Category: Travel Blogs

WTM 2007: First Impressions

Happy Hotelier's WTM Press Card
A proud member of the Press 🙂

Yes I succeeded to get the press card and I am proudly showing it here as proof. It is my first, but definitely will not be my last. Maybe the idea of applying for a press card will inspire fellow Bloggers to do the same for other venues, fairs, or whatever.

I hopped over to Londen City Airport from Rotterdam with VLM. This was very convenient time wise and legroom wise.

I was lucky to have some dear friends who had a bed and a breakfast for me, but the route door to door from The Hague to Excel took the same time as the commuting to my friend’s address in a little suburb North West of London (half way to Luton).

During my tubing around in London it surprised me how many Londoners are leaving their papers and big paper coffee cups in the trains where cleaners collected them by the sacks full.

WTM has the same problem: Almost all food is offered in paper or carton and they produce tons of waste: An idea for WTM 2008: Back to porcelain and glass as reportedly green conscious organization?

More to follow.

Would WTM accept a Blogger as Publisher/Editor/Journalist?

WTM LOGO

In order to sniff up some travel and luxury travel news I would like to attend WTM as a Blogger, not as a Hotelier. Not being able to offer thousands of rooms my hotel is simply too small to justify a visit to WTM (although I did that once in the past).

So by way of experiment I applied for a Publisher’s Badge.

In reply to my application I got following answer:

Dear Mr Van den Elshout,

Thank you for submitting your registration to attend World Travel Market 2007 as a member of the press.

Press badges are restricted to Publishers, Editors, Journalists, Photographers and Broadcasters. A press badge allows access to the Press Centre at WTM.

In order to process your registration we need to ask you to send us by mail a copy of accreditation in the form of a photocopy of a recognised press or media card, business card, NUJ card or a letter from the editor, that verifies you are working member of the press community.

Please print a copy of this email and send it with the copy accreditation to the following address:

As Blogger I would like to attend the WTM. However as a blogger I do not carry around business cards and I try to avoid any snail mail. So I am curious to see how this can be solved with WTM….

The funny thing is that for my other Blog I do the same with trade fairs and manufacturers and they have no problem to recognize a Blogger as press. They even are sending me tons of press releases……without questioning me….

Update 24th October 2007
Good sports at WTM. I just received their confirmation that they have accepted me and will issue a press badge after I had referred them to this post in my answer to the above quoted e-mail.

How to boost your Blog’s Web Presence: The T-List

T-List

The main wisdom is that the more links point to your website, the more traffic you generate and the better the (Blog)search engines can find you. So how to spread the word about your Bog?

Some examples of techniques to get the desired results are:

  • Comment, comment and comment; The advise is both inbound and outbound:
    • Give as many comments on interesting posts of fellow Bloggers as is feasible.
    • Obtain as many comments as possible simply by writing about subjects that may be of interest to others.
  • “I have been tagged”: Somebody points to (tags) usually 5 fellow Bloggers and the tagged ones should answer the pointing (tagging) by a post under the header “I have been tagged” and should give away a few until then unknown personal facts about themselves and at the same time tag 5 new fellow Bloggers.
  • Get interviewed by another Blogger:
    • Guillaume Thevenot exploited this successfully with his tag 20 Blogs I like, wherein from time to time he posts an interview. In addition he started this week publishing a list of 50 top Travel and Hotel Blogs according to technorati.
    • Paul Johnson copied the idea and has thus far published 17 interviews on A Luxury Travel Blog and yes yours truly Happy Hotelier is amongst them!
  • Join communities: For instance My Blog where you can obtain a nice widget (see my right column) that gives you an idea who passes by your Blog. Technorati, is another possibility and there are many more.

The T-List was launched yesterday by by Mathieu of Radar who modeled it after the Z List, originally launched by Mack Collier of Viral garden:

  • The idea is simple: Write a post, and copy and paste the list of the one who T listed your Blog into the post. Make sure the links are active and correct. If your blog is on that list, remove it as all to obvious self promotion is “not done”. Don’t worry, because if your Blog is on a T List, it will be on others and will spread. Add your favorite blogs to the top of the list. Publish the post. People will notice the incoming links, and hopefully write their own T List posts. The result will be that all bloggers will get more links pointing to their blogs, and more readers got to be good!

In other words:

  • Create a new post on your blog.
  • Copy and Paste the entire list of blog links in the post
  • Add any blogs that you want to include near the top of the list. (Optional)
  • Include the blog where you first got the list from, on the list in your post.
  • Do not include your own blog links on the list in your post.
  • Make sure that all links are copied intact.
  • Publish the Post.

Here we go

I add:

To the list of Radar:

  • Hotel Blogs [discontinued]
  • Les Explorers [discontinued]
  • Chrispitality Media Blog [discontinued]
  • A Luxury Travel Blog
  • Travel Rants [discontinued]
  • Travolution Blog
  • BootBlog [discontinued]
  • Erin Julian [discontinued]
  • My Travel Backpack
  • The Travel PR Blog

Your turn!

Added 10 March 2007:

Thanks David Ourisman of Travel Horizons for creating a T-List logo that proudly appears at the top of this post.

Look at my T-List page for an as complete as possible updated T-List.

 

Last edited by gje February 6, 2017.