Hope any readers that went had an enjoyable time at the World Travel Market this week – I spent the best part of yesterday at Excel. A round up of posts covering the Travolution conference at WTM is available on their blog.

Search engine marketing specialist Martin Dinham speaking at WTM advises that the travel industry should be making more of natural/organic search (the listings on the left hand of Google’s results pages) and to do so, need to include blogs, videos, metasearch sites and socal community sites as part of their online marketing strategy.

Analysis at Travolution on what UK and overseas tourist boards are doing online.

Ginny Mcgrath has written a piece at Times Online looking at sites that are selling ‘experiences’ to visitors before they set off. She discusses that such planning ‘quashes the spirit of spontaneity’ of indepenent travel. The emphasis is on the October launch of one of the latest such sites, Isango (approximately 1000 activities at present). Competing sites mentioned are London based Black Tomato and Australian run Viator.

‘Half of UK outbound trips booked online’, nearly double the German share.

‘Destination Marketers Under Threat’ says Roger Carter (MD of Team Tourism Consulting), speaking at Wired Travel Asia. He puts forward three reasons for this threat to DMOs (including the role of the internet, demanding consumers and commercial players operating in the DMOs traditional space) along with ten principles to e-marketing success.