Advertising is a high-stakes business. As we indicated yesterday, it is often the most visible part of a travel agency’s marketing plan and takes up a large percentage of the marketing budget. Choosing the appropriate media to present your advertising is therefore a very important decision. Here are a few basic concepts that will assist you in selecting the media you should use. We will discuss print advertising primarily, but the lessons apply to all media.

In selecting your media for an advertisement, there are three important factors: Read the rest of this entry »

Advertising can be a scary proposition for a travel consultant. In a service industry like ours, advertising can represent as much as 80% or more of an entire marketing budget. Purchasing the right media can be a daunting gamble and generating appropriate creative is as much art as science. Results can be difficult to measure – it can sometimes be tough to determine whether an advertisement created any results at all. Yet, advertising is often the most visible marketing done by an agency. Getting it right is important. Thus, the next few articles will deal with advertising: what it is, how to plan, execute and measure. Hopefully, at the end of our series, advertising will not seem quite as dark an art as it may right now.

A good working definition is that advertising is paid, non-personal communication through media about a company meant to persuade a target audience to act in a desired manner. Read the rest of this entry »

From the dawn of the jet age to airline deregulation and now the era of terrorism. That is the ultimate birds-eye view of my 50 years in travel journalism and publishing, a personal milestone I reached without the slightest desire to acknowledge a couple of years ago.

This exercise in self-indulgence begins on December 13, 1955, the day I was hired as a reporter/editor on a modest monthly trade journal that covered travel to the Caribbean and Latin America. It was a decision that I’ve rarely second-guessed, although I turned down a pre-reporter news-clerk job at The New York Times and a reporter’s slot at the old New York World-Telegram and Sun. Read the rest of this entry »