn't include Monarch - which also flies this route - leaving earlier in the day.)

The steward on board told us the 174 capacity plane had just 44 seats filled on the outbound trip. Returning there were 97. So take out the 80 journos, agents etc and that leaves just 17 fare paying customers.

With £100million to burn there's time yet to market the services and see load factors increase, but those planes need to be seriously full to turn a profit. I wonder if they'll succeed? Right now I'd probably only put it at 50:50. Others have been forecasting the company's downfall against a backdrop of mounting losses.

But you know what they say about the luck of the Irish.

I had an interesting evening at the British Guild of Travel Writers monthly get together last night. I was speaking with Alastair McKenzie and Simon Ward Wanderlust's web editor about all things web 2.0.

We were preaching to a quite sceptical audience. And I can see why. There remains little money to be made for pro travel writers in writing for web... and next to nothing from blogging or tweeting.

So why bother?

Well, one thing we all agreed on was that it's getting ever harder to make a proper living writing about travel and the net is very much to blame. Falling ad revenues for print media are directly related to reduced reader numbers - because people are reading stuff on-line for free and not bothering to buy magazines and newspapers in the ways they would have done before the net existed. The future looks pretty bleak for old school freelance travel writers.

Some key points I tried to make about why being part of the on-line world matters (and I hope I succeeded)

• Blogging allows you to publish whatever you want (within legal bounds) - and that's immensely satisfying - indeed liberating. No need to worry about the whims of an editor.
• Being active online - blogging, tweeting and more - also establishes your profile. People use Google to research all kinds of stuff these days. If they're looking for a travel writer chances are that's the phrase they will Google and if you aren't there, they won't find you.
• Most editors are now experimenting with social media - and if you're present in the online environment you stand out immediately as plugged in, in touch... ahead of the game... smart.
• Most writers love to get feedback - and in print it's a real rarity. Editors don't have time to let you know they liked something, reader letters to the publication often don't get forwarded on to the writer. On-line it's a whole different world - people can react, respond, comment right there. It's fascinating... and for me anyway, it's why I write at all - having a sense of an audience of people who (at least to some degree) value my opinion.
• Developing a readership - as I seem to be doing - means that suddenly your voice matters. Today I got offered a Press Trip to Sydney (yep, Australia) as a blogger - on the understanding I'd blog about the experience. That's a seriously big deal. More on this and what it means in another post

None of these will make anyone any better off as a writer and if I were freelance right now I wouldn't spend more than an hour or so a day doing it... but that hour will be time well spent.

Of that I have no doubt. (And actually it might be quite fun too.)

So here's my list of things I learned today at the Travolution Summit in London

1) The recovery will start next year
Dennis Turner Chief Economist from HSBC said so! (and he should know seeing as HSBC was one of the big banks less exposed to the dodgy toxic mortgages).

2) Low Cost Carrier SouthWest airlines is now a full service airline
It's pursuing a strategy of selling itself as a 'services included' carrier (Low fares... no hidden fees) to distinguish itself from its competitors. Will the low cost model be superceded as travellers tire of paying extra for just about everything? (God I hope so, but I doubt it)

3) Boring is the new cool
Lufthansa UK and Ireland GM Marianne Sammann says sometimes they are called 'boring' because they just focus ondoing the basics as well as they can. Maybe boring is quite a nice characteristic in the current climate? Dependable... trustworthy... not trying to flog you something you don't want?

4) Holiday home rentals is a huge market ripe for a social space
Holiday home rentals company HomeAway is growing fast with 15- 20,000 new properties being added each month. And according to CEO Brian Sharples they just intend to focus on the basics. And there's huge demand for people to exchange information and discuss online. Anyone fancy setting up a social space? Is there one already?

5) Facebook apps can generate huge amounts of UGC
Trip Advisor's restaurant reviews were paltry compared to their hotel reviews until they launched their Local Picks Facebook app. The app generated 10s of thousands of reviews in months. It now provides over 250,000 new pics of restaurants to the Trip Advisor site each month.

6) User Experience is the new marketing
Marko Ahtisaari CEO of Dopplr (and all round smart dude) said several extremely pertinent things. This was my favourite. If ever there's an element of travel websites that needs working on to achieve competitive advantae it's UX. (With quality, unique content a close 2nd?)

7) Keep it simple
The OTA's growing fastest are the ones that are selling the simpler products (ie JUST hotels or JUST flights rather than the complete package). Are people trying too hard to be all things to all people? I think we will see the emergence of niche operators (or niche brands created by bigger players) doing increasing amounts of business by focussing on a specific audience and serving it really really well.

And... one for luck... Twitter is...
I just have to accept it. Personally I think it's a horrible distraction, but the twitter feed (hashtag/ travsummit) was buzzing with stuff all day. Biggest Tw'istake? - BGB PR agency sending all their tweets in one go making it look awfully like they wanted to dominate the conversation. It looked baaaad.

Decades ago when I was working in marketing... brands were a bit of a holy grail. The thinking among the trendy people with big shoulder pads (it was the 80s) was that if you could create a certain 'something' about a product or service that people could relate to and feel good about you added immeasurable value to it. The more people felt an emotional attachment to something (even as mundane as say gravy powder - remember the Bisto family?) the more they'd like it and purchase it.

These days global branding company Interbrand actually attempts to put a monetary value upon this certain 'something'. Apparently Coca Cola is the number one brand by value - at USD 66,667 million. I have no idea how they calculate this.

The thinking goes that a brand is hugely valuable and should be nurtured and maintained.

But I think the relationships people have with brands are changing. Does anyone believe anything a banks or insurers say these days? All that baloney about being on our side, helping us build for our futures... it's meaningless. In certain sectors many large companies now have such dissonance between what they trumpet with their advertising and the reality of their products that I'd suggest brand can have a negative impact. I'm thinking fast food, banking, utilities even some retailers (supermarkets). I now go out of my way to seek out the smaller independents when I can. I just don't trust the big guys.

Where does this leave the travel sector?

Following the collapse of XL and airlines like Zoom and Silverjet last year damage has been done here too. But I'd suggest that generally travel sector brands remain fairly true to their promises. Trust is a crucial part of the mix when it comes to booking a holiday, particularly in these more uncertain times. It's been interesting to see that big tour companies like Thomson and Thomas Cook have majored on more old-school brand ads of late rather than shouting about specific products and prices. Cooks even reverted to the old slogan 'Don't just book it'. I'm not surprised to see this.

Going back to that Interbrand survey - there isn't a single travel company brand in the Interbrand Top 100. So maybe the travel sector has a long way to go yet when it comes to building great brands.

Does brand matter these days for travel?

Or has the Net - in particular the price comparison sites - driven people's perceptions of the value of holidays and flights down to nothing more than how much they cost?

And which travel brands work?

Who would you pay a bit more to go on holiday with or fly with because you trust them that bit more than a cheaper competitor offering a similar product?