Suppliers publish brochures to support distribution via highstreet travel agents

Brochures are required in order to build desire for a product via 3rd parties – and they are very good at that – because we have years and years of practice in creating great physical brochures.

Without brochures this would make the travel agent’s job much much harder – because the natural replacement to brochures (which is rich media websites) – need only be on the web in one place – not on every agent’s website (for cost and SEO reasons)

Hence the future of brochures is directly linked to the future of highsteet travel agents. Agents need to remember that when they complain about just been seen as brochure pick up points!

Report this comment

I think the day of the brochure is nearly over given that many people now shop for their hols on line. Brochures are bad for the environment and I suppose most people going into a travel agent will load up with lots of brochures which a) had to be printed, b) transported around to get to various t/as and c) then disposed of and a lot of them are not fully recycleable.

As far as photos go, it is difficult. Naturally the companies are not going to use the pic showing building sites and such but what do you do? If they just take an alternative view then they are not lying. But if they use photos of a view that was good and is now obscured by cranes then that is lying. But they can do that on line as well as in brochures. As I said, a difficult one.

At least nowadays people have the option to check out locations on on line tourist related forums prior to booking to get the updated position of their chosen location.

Report this comment

This debate has rumbled on for years but now that the vast majority have web access, I think finally the traditional holiday brochure’s days are numbered. Online rich media content is the way to go but there are still plenty of challenges there too in terms of improving accuracy and quality.

Report this comment

Brochures are only useful these days for kids projects.

Other than that I always go online to find out about properties and what the current status and price is – brochures are outdated and can’t stay current.

Report this comment

I’d agree with you there – environmentally unsound and very unreliable compared to the web – they are expensive to produce too and provide a barrier to entry for smaller operators wanting to work with agents.

Websites are much more effective. I take Alex’s point – but perhaps with downloadable PDF’s in agent sections of the website this could be solved. Maybe gives the agent more of a chance to talk to the client while downloading appropriate pdf’s – and allow them to build rapport at that stage.

Report this comment

I certainly agree with the points about holiday brochures frequently being out of date, but I also agree that they’re still used to help create desire in high street branches – the web’s great but so is a glossy photographic brochure you can carry around everywhere & look at to daydream about destinations.

I’m not sure the environmental argument is sound though – are we really taking into full account the environmental impact of running and cooling servers and all associated infrastructure of serving up webpages 24 hours a day?

Not to mention the environmental consequences of the equipment lifecycle, from manufacture to disposal. The manufacture of just a small laptop can typically involve the use of a number of toxic chemicals (including arsenic) which then have to be disposed of, as well as carbon emissions for building a laptop being quivalent to the CO2 the average car emits in a month…imagine what server manufacture might involve.

Report this comment

Are websites any better? You ranted about them before… the nice picture on the website taken in 1994 does not show the 3 hotels that have now been built… or the run down state of the hotel.

The thing about brochures being a legal document…. if someone knows there wrong you’re told. We get so many complaints about brochures, yet in a lot of cases the errata’s are pointed out and people do not read them. Websites are not legal documents (or do not have to be) so errors can be just left there.

Report this comment

Must admit I’m going to go against the grain here. I think brochures have a good few years in them yet. When it comes to reading lots of detailed text, and taking time to absorb the atmosphere of a place through words and pictures before deciding whether to shell out thousands on a holiday, NOTHING beats holding a paper product (magazine, brochure, etc).

Kindle, schmindle – people want to feel and smell nice paper, and to take the time to flip through real pages, dipping in and out, weighing things up in their mind. Paper is like TV: it is “lean back” technology – you lean back in comfort and take it all in with a feeling of leisure and enjoyment. The web is “lean forward” technology – you have to sit forward over a keyboard and look into the screen, move the mouse, click around, engage… Leaning back or leaning forwards radically alters the customer experience…

People who spend all day with lean-forward technology (like you and me and, I guess, everyone reading travel-rants!) forget that the HUGE majority of everybody else don’t. Paper really matters. People love brochures. You only have to go a consumer travel show like Destinations to see thousands of people walking around carrying bags of paper information and literally wheeling suitcases full of brochures…

Report this comment

Brochures will still exist – as Matthew says, people still like to feel paper between their fingers, and this is why the Kindle will never be as successful as the iPod – but their content is changing. The best tour ops now are creating brochures that are less ephemeral – ie they don’t contain prices or even named hotels – and more like coffee table books.

They give the reader a real flavour of what the destination is like and what kind of experience they will have there, which encourages the reader to get in touch to find out specifics.

This makes sense as a brochure containing specifics gives the reader little reason to continue the conversation, and gets out of date very quickly. Far better to do a ‘coffee table’ brochure and keep the specifics to your website or blog, which can be updated more easily.

We’re off to a B2B trade fair in October and yes, I will be doing a small brochure, but just as a reminder to the visitor of who we are and what we’re about. The real ‘meat’ is on our website.

Ultimately, why should I spend weeks/months writing, designing, choosing images, proofreading and signing off a document that will be out of date before it’s even come back from the printer, when I can spend my time far more productively?

Report this comment

Well, we will see new way for electronique brochures.

Stanza, a IpHone reading application (http://www.lexcycle.com/)

Amazon Kindle, a software and hardware platform developed by Amazon.com for reading e-books

jetBook, a eBook Reader

The eBook Store from Sony

and much more to come….

Report this comment

I’m with Matthew. People do like to look at brochures, to pour over them together, to pass them around. I also agree with Gsp that the environmental argument does not necessarily stack up.

IMO, from a marketing perspective, operators should be using brochures and web sites in tandem and yes, some should be working harder at keeping images relevant and up-to-date.

As a former specialist tour operator I know that if you wanted travel agent distribution you had to have brochure stock (and I am sure that’s still true today). Indeed I understand that there are travel agents who do not have internet access and if they do I suspect they would not be willing to bear the cost of printing pdfs on a large scale (a process which also has an environmental cost).

Personally I do not like to see the brochure waste but I am sure the printed page will be with us for some years to come.

Report this comment

Agreed Darren – Bump technology now enables 2 people with iPhones to transfer contact details by bumping phones, no reason why this couldn’t also be used for PDFs. Using a site like card.ly means I can sms someone my contact details & social networks in seconds (see card.ly/timrussell for an example). USB sticks are still quite pricey, at least for small startups like mine, but CDs can do a similar job.

Report this comment

I think that we are starting to see the travel brochure evolve from the traditional picture and price panle and that in the future it may be more like Tim said “a coffee table style publication” which will then lead the reader to the various forms of digital media that surround them i.e. www, mobile, digital TV etc. (mediums which themselves are evolving every day!).

Also given the fact that tomorrow’s traveller (our children) are a totally different type of consumer of information. Research shows that they are more likely to get their news and communication in a digital rather than traditional print format.

Therefore with the continued growth of digital media serving, in all its different forms then the “Traditional Brochure’s” days are probably numbered but the digital arena needs to pool all the data that is flying around into a more concise offering something I think we will see with the emergence of the semantic web.

Report this comment

I honestly think that there’s a serious over-estimation of the number of people who’re not just online, but also the number of people that actually book holidays online too. If I were to think of family & friends who’re online, sure it’s a good percentage, but it’s not a vast majority. Especially among the older generations. And especially here in rural France.

On a recent visit to my home town back in the UK, I noticed that the travel agents on the high street were doing brisk business still, with folks being shown their choices by staff from a brochure. I don’t believe the brochure is an outdated, outmoded form of information at all. I don’t think its days are numbered either, simply because (and again, especially here in France) it’s a deeply rooted ‘tradition’. I’d say that’s probably true of the UK too.

We’re asked quite alot for brochures, by clients who’d like to show non-internet savvy friends & family what we have to offer. I get perhaps 2 or 3 requests a month for these, but sadly we point them in the direction of the website as there’s just so much more info on there than is possible for us to condense into a small A5 brochure.

When I’m thinking of holidays, I look at brochures too, but I do combine this with web searches.

Report this comment

There’s a lot to be said pro and anti. But I find that there’s a lot of information NOT on the websites. Hotel size, for example. As someone who dislikes hotels above 300 units, it’s often as I’m web booking I double check with the brochure and find the hotel size not suitable. Also, a brochure is, as said nice to browse and dream through!

Report this comment

More than 1/2 of my clients still like to have a brochure. Not so much hotel brochures but escorted tours, independant tours and cruises there still is a demand for a brochure to browse through.

Now as all companies are cutting costs on this and offering downloadable brochures sometimes, I still have many clients that do not want to go on the internet and now the travel agent has to incur the cost of printing it out and mailing it to service the client.

This is also happening with documents after a trip is booked. Everything is become E docs to save in cost. Though the positive is we save the trees from using to much paper!!

Deb

Report this comment

Travel brochures are here for a long time yet. One luxury tour operator (who didn’t even sell through agents) decided to stop doing brochures about six years ago and invest the 6-figure sum saved on web development and client events. It almost killed the company. Six months and several redundancies later, brochures were back.

Were they just acting a bit too soon? I don’t think so, People like brochures. They like the portability, the photos are better than online and for a luxury operator it is a way of showing the quality. I’d put a tenner on brochures still being around in 50 year’s time.

Report this comment

@Simon

I agree with the example of the luxury tour operator who feel it is necessary to retain brochures to continue working with their existing customer base.

However new tour operators are constantly launching that don’t have brochures – and they focus on building a customer base that doesn’t require brochures (and probably, at this moment in time, losing potential customers who desire a brochure).

The question then is – will the tour operators (in 5 years time (not 50!)) who haven’t moved to brochureless distribution be able to build a customer base / brochure free expertise – when they suddenly come to the realisation that others competing with them don’t have brochures – and have strong customer lists of happy customers who have booked without brochures.

That is the key decision point – keep printing brochures, keep feeding the existing customer base….. or go brochureless, build a new customer base, and probably disrupt your existing customer base. For new tour operators without existing customer bases it is a much easier decision to make. For existing tour operators with a strong customer base addicted to brochures it is one hell of a tricky decision to decide to stop printing them.

Report this comment

@ Alex
One problem is any operator that stops producing brochures will lose sales. But the bigger problem is that it’s very hard to quantify your drop in sales. You could contact 100% of your client base and you might get 100% response saying they would still book if you dropped the brochure but the reality would be completely different.

It’s a leap in the dark that makes it a hugely risky/reckless decision.

Report this comment

I too think that online booking is over-rated and that the whole internet thing is hyped beyond belief. Nothing beats being able to browse a brochure in the luxury of your own home. Also, the cost to the environment is an interesting one. Printers and paper suppliers have gone to great lengths to produce more environmentally products. The range of recycled paper available now is incredible, and even when it is not recycled it is usually from well managed forests. Vegetable based inks are now very common, and paper is naturally bio-degradable. So the argument is not entirely sound when it comes to the environment.

Does anybody consider just how much power is used to power the internet? For example, the servers in the East Anglia region take more power in a year than the whole of Ipswich. And experts say that the internet will have a greater carbon footprint than the whole of the airline industry! How green is that? We are all hypocritics to some extent. With green issues we only pick on the easy targets so we can, at least, seen to be doing something.

Report this comment