Travel Weekly Blog

I'm just using this post to reproduce a comment I made on Travel Rants' 'ban fam trips' post, which looks set to go down as one of Darren's most provocative.

Both Kevin (Travolution) and I have been involved in the discussion over there, and our rival TTG has produced a news story and a comment from editor Lucy Huxley about the post.

So:

...I'm all for the industry being conscious of how it appears to consumers, and it's good that we're able to come here and make our case to a largely consumer audience.

The thing I'd want to get across is that fams and biz trips aren't a separate entity that has nothing to do with the wider market - you can't put them in a box and say they're bad, but consumer travel is good.

As one of the industry's most important marketing and research tools (and here industry = tourist boards, agents, operators, airlines, the lot) fams are crucial to how leisure travel is packaged and sold to consumers.

Chances are the hotel you book or the excursion you go on are available because someone - the agent who sells it to you and/or a representative of the operator who provides it - scoped it out on a fam. And as the folks above say, in that context there's no substitute for first-hand experience.

I mean what I say in the first paragraph - these discussions can be frustrating to those who work in the industry, but to some extent they represent the perception of consumers.

It would be a mistake to reject them because they aren't written by insiders, and it's good that most of the comments have focused on explaining the fam trip model rather than having a go at Darren.

As for the comments themselves, Gavin 'Joe Blogs' Boswell was first in, with good follow-ups from Kelly 'Sandwagon' Pipes, Murray 'Advantage member' Harrold and Nick from Broadland Travel.