Around the World in 8 Hours
November 14th, 2007
On Monday, November 12, 2007, I visited the ExCeL Centre in the London Docklands for the annual World Travel Market. I have been to this event several times before but it never fails to amaze me. The event is a business to business gathering of global travel trade industry and each year it seems to get better. People from each corner of the earth convene to meet, network, negotiate and catch up on the latest developments in the industry.
As we grow the myguideTravel family, we find this event to be an important one to see where the market is today and will be going to tomorrow. The venue is set up according to geography and the world’s regions are on display with tourist boards, hoteliers, visitor attractions and hospitality vendors all in attendance to promote their services. The ExCeL Centre is a splendid facility and is easy to navigate. I always find it helpful to invest the time to walk about the entire venue and to take in the spectacle. Many of the participants put on clever and entertaining stands to attract and retain attention and it is interesting to compare & contrast the various ones.
My team member, Conor B. Buckley, and I were visting WTM with Keith Roberts, managing director of myguideBritain, and we took some time to peruse the diversity of what was on show. Where it once took Phileas Fogg 80 days to get around the world, it took us only 8 hours. We saw everything from cruise trips to the Arctic to man-made islands in the Middle East and literally everything in between.
With all of this, there is the recognition of the great responsibility we have to ensure the long term future of the our industry as many of the most exciting tourism opportunities in the world are fragile and irreplaceable and must be appreciated and explored with this in mind. WTM hosts the World Responsible Tourism Day with this in mind to focus our
collective efforts on sustainable tourism. We at myguideTravel acknowledge and embrace the responsibility we share with our Guests to reduce the footprint we leave behind us in our exploration.
Entry Filed under: Travel
1 Comment Add your own
1. Albannach | November 23rd, 2007 at 11:52 pm
Phileas Fogg had the right idea, a ‘holiday’ of 80 days to travel the world - now that sounds nice. Steamers, trains, even elephants and sledges. Very environmentally friendly, where getting there (in his case, back to Britain, and why not indeed) is part of the experience (ah, the joys of transatlantic steamers instead of flying machines, so long as you’ve plenty of time and don’t mind the odd swell).
Only I wonder how much he actually saw and discovered of where he travelled. Perhaps better to see more of less? You make a very good point about seeing the future, perhaps we are already there.
We can see the world in 8 hours, rushing here and there, must see this and do that, drive a little further. But far better to slow down and actually enjoy where we are, realise we’ve arrived … somewhere different. Now wasn’t that the point, to discover why warm beer is so good, why haggis run anti-clockwise around the hills, why the Welsh insist on singing like Julie Andrews and Guiness tastes so much better in Ireland?
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