Steve Keenan has been a travel journalist for 25 years. He started at a Reed paper, news editing at Travel News in London - now Travel Weekly - having spent a decade reporting general news in the UK and abroad. He also taught English in Peru, delivered cars in the USA, ran the Sydney desk at AAP and took the train home from Hong Kong. He left Travel News in 1990 to freelance for several publications, including The Times of London, which he later joined as deputy travel editor. In December 2004, he became the first national digital travel editor in the UK, running the combined travel website of The Times and Sunday Times. The introduction of a paywall at the papers in 2010 persuaded him that the connected world might continue outside of Wapping and he left to co-found Travel Perspective. The company runs the social media seminars at World Travel Market London, and works with Reed Expos and others in helping the travel and tourism industry best communicate stories in all forms of publishing.
Hospitality and tourism firms are being warned to beef up their cyber security with a warning that attacks on businesses is rapidly on the increase.
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The Roadmap out of coronavirus, unveiled by Prime Minister Boris Johnson, prompted the rush to book, with consumers understandably wishing to have a holiday to look forward ... Read more
If you can’t visit us, watch us. Which is what Tourism Australia said this week in producing high-quality videos reminding would-be international visitors what they are missing.
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When travel shut down in March, the Faroe Islands – along with a large part of the world – turned to virtual tourism to remind tourists what ... Read more
MORE than 400 travel influencers & content creators gathered in Italy at the weekend for a summer conference and catch-up. The Traverse event in the Trentino town ... Read more
On September 1, the Cranborne Chase will launch an app using augmented reality to promote its wares. It’s an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty (AoNB), largely in ... Read more
Blunt force trauma is a medical term which describes an injury caused when an object hits or strikes a body. These days, social media has pretty much ... Read more
SIT back and enjoy the films. No, not The Oscars silly, but a series of travel shorts from Culture Trip, the media company promising to shake up ... Read more
ANOTHER new year, another debate on whether virtual and augmented reality will become, well, a reality. Not delivering on what’s been promised, gimmicky ideas, a focus on ... Read more
When travelling around America in the 1980s, helpful signs directed you to park the car and photograph a view. With a camera back then, not a smartphone. ... Read more
The analysis of an influencer’s worth is deepening daily, as brands turn away and genuine influencers turn on their wannabe colleagues. Two influencers in the past week ... Read more
WE are delighted to be back at World Travel Market to deliver seven world-class seminars on the best use of social media in today’s travel and tourism ... Read more
England had its hottest summer ever this year, while the UK as a whole equalled previous highs set since records began in 1910. The heatwave lasted 46 ... Read more
There were two developments this week that will help social media organisers and brands improve their output in visuals. One concerns images, the other video. And both ... Read more
I read an interesting line the other day: the regular Instagram feed is getting boring as everybody is playing with video on the platform. The observation is ... Read more
I grew to accept that Google owned travel several years ago. Already seduced by Gmail and hangouts (remember them?), it had me at Google Maps. So when ... Read more
TWO friends left Facebook this week after revelations that the data of 50m people had been mined and sold without the knowledge and permission of the user. ... Read more
For three years from 2014-17, I looked after a lot of social media accounts. It was the phase where travel companies knew they had to have social, ... Read more
Back in July, on these pages, I wrote about the long and slow decline of Storify, a platform which allowed users to aggregate links, photos and social ... Read more
This year, the Faroe Islands won. Their victory highlighted, yet again, the importance of setting out on a project with a clear strategy. Because there are many ... Read more
In the old days, about 2014, a travel influencer was a blogger with a decent set of numbers on their website and social media. Such a blogger ... Read more
It started in the summer of 2016, a conscious algorithm move by Instagram to get shot of bots and introduce an avalanche of features that are still ... Read more
I was a big fan of Storify… as were a lot of journalists and news organisations, who regularly used the site between for the four years after ... Read more
JAPAN has done a tremendous amount of work in the past decade to help foreign travellers by installing English language signs at transport hubs and dual language ... Read more
With the summer season approaching, this should be a cracking year for British holidays. Forecasts say the weakened pound and fragile economic confidence is likely to see ... Read more
This week, I wanted to create an Instagram account for a tourism destination on my iPhone 5 but I wasn’t allowed. I’d taken a few steps – ... Read more
A lot, according to Visit Britain – and it’s going a long way to disrupting traditional research methods. Will talking to friends, family and colleagues replace other ... Read more
One is interesting, two is a co-incidence and three is a feature. Or, in this case, a blog post. The 1-2-3 motto is a benchmark which journalists ... Read more
Instagram is looking forward to 2017 by adding a host of bells and whistles to its increasingly strong dominance of social media channels. While Twitter’s social stock ... Read more
Real-time travel information for tourists is the widely acknowledged ambition of any destination. That is, being able to stay in touch with your visitors throughout their stay, ... Read more
Summer has been normally the quiet time of year, when everyone in the travel industry is on holiday with the rest of the country. But there’s been ... Read more
FIVE years ago, Travel Perspective was asked by an online travel agent to help re-write all of its destination content following a big algorithm change by Google. ... Read more
How is your gold plated social media strategy shaping up ahead of tonight’s launch of The Olympic Games? Just putting the finishing touches to your schedule of ... Read more
If visiting Istanbul, you may well buy a tourist pass giving discounts to museums, bus tours and other attractions. Many cities have them. But not all offer ... Read more
A COUPLE of years ago, I started playing with an analytics tool called Sumall. It’s essentially a site that pulls together social media statistics from all platforms, ... Read more
One of the many, many benefits of this technological age is that it has allowed destinations to put themselves on the map in a way that they ... Read more
With Christmas shopping yet to reach its peak, time spent researching product reviews will be hugely on the increase. Online reviews now form a vital part of ... Read more
You can’t keep Instagram out of the news. Already the brightest star in the social media firmament, IG is generating ever more heat this summer. I wrote ... Read more
For several years when I was deputy travel editor at The Times, we ran a weekly slot in which we invited readers to share their favourite travelling ... Read more
Instagram remains the current darling of social media, its star rising as brands clamour for attention in the best photogenic social platform on the market. The ability ... Read more
Instagram’s website has been redesigned. On the face of it, that’s very nice but there’s not a lot to shout about. It does look better, certainly. Only ... Read more
There was a distinct moment when David Coulthard realized he had ‘cracked’ the challenge of encouraging his staff to adopt social media. The marketing manager of Salisbury ... Read more
It’s getting to the point where you need to check whether its acceptable to brandish a selfie stick. Last month, several museums banned the ubiquitous poles. Music ... Read more
Recently, a blogger friend told me of a trip she will take in March to Africa. Nothing new there. Except that the publication she is writing for ... Read more
Over the past five years, bloggers and brands have built fictitious number of real followers. They have bought followers, blindly followed everybody that follows them (without regard) ... Read more
I don’t know how I feel about Storify. I mean, we’ve been together for two years now and I’ve never been let down. Yes, I’ve dumped others. ... Read more
Let’s put video to one side for a moment. But if you accept that images are very important to your social media strategy, then Instagram has to ... Read more
It’s called click-baiting, whereby fantastically humorous quizzes await those who link through and then (usually) share the results with friends on Facebook. In this case, ‘Canvey Island ... Read more
I work with social media in travel every day. Nose down to the grindstone, I don’t sniff the air often enough to always gauge what others are ... Read more
In preparing monthly reports for travel clients on how well their social media is faring, I’m a fan of Twitonomy in gathering data on Twitter. It gives ... Read more
They say that email marketing is dead. That the opening rates are so low, that you do your brand more damage than good by abseiling into an ... Read more
There have been a few more blog posts doing the rounds recently announcing the death of the social media consultant. The broad argument goes that, as companies ... Read more
Twitter has become a commercial beast for some time now. But until last week, I’d not really considered it as a potential business tool, instead using the ... Read more
Screenshot by Jennifer Van Grove/CNET There’s an old saying in journalism that goes like this: One is interesting, two is co-incidence, three is a blog post. That ... Read more
Image: Macca Sherifi More than 165 travel bloggers gathered in Newcastle/Gateshead at the weekend in the year’s first UK gathering, allowing observers (including me) to test the ... Read more