This year’s social media programme at World Travel Market London 2015 takes place across three days and will feature senior executives from Facebook, Twitter and Tripadvisor as well as startups, destinations, bloggers and publishers.
Organised in partnership with Travel Perspective, the sessions begins on 3 November in the South Gallery before moving onto the Global Stage for 4 and 5 November .
The keynote speaker for the programme is Lee McCabe, global head of travel for Facebook. He will talk about how travel firms can leverage Facebook’s 1.5 billion users in his presentation entitled “Facebook future: mobile, messaging and virtual reality”.
This session takes place on 4 Nov from 1.30pm to 1.55pm on the Global Stage AS850.
Twitter is another worldwide platform which is engaging with the travel industry. Samir Bhana, its sales manager for UK and Ireland, features in a face-to-face interview with Mark Frary, co-founder of Travel Perspective.
This takes place on 5 November from 12.50pm to 1.25pm, also on the Global Stage.
Tripadvisor is another Nasdaq-listed billion-dollar blue-chip business represented in the social media programme. Product director Sarah Davey appears on a panel of experts, each of whom will choose their favourite new travel start-up and explain what is so exciting about it. Each startup will presents to the panel with the audience voting to decide which one is “Travel’s Next Big Thing”.
Her insight will be worth listening to – in 2009 she founded Tripbod, a digital platform which connects travellers with local experts, and which was bought by Tripadvisor in 2014.
This session immediately follows McCabe’s keynote.
The other six sessions include sharing best practice examples from destinations, travel firms and businesses outside the sector. Working with bloggers from outside the travel industry is also on the agenda.
“Content marketing” is also up for discussion with a panel offering travel firms advice on publishing.
The programme ends with a session on how travel firms can use video marketing in the age of mobile, hosted by two executives from YouTube.
WTM London, Conference Manger, Charlotte Sutton, said: “We’ve been running a social media programme for a number of years, and every year interest in the topic grows.
At the same time, social media is maturing as a marketing and sales channel, but there is still lots to learn for the experienced and newcomer alike. This year we are also looking outside travel for best-practice examples.”
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About World Travel Market London
WTM London, the leading global event for the travel industry, is the must-attend four-day business-to-business exhibition for the worldwide travel and tourism industry.
Almost 51,500 senior travel industry professionals, government ministers and international press, embark on ExCeL – London every November to network, negotiate and discover the latest industry opinion and trends at WTM.
WTM London, now in its 36th year, is the event where the travel industry conducts and concludes its deals. WTM 2014 will generate around £2.5 billion of travel industry contracts.
WTM London is part of Reed Travel Exhibition’s World Travel Market events, which also includes Arabian Travel Market, World Travel Market Latin America and World Travel Market Africa. www.wtmworld.com
World Travel Market Events
World Travel Market is comprised of the leading leisure travel events in the world; World Travel Market London, WTM Latin America in Sao Paulo, WTM Africa in Cape Town and Arabian Travel Market in Dubai.
New events for 2016 are WTM connect Asia and WTM connect China, which join WTM connect Ski and International Golf Travel Market. These unique one-to-one events are targeted at leisure and niche travel markets, allowing exhibitors to exclusively meet with elite hosted buyers.
The World Travel Market events are attended by the global travel and tourism industry’s senior executives to conduct business deals and discover the latest research, insight and opinion.
In 2014, the World Travel Market events facilitated around $7 billion in industry deals from negotiations between the more than 15,000 buyers, 9,500 exhibitors (1,500 main stand holders and 8,000 stand sharers) in attendance of its four events.
WTM is part of Reed travel Exhibitions, the leading events organizer in the travel industry, and is owned by the world’s leading events organiser Reed Exhibitions.
Reed Travel Exhibitions
Reed Travel Exhibitions (RTE) is the world’s leading provider of exhibitions in the travel and tourism industry. Its wide-ranging portfolio of events around the globe covers leisure travel, luxury travel, meetings, incentives and business travel, as well as golf, ski and spa travel.
RTE, which organises more than 22 events around the world, includes three divisions; World Travel Market, IBTM Events and International Luxury Travel Market.
RTE is a business unit of Reed Exhibitions.
About Reed Exhibitions
Reed Exhibitions is the world’s leading events organiser, with over 500 events in 43 countries. In 2014 Reed brought together over seven million event participants from around the world generating billions of dollars in business. Today Reed events are held throughout the Americas, Europe, the Middle East, Asia Pacific and Africa and organised by 41 fully staffed offices. Reed Exhibitions serves 43 industry sectors with trade and consumer events. It is part of the RELX Group plc, a world-leading provider of information solutions for professional customers across industries.