World Travel Market 2013's Mobile Travel Panel: Follow-up!

Thank you to all the readers who came along to World Travel Market’s Mobile Travel Panel yesterday afternoon. If you recall the topic was, “Desktop is dead! Long live mobile travel!”

Andrew Cocker, Chief Marketing Officer of Skyscanner gave a stimulating presentation for the first 25 minutes. He included a load of statistics and perspective, some from the wider travel market and some from Skyscanner’s own internal research. It’s always useful to be brought up to date with the wider industry, however I think the audience really appreciated the insight Andrew offered from Skyscanner’s own experience. Afterwards, I thanked Andrew for being so candid and direct — I think his approach was very much valued by the audience. Indeed, Andrew was mobbed by the audience afterwards.

The panelists, Ben Smith from Wireless Worker and Rafe Blandford from All About Windows Phone were characteristically excellent too. Ben, Rafe and Andrew spent about 35 minutes kicking a wide variety of issues around, asking their own questions whilst taking lots of feedback from the audience.

The major thrust from the panel was, I think it’s fair to say, ‘get with it’ — that is, mobile is definitely here. Rafe was particularly bullish, urging the travel industry to invest now to ensure they can collectively meet the growing demands of a mobile first travel world.

Thank you to everyone who came along!