The consensus on the question I posted before seems to be that it's okay to encourage travel, but that we need to encourage traveling BETTER, whether that means encouraging choosing trains over planes, taking longer trips, seeing things in a different way, etc.
My question now is HOW? How do I as a content creator do that? I mean, just lecturing people about sustainability or whatever isn't going to help. I'd love some PRACTICAL ideas on how to encourage better travel.
So far I'm trying - not always succeeding - to avoid writing about the places that are very popular and instead focusing on lesser-traveled places. I'm avoiding big general listicles and instead trying to write about much narrower topics. As much as possible, I'm traveling by train or bus rather than plane and that'll come through when I write about a place. Any other suggestions?
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I know there are quite a few travel marketers and content creators here, so really interested in your professional opinions on Travelport's 7Wonders campaign.
We partnered with Jamie ‘Adventureman’ McDonald to try and break a Guinness world record - to visit the 7 modern wonders of the world in under 7 days. We were mostly focused on creating compelling video content and generating good PR - the main video is here:
I think the video is fun. Even though we're a B2B travel tech - we're trying to take a very distinct approach to most corporate-style B2B technology marketing which tends to focus on website, event sponsorship, product features, etc. This looks and feels a lot more like travel marketing to me.
[EDIT: Added the correct video link - sorry!]
Hi Mark, it's a very well produced video with lots of interesting places!
However I'm wondering if a "fast travel" campaign is perhaps a bit outdated for a big empathetic tech company in 2023?
Critics would argue that flying around with a professional film crew to snap selfies of places that that took civilisations a millennia to build, then depart for the next city 5 seconds later, is well - a bit off-putting.
From a travel tech perspective, it's clearly impressive that Travelport can enable all this well connected global travel, so well played. Equally from a traveltech perspective, this exercise is also unnecessary since you've got so much data from existing journeys, you could have simulated this trip.
imo, the sustainable way to have done this campaign would have been to find people who were genuinely traveling to those destinations, and connect them at the origin / destinations in some sort of "around the world relay". Perhaps not as fun for Jamie and your marketing team to scoot around the world, but better for the planet!
In the end, who is the customer for these videos and who are you trying to persuade? If it's for travel agents who sell flights and want to have confidence in a global distribution system, then yes - this video ticks those boxes.
Not sure if this feedback is what you're after, but hope it helps!
PS: I also watched the earlier video in your comment featuring your cool CTO — can you re-post it?
Thanks for your thoughts. I had some similar feelings myself - but I could see why from a marketing perspective it had to be real.
(By the way, we didn't fly camera crews and marketing people with Jamie - we either hired local or prepositioned key people along the way)
Here's Tom Kershaw talking about the tech side of it:
Good job. Fun, informative and relevant. A win in my book.
This was absolutely incredible and inspiring. Very well done!
I had the same initial reaction as Ian about fast travel and being so disconnected, but ultimately you can't win them all ;) It's a fun challenge and watch, you're obviously not encouraging others to make such an approach to travel, it's just a quick satiation of our wanderlust and entertainment needs all in one go, well done!