Mark Frary is co-founder of Travel Perspective, a social and digital consultancy working with travel companies and tourism organisations to create successful marketing campaigns
He is an author and writer specialising in travel, social media and technology. He writes regularly for The Times and has written for many other publications including the Evening Standard, the Independent on Sunday, the Daily Express, Food & Travel, ABTA magazine, the easyJet magazine and Teletext. Mark also gives expert advice to leisure and business travel companies on their social media and communications strategies and is the co-founder of Social Travel Market, an annual conference on the use of social media in travel at World Travel Market.
He is the author of seven books including The Origins of the Universe for Dummies and is currently working on a biography of the ski pioneer Erna Low.
Mark lives in Ampthill in Bedfordshire, UK with his wife and three children. www.travelperspective.co.uk
It is easy to assume that marketing spend now is wasted money. Many countries still have not opened their borders and, at the end of September, airline ... Read more
One survey found that 79% of travel decisions are influenced by Gen Z – the travel and tourism industry should ignore that statistic at its peril.
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COVID has been a ‘total disaster’ for tourism to Sicily, as it has been for many destinations. But now the Italian region is investing millions of euro ... Read more
Travel has gone from a position where it represented more than 10% of global GDP, employing or supporting more than 300 million people, to a virtual standstill ... Read more
At World Travel Market in 2016, we ran a session called Content In Crisis which looked at the gnarly problem of whether influencers should be required to ... Read more
Search on Wikipedia for the concept of ‘digital commons’ and you are told that it refers to “information and knowledge resources that are collectively created and owned ... Read more
Search for the hashtag #goatsintrees on Instagram and you bring up more than 7,500 images of just that, often with a glamorous millennial in the foreground wearing ... Read more
Instagram has taken another step forward in becoming a key marketplace for people to buy things. This week the company announcemenced the rollout of something called Instagram ... Read more
“What is work, Mummy?” “Oh it was just something we used to do before AI and robots started doing everything for us, darling.” “And what did you ... Read more
Messaging apps such as WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger are a shady place. Lots of stuff gets shared around in these private places. That’s kind of annoying if ... Read more
In six days, a video has raced up YouTube’s trending charts thanks to, at the time of writing, some 113 million views. It is not the latest ... Read more
Are you an influencer or a microinfluencer (or even a nanoinfluencer)? After this week, more may be in the latter category. Instagram has finally announced that it ... Read more
If I talked about a social network with hundreds of millions of users based around a feed of content curated from the best of what your friends, ... Read more
Very large, successful multinational companies, whether they drill for oil, make cool technology products or are huge e-commerce platforms, tend to have one thing in common these ... Read more
What a difference a day makes. On Wednesday 25 July, Facebook’s share price reached $218.62, its highest ever, valuing the company at a whopping $615 billion, around ... Read more
The scandal around the use of data harvested on Facebook has caused many people to reassess their use of the social networking site and saw the rise ... Read more
Finding travel inspo has been a huge success story for Pinterest. Of the 100 billion or so ‘pins’ – the visual bookmarks that are at the heart ... Read more
You might have noticed that Facebook has been a lot in the news recently what with those pesky privacy issues that have been brought to light by ... Read more
There are more than 1,000 places on UNESCO’s World Heritage List and it should probably come as no surprise that there is a strong correlation between this ... Read more
Brands are increasingly looking to use influencers, such as Instagram stars and bloggers, in their marketing but the chasm between what brands and their PR companies expect ... Read more
“What is real? How do you define real?” So says Morpheus to Neo in the classic sci-fi movie, The Matrix. His quote took on more significance this ... Read more
Tourism associated with gigs and music festivals like Glastonbury is now big business. UK Music’s Wish You Were Here study in 2016, revealed that music tourism generated ... Read more
Two destinations have announced two very different but both very eye-catching approaches to marketing themselves in the past week. But at the heart of both Visit Sweden’s ... Read more
Will 2017 be the year for augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR)? Some would argue that 2016 was the year. Pokémon Go became the most downloaded ... Read more
It’s been a busy month for the major social networks, with a flurry of new features announced. But who is making the best new features? Facebook effects, ... Read more
It has become the latest trend by countries around the world – trolling Donald Trump. In his first speech, President Trump made it clear that he was ... Read more
So farewell then Vine, your life has been almost as short as the clips you host. The platform, which enabled users to create short, looped videos of ... Read more
If you are looking for the next big thing for destination marketing, you need look no further than Snapchat’s geofilters. A growing number of DMOs are investing ... Read more
One of Britain’s newest tourism attractions has opened in County Durham this summer and its organisers are hoping to match some of the success of Puy du ... Read more
Social media has been a key part of this year’s Euro 2016 football championships. Twitter added new features just for the championship, including auto-generated emojis when you ... Read more
I often wonder whether we are seeing the end-game for the traditional tourist board or destination marketing organisation (DMO). Tourism boards and destination marketing organisations have been ... Read more
One of the most annoying quirks of Instagram is finally being addressed, bringing an end to a nightmare suffered by social media managers who have to look ... Read more
I can’t emphasise this enough – if you are not using video yet, you had better start soon. Video’s rise has been stratospheric this year. In its ... Read more
This week there has been a lot of talk about Facebook introducing a dislike button. Even James Corden on the Late Late Show has an opinion on ... Read more
Google’s first results page has come a long way since the company launched 17 years ago. When we first started using that rather clever search engine, the ... Read more
The internet has almost come full circle. It seems like a strange concept now but back when America Online ruled the internet superhighway (as it was inevitably ... Read more
Destinations, attractions and other tourism businesses will soon be able to promote themselves even better on Twitter thanks to a new feature being tested by the microblogging ... Read more
How often have you clicked on a link to an article on your Facebook feed only to sit for what seems like an eternity before something shows ... Read more
In one of the many presentations made at our inaugural Social Travel Britain conference in Salisbury over the past few days, Dr Philip Alford of Bournemouth University ... Read more
They were first spotted in 2007. They were given the official thumbs-up in 2009. Now they are everywhere. You cannot escape. By they, I mean hashtags. I ... Read more
YouTube has just celebrated the big one-oh and look how far it has come in those intervening years. Here are our ten thoughts for brands on the ... Read more
The Japan National Tourism Organization (JNTO) has just launched a high-profile campaign working with three bloggers – Kash Bhattacharya of Budget Traveller (budgettraveller.org/), Abigail King of Inside ... Read more
In the past week, Facebook has made it’s latest attempt to grab a bigger share of the geolocation market with the launch of Place Tips. These nuggets ... Read more
The future is here at last and science fiction aficionados will rejoice in the latest news to come out of Mountain View. The news from Google headquarters ... Read more
A ruling by Britain’s Advertising Standards Authority last week threatens to remove a key plank from the content marketing strategies of travel companies. The ruling rapped Mondelez, the ... Read more
We spoke in our last blog post about why Instagram was the star social performer for 2014. Just this week, we have heard how the Australian state ... Read more
You cannot fail to have noticed the Ice Bucket Challenge videos that have been filling our Facebook news feeds over the summer. According to Facebook, between 1 ... Read more
If you are on Twitter, you won’t need any introduction to the concept of newsjacking. It is the, some say shameless, practice of jumping on board something ... Read more
Facebook autoplay videos are the new Marmite – people either love them or hate them. Either way, they are hard to ignore. Starting last September, Facebook started ... Read more
Thomas Cook Group has this week launched what it calls a “travel industry first”. Holidays to go! is a Twitter-driven offer engine that lets holidaymakers tweet at ... Read more
Facebook, which has just celebrated its tenth birthday, issued its latest results at the end of January and the results and comments from senior executives contained plenty ... Read more