Simpson Travel
January 2025
Andy was invited to speak to the senior management team at Simpson Travel on a variety of aspects of travel and marketing, reflecting on 2024 and thinking ahead to 2025. He shared a number of trends in the travel and specifically villa market to help guide some ideas for the next 12 months, exploring how the largest tech player may (or not) be able to help with their goals.
It was a great afternoon and we hope it starts some further initiatives for this great company!
AITO Kickstart
January 2024
To start the year right, Andy was asked to talk about AI to the great AITO travel agents attending the Kickstart conference in Leicestershire. Given AI is such as hot topic (still), there was a lot to cover, including exploring some cool creative tools as well as more practical applications of how LLMs, machine learning and other aspects of AI might help businesses in 2025. Due to a technical issue, the audience were almost literally blown away by an incredibly loud speaker, but once passed, some good ideas were shared to help kickstart the year for the AITO agents.
ABTA Travel Trends Conference 2024
November 2024
ABTA members flocked to the annual Travel Trends conference in London, bringing together a large number of view points to help improve our general understanding of the travel landscape in this post Covid world. The general consensus of the day was that travel is in good health and that most travel brands have had a good 2024. Whilst there are some moves for some audiences to book later, there are many sectors in travel where bookings are happening increasingly ahead of time, with one brand seeing 20% of their 2027 itineraries getting sold!
Research released by ABTA showed that travellers are taking nearly four holidays per year, with roughly two overseas and two within the UK, opening up a lot of opportunities for all sorts of travel brands. And although the economic outlook looks tough in the UK, travel is still definitely a priority for most. For those brands willing to be more efficient and/or creative, the chance to grow significantly is there! Whether they will adapt and change or not remains to be seen.
