The travel pages of the nationals would be empty if it wasn’t for the endless surveys and top 100 lists.

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Good questions. Surveys are a well worn path that are always contrived and only very rarely statistically significant. It is not just a problem limited to travel. Beyond some kind of governance of the use of surveys & statistics in advertising and promotion it is hard to see what can be done.

Remember being advised by PR department in old job, “if you want to get some publicity just pull together a survey, as long as you’ve got over a 100 respondents and it isn’t too obviously just your mum and granny answering the questions it will be fine.”

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This is a similar argument to the one I have regarding news outlets. I’m tired of reading press releases in news venues. I’m tired of opinion and unabashed bias being masqueraded as journalism.

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I do believe most of the surveys are carried out, yes.

However the panel base and methodology should always be scrutinised.

For example:

“80% of people said they would book a holiday online in 2008….” blah blah blah.

In the small print you will probably find out that the survey was conducted online, so it is obvious that the sample are web users and therefore more likely to book via the internet.

Most surveys have some kind of agenda. And if it is backed by Company X or Y and the findings did not suit their ends, the press would never get to see it.

ChavGate, in my opinion was a PR wheez which consumers lapped up. I’m sure some consumers were offended, but many others would not have been – it’s a simple as that.

As shocking as it seems, many would’ve thought: actually, i quite like the idea of filtering out so-called undesirables and therefore Activity Breaks seems like a good place to book through.

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49% of surveys are made up! And there’s only a 23% chance that statistic is true The problem with stats is that they are based on particular criteria to meet a desired outcome which doesn’t often give a balanced view. I’d like to think that most travellers are savvy enough to realise this.

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A client of ours – Jersey Tourism – recently employed a market research company to conduct a survey to find out whether consumers know what the currency is in Jersey. The survey was definitely for real, and our press release explained how it was conducted (by telephone on a balanced sample of 1000 UK residents) as did most of the resultant coverage – http://www.independent.co.uk/travel/simon-calder/simon-calder-as-sterling-sinks-time-to-test-out-some-funny-money-1520969.html and http://www.travelweekly.co.uk/Articles/2009/01/28/30096/survey-reveals-41-of-the-british-public-dont-know-jersey.html

Point is the survey revealed that 41% of the UK doesn’t know the currency in Jersey is sterling, quite a large figure and something which effects their holiday decision making process, so for Jersey Tourism letting the public know this should be of benefit to the consumer.

I agree that travel industry news is riddled with surveys and stats but that’s not to say that it’s all baseless or indeed useless info… and I’m also not sure that any other trade’s industry news is all that different. I bet if you were an avid reader of Construction Week you’d come across a bounty of survey results. All journos love a good statistic!

As for the desperate media buzz, I agree with Kevin, completely don’t agree with their sentiment but I’m pretty sure ChavGate was very effective for Activities Abroad…

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Nothing to add to Kev and Ian’s good comments, but here’s some further reading…

Andrew Marr tackled some of these problems with a great tipsheet on ‘how to read a newspaper’ a few years ago:
http://wearethebest.wordpress.com/2007/03/05/andrew-marr-how-to-read-a-newspaper/

And Yes Minister’s take on the opinion poll has never been bettered: http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=2yhN1IDLQjo

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It’s PR chaps… if say you’re a PR and you have a travel client who you have convinced to part with a chunk of cash each month you have to DO SOMETHING for them to justify your fee…. so that means those of us who write and blog about the industry get buried in a never ending avalanche of twaddle dressed up as ‘news’.

It’s a real wolf in sheep’s clothing thing too – real news disappears under the mass of pseudo surveys. I agree with Kevin they are carried out, but are as statistically significant as something my cat could tell me 90% of the time. (see what I did there?) If you want to read an interesting exhanged between me and a PR on this subject have a look at this…

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[...] over at Travel Rants has had a bit of a go at the travel media. As someone who reads most of it, I’d find it hard to disagree with his points. There seem to [...]

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@simon

we were very open with our press release policy.

I can’t say the same for other travel trade media brands:

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Shock! Horror! Survey finds that 99% of business travellers prefer business class! I seem to remember reading a survey in one the travel papers that said something like this… Many of the surveys do state the blindingly obvious and leave me open-mouthed that the travel trade press can make a news story around such. Mind you, the travel trade press is pretty tame and often swallows a lot of this nonesense hook, line and sinker. I was trying to remember when any of the main travel trade press had anything remotely resembling a controversial story….

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Fantastically and typically provocative muse from the Murray Harold comment machine, the man who criticised Twitter users on Travelmole and secretly had an account anyway.

I would like to think that Travolution has had something “remotely resembling a controversial story”…

Or, indeed, a series of stories:

Google trademarks, for starters – http://www.travolution.co.uk/articles/2008/05/23/1437/the-google-brand-name-policy-switch.html

But well done for stirring the trade media from their press release-induced quagmire to get another reaction.

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Darren, which travel press are you referring to, by the way? The travel press for the travel industry or the travel press for the punters? I mean, Conde Nast, for example is very readable. I feel that the (travel) trade press, though, tends to write what it thinks we should be interested in, rather than what the “Travel Consultant on the Clapham Omnibus” may be interested in. With respect, Google brand names? Yup, fair enough Thomson or Thommy Cook are/ were probably spitting teeth, but to the average consultant, attention span was probably measured in nano-seconds. The Activites Abroad thing – I can see that now, the PR types going around, first shouting “Duck!” and “Oh! Bother!” then, suddenly, “Hang on, we have some mileage in this – quick, claim it as a cleverly thought out, distinct policy!” Does the travel trade press read their “letters” page, I wonder? Over the many moons I have read these, through Clarksons to the Internet to Twitter (Kevin )The subjects have never, ever changed: Discounting, agent being bypassed by the use of, poor communication twixt agent and operator/ airline, agent being hammered financially for operator mistakes (occasionally vica versa), discounts (again) this time: industry, for the ruining of, costs of bonding, ABTA fees, occasional pops at British Airways and the odd general brick hurled at IATA. Doesn’t seem to matter if its online or on High Street, either

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@murray – perhaps if the google trademark issue appeared in Travel Weekly of TTG it might’ve passed the humble sales consultant like yourself by.

For Travolution readers (mid to senior execs across the travel industry) it was a big issue and captured more than a nanosecond of their time.

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