Category Archives: inspiration

I may be a boomer but my life’s not over yet

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What happens when you reach your mid 50’s? I’ll tell you. You get emails from Saga Holidays, you get invited to cash in your Pension, you get funeral directors Marketing you, you get marketers sending you emails showing products that I’m simply not ready for. Listen I’m not ready to sign out just yet!

Millennials in marketing need to remember that once we were your age. I lived in a time before mobile phones and pc’s but I also lived through the development of the wonderful devices we have at our disposal today. I have bought every one of them: brick phones, Apple, BBC A and B, Motorola and Nokia. You name it, I’ve used it and I have loved each and every device. I have seen amazing things from the transition from face to face conversation (yeah where’s that gone) , to social networking on Facebook. I’ve probably had more experience than most millenials with devices so please, please stop thinking I am a techniphobic and please stop sending me emails that have large fonts, assuming I’m ready to retire, or worse die.  

I have much more life in me yet, I have learnt the art of conversation, chat up lines, confidence in front of others and a knowledge that spans decades of change. I’m quite interesting really. 

 Remember, I use my phone and iPad instead of paper, I still want to go on exciting holidays and experience amazing things, I have probably done many things you could only dream of. So next time you are marketing my generation please treat me with respect, don’t make assumptions that my generation is technically incompetent and past our sell by date. Who knows while you are sweating it out in the gym I just might be buying whatever it is you are selling: age has nothing to do with it! 

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Me and my Mac

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Me and my Mac – this is not an advert, but a reality

The best PC ever

My MacBook Pro 13″

So, there I was travelling to Athens, Istanbul then back to Athens.  I had various devices with me: My iPhone 5s, A Moto G running Android, iPad Mini and my trusty Mac Book Pro 13″.  With varying degrees of internet access and high roaming charges, I soon ran down my mobile phone batteries.  The iPad, a brilliant device, just wasn’t up to the heavy music and video-laden PowerPoint I was editing for three presentations, 4 workshops and music downloads over ten days.

Each day I would revert to my Mac book Pro.  Sliding it form my trusty TUMI bag I rarely had to recharge it from the nightly charge (sometimes not even charging nightly), I placed it on the desk, flipped the lid and instant access.  Easily vamping onto the hotel or bars free Wi-Fi I was soon up and running, tweeting, Facebook posts, updating my blog, all whilst my Windows using colleagues struggled to lock into the Wi-Fi signal, let alone get their presentations working.

You see, the MacBook Pro is simply a brilliant device.  Expensive, yes, but the productivity increase you get for using it over a Windows PC is at least 50% more.  Recently I took delivery of a Windows Tablet that our IT team was dishing out to our Australian Sales teams.  I had to test some software.  First off I set up my various accounts: Google, Facebook, Twitter, Hotmail, iCloud etc.  The I needed to download Google Chrome.  Once I managed to maintain a stable wi-fi signal (the Tablet kept dropping it) I downloaded Chrome and fired it up.  To my amazement it started and post my first search popped up many spam windows offering me discounted goods, various tablets and enough gambling sites to drown my finances.  I then went in search of Adaware to remove the hijacking sites form my browser.     During the download, which took an hour, I received more and more adds and enough pop-up windows to bury the one window I needed to see.  Within seconds of getting this tablet onto the net I was plagued by spam and ad sites.

Back to my Mac:  No matter where I am, no matter what I am doing, no spam, no ad-sites, no crap.

With it’s great illuminated keyboard (the eyes aren’t what they used to be),  the retina display, the whisper quiet operation (the Toshiba Tablet has the loudest fan I have ever heard), and flash disk, this is definitely the best laptop around.  A productivity inflating wonder there is nothing to touch it available today.  If you just want to get on and work seamlessly and not be hampered by a trashy interface (Windows 8), connect seamlessly to any wi-fi network and stay there, simply work on your laptop, then the Apple MacBook Pro 13 is the one to get  PERIOD!

London my favourite city

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So, here I am , wandering the streets of central London perfectly at home in my favourite city. I have been working here full time for 6 months but over the years have lived and worked here, regularly conducted business here, and enjoyed weekends away here.

London is a vibrant City with a great mix of people and a cosmopolitan feel. On a balmy hot summers evening like tonight, people spill out of bars soaking up the sun and enjoying a cool beer while engaging in conversation. It’s on evenings like this that you realise how full of people London is.

Wandering the familiar streets of Soho where I first walked in 1978 when I was 18, I notice much has changed, yet much has remained the same. Seedy signs in doorways and phone booths, the smell of Chinese food and red coloured chickens hanging in the windows of the many Chinese restaurants in Chinatown. Much more commercial than it was in the 70’s I remember wandering down to Chinatown on a Sunday afternoon trying to buy some beer or lager for a variety of rock and pop stars who were recording, now famous albums, at Trident Studios where I worked just off Wardour Street. Now stripped of its notoriety Trident Studios hosted such luminaries as David Bowie, Elton John, Marc Bolan, the house band Queen, Genesis, Phil Collins and Rod Stewart among others.

Living now as I do during the week, in South Kensington, I find Soho an amazing starting point for a quick drink, before embarking on the long but feature rich walk back to South Ken. A quick visit to Sister Ray record shop on Berwick Street then passing Liberties store with it’s Tudor black and white façade and across Regent Street. Stopping in Heddon Street to see the Plaque where Bowie once stood at a phone box for the cover of Ziggy Stardust & the Spiders from Mars, and then a short hop to the Apple store on Regent Street. A quick play with the iPads, iPhones and various accessories I move on down to Piccadilly Circus and past the brightly lit advertising hoards and on past the Statue of Eros where I remember many an old 60’s movie with opening credits and a shot of old british cars, red double decker busses and black London cabs going round and round the statue.

From here I wander down to Trafalgar Square looking up at the statue of Nelson proudly surveying the surrounding scene high above on Nelsons column now guarded by not four, but three lions and a green chicken.

This is an amazing place and I have only touched the very surface of the centre of this wonderful City. Watch this space as I continue my travels to Covent Garden, The Famous Strand, The Houses of Parliament, St Pauls and so much more.

My favourite city? Not arf!

Inspired: The brochure is dead, long live the tablet

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Inspired: The brochure is dead, long live the tablet

“In this article I, imagine a world without brochures”

Inspire me

Inspire me

Arguably there are 5 stages to online holiday booking.  Dreaming, Researching, Booking, Experience and finally Sharing.  With the plethora of tablet and fablet devices hitting the high street and a device on most peoples Christmas list does the online experience really support this process?

It was 1998 when I first entered the Travel technology market.  I spent many an hour discussing the demise of the traditional brochure.  An expensive and time consuming production which would end up in Travel Agents or be sent to thousands of potential customers.  We really believed back then that the brochure could be transferred to CD/DVD and using electronic media we could extend the “Magazine” experience to a PC.  Imagine clicking through thumbnail images and reading reams of copy interspersed with the odd panoramic image or video of the potential destination.  How wrong we were.  No one wanted to replace the magazine experience by loading up a CD and basically reading the brochure electronically.  The Dream/inspiration phase was still supported by consumers (dreamers) picking up a brochure and thumbing through it’s contents whilst relaxed at home.

Fast forward to 2013.  It’s taken nearly 15 years for a device to finally become so mainstream that it might actually challenge the traditional brochure: the tablet.  Using apps such as Flipboard (www.flipboard.com) we can quickly see how content can be transformed into an inspiring magazine, beautifully laid out onto flip-able virtual pages with delectable fonts and supportive white space.    This Christmas is the first year that consumers are most likely to the holiday search looking for inspiration using their tablets.  They will be looking for imagery that inspires, turning their dreams into reality?  Or will they?  How many of the OTA’s provide inspiration from their home pages?  What the consumer will most likely find is a tablet unfriendly search box where they are forced to put in dates, destinations and click the search button.  They will then be presented with uninspiring thumbnails and way too much text to consume.  All topped off with an overly large font showing price per pax!

Think about socialising.  In clubs pubs and restaurants people chat about experiences.  They constantly socialise on social sites about their holidays, their desires and post holiday images using Instagram, facebook and twitter.  Soon they will post their images to Pinterest creating a travel board that will be re-pinned time and time again as like-minded consumers find inspiration in those images and experiences.

Inspiration is the key.  Traditional search cost and book seemingly ignores the dreaming and inspirational part of the consumer journey.  The social aspect is dabbled with but not understood and so tour operators only achieve a small percentage of likes finding it difficult to create and generate social conversation by thinking of this phase and posting relevant, inspiring imagery on their social pages.

So what do OTA’s need to do?  They need to embrace the phases of holiday booking.  Ditch the search cost and book process of old and inspire, converse and start the buzz.  Focus on tablet first to provide an online inspirational magazine where the consumer can browse through inspiring images.  Inspiration that is relevant to the viewer where they login using social log in, where they can post their favourite images using any of the social media apps.

Come on Travel, 15 years on lets get inspired!

Article originally published on Travolution.com December 10, 2013.