But you can’t hold on to that hate forever, right? They say time heals all wounds, but a giant earth crater filled with lava is a tough wound to cover up. Here at Joobili we wanted to give you a few reasons to “un-hate” Iceland when the time is right. Think about it, how many countries have a recognized holiday for Beer Day? Iceland also puts on one hell of a music festival in October. And if you still can’t find it in your heart to forgive Iceland, then do it for the puffins. You’ll find all these and more on our list of 11 Reasons to Un-Hate Iceland. Just consider it…that’s all we’re asking.

Twitter: Early discussions seemed to focus on Twitter rather than blogs or other forms of social media. Actually Facebook dwarfs Twitter in both total consumer reach and in tools for interacting with your audience. But who cares about utility, Facebook was so 2008, right? What will it be in 2010?

Paid Content: Is content a commodity (nearly free) or is Rupert Murdoch maybe not as senile as we all think? The room seemed to be split on the issue. It’s hard to define which content is worth paying for, but clearly the status quo of free content is not sustainable either. You might enjoyed reading Mark Cuban’s take on this debate here.

Libel: Simply stated, you are responsible for the content appearing on your blog. The ability to create a (free) blog that can potentially reach thousands of people is truly a revolutionary shift in communication. But with power comes responsibility and you can’t have one without the other. Some bloggers are learning the hard way. The basic advice was to understand what is considered libel, pre-moderate comments on your blog and create a comments policy. The discussion got me thinking about Twitter accounts and Facebook pages. Are you responsible for libel that appears on these platforms?

I was invited as a guest speaker on the subject of tourism and social media. No, not facebook and twitter type social media, rather literally making your website “social” with other websites. For tourism websites this means distributing content across the web and integrating with other sites. This is something we are working on here at Joobili as well. Like the tourism organizations, we are sitting on great content and we need to do a better job getting it out to the wider web. It makes sense if you are a tourism organization to try getting your content in front of as many people as possible it’s not that simple. Performance is usually measured by the amount of visitors to visitdestination.com and the idea of tracking “influence” and “reach” in multiple channels is too fuzzy for some people, even if it is more effective.

I came away feeling encouraged by the number of people who do “get it”. They understand the evolving nature of the web and are working hard to promote their countries in the proper way. Some are held back by the inevitable bureaucracy of a government institution, but overall I’m optimistic about the future. One of my fellow presenters, William Bakker gave a good summary of the event on his blog.

HomeAway: Online travel seems a little obsessed with growing vertically, which made Brian Sharples’ presentation about HomeAway’s horizontal growth very interesting. Diplomacy kudos to Brian for not taking the bait on CheapFlights’ repeated mentions of their “organic growth” as if to say raising hundreds of millions in VC money were somehow cheating.

Frommers Unlimited: 85% of potential travelers search online before deciding where to go. This is great news for Joobili and other sites trying to fill a void in online travel inspiration. Go to nearly any travel website and the first thing you need to do is enter your destination. What if 85% of us don’t know where we want to go, we need some inspiration?

Google: Travelers average 12 search occasions on 22 different sites over a span of 29 days before booking their holiday. No matter how much I trust a travel site’s content or consumer reviews, I still find myself double-checking my results against a handful of other sites. The on-stop-shop for all things travel is an online Xanadu.

Dopplr: CEO Marko Ahtisaari was not a keynote speaker, but he stole the show with some precision insights. As a Dopplr user I was not surprised when he suggested “user interface is the new marketing” and “innovate by subtracting rather than adding”. Great advice that sounds obvious, but requires a lot of discipline. On a personal note, it looks likely Joobili will partner with Dopplr in the coming months to offer event and festival inspirations matching the exact travel dates of Dopplr member itineraries.

London Day 2

We also used our trip to London to meet with some more potential investors including Eden Ventures, Fidelity Ventures, and Brent Hoberman of lastminute and mydeco fame along with the manager of his new fund, Rogan Angelini-Hurll. I won’t disclose too much about the meetings, but I will say that everyone we met with was incredibly cool and generous with their advice and network of contacts. There is a perception of VCs as sharks preying on naive young founders, and I’m sure those guys exist, but we haven’t met them yet.

I won’t bore you with a full recap, put if you’re interested you can find detailed reports here, here, and here. Instead I’ll just share my favorite moment. The European CEO of TripAdvisor was being asked why they didn’t offer a “smart search” feature that customized your hotel suggestions based on your previous searches. His response was that people are far too complex. Just because you searched beach vacations 3 months ago doesn’t mean that you still want to go to the beach. The interviewer then recounted a fantastic quote, “Who is the customer is the wrong question. Instead we should be asking ‘when’ is the the customer”. Isn’t that what it’s all about? Who you are depends on when you are, what mood you’re in, etc. I think you know where I’m going with this. Destinations are like people. They aren’t the same day in and day out. Let’s stop asking where to go and start asking when to go. You with me?

Over the weekend I attended the Central Europe Travel Show held right here in Budapest. It was quaint compared to WTM London and ITB Berlin, but still worth a visit. I gave the regional tourism offices a little intro to Joobili and met with some Hungarian event promoters who plan to upload their events. The most interesting meetings were with Vista and Neckermann, the two leading travel agencies in Hungary. They are interested in including some of Joobili’s events in their newsletters. Let’s face it, advertising a trip to the Choco-late Festival in Bruges, Belgium is a lot more interesting than saying “Special price on Belgium Holiday”.

• More than half said they planned to increase budgets and a quarter said they expected online marketing budgets to rise by between 11% and 50%.
• 66% plan to increase spending on SEO. The preferred method for grabbing the attention of search engines was offering unique content… (cough) like Joobili events (cough).
• 50% planned to increase destination content and 47% expected to increase spend on AdWords.
• 20% said they expected to reduce spend on banners and six out of ten expected metasearch spend to remain the same.
• After SEO, user-generated content (34.8%) is the next priority for travel companies to add to their sites followed by video (28.3%), image galleries and marketing micro sites.
• Delivering content over mobile and localizing for non-English markets were the lowest priorities.

The Times Online published an article yesterday listing the 10 best festivals for 2009 (thanks Anna). The list is compiled by the author of the new Lonely Planet book I bought last month A Year of Festivals.  No mention is made of why the 2009 edition of these festivals will be any better or different than previous years, but I guess we’re entering the media season of annual countdowns and all things 2009. Three European festivals made the top 10: Venice Carnival, Glastonbury Festival, and the Galway Oyster Festival. I was especially happy to see Venice since I just booked my flight to attend the Carnival this year. Can’t wait!

Read the full article: Times Article

The Budapest Christmas market opened this week. It doesn’t usually get included in the “Best of European Christmas Markets” lists but I think it deserves a spot. What makes it so appealing is that only certified handcrafted goods are allowed in. I know, I know… all the markets claim handcrafted credentials, but if you go there you’ll find a lot of plastic kitsch sprinkled in. Not in Budapest. I did a quick search on Joobili and came up with a few other notable Christmas Markets.

Nuremberg Christmas Market: Huge market in the shadow of a lantern-lit castle

Geneva International Christmas Market: The “international” part is a bit of a mystery since the market is mostly filled with Swiss folk arts and crafts but hey, it sounds good, right?

Copenhagen Christmas Market: Iced doughnuts with black currant jam…yummm.

Belgium Christmas Market: This one actually deserved the International label with stalls from throughout Europe.

Dresden Christmas Market: Bet you never thought you’d see a 4-ton fruitcake tower (seriously)

Rome Christmas Market: What Rome lacks in crafts it makes up for with a mini city of nativity scenes and a humbling spiritual experience at midnight mass in St Peter’s Square.

Strasbourg Christmas Market: Don’t leave without eating the Flammekeuche

Did I miss any of your favorites? Let me know.

Trip Advisor 2009 Travel Trends