Companies and international travel bloggers meet at the second ITB Berlin Bloggers Speed Dating event – lectures and workshops on working with bloggers – first ITB Berlin YouTube Film Award offers prize money worth 1,000 euros for the most creative entry
Berlin, 31 January 2014 – Bloggers have become an established part of the tourism industry. More and more companies are exploiting the wide-ranging impact of travel blogs in order to target customers. From 5 to 8 March 2014 ITB Berlin will be hosting numerous events where trade visitors, exhibitors and international travel bloggers can meet. On the Saturday of the show, as part of a stage event at the eTravel World, travel bloggers will be offering an insight into their work. The workshops, discussion rounds and lectures taking place at the eTravel World and the ITB Berlin Convention will provide networking opportunities for exhibitors and bloggers. ITB Berlin expects that some 300 bloggers from 15 countries will attend the event, an increase of around one-third compared to last year.
ITB Berlin Bloggers Speed Dating event
This year's ITB Bloggers Speed Dating event will be taking place for the second time. For exhibitors and bloggers admission to this event on 6 and 7 March is free of charge. The ITB Bloggers Speed Dating event will not only provide hotels and tourism destinations such as Australia, Finland, Florida, Kenya, Jordan and Portugal with a platform for meeting travel bloggers from around the world, but a number of federal States such as Lower Saxony and Thuringia as well. The aim is to show exhibitors new possibilities for marketing their products and services.
Focus on working with bloggers
At ITB Berlin this year's supporting programme of events will feature around 40 events organised by and involving bloggers. Corporate social media managers often face many challenges when working with bloggers. Thus, the German National Tourism Board has organised a workshop that will illustrate the opportunities and risks involved in working together and will highlight options for generating content and traffic.
Managers at hotels and destination tasked with evaluating their internet ratings can find out more at the workshop organised by Claudia Gunkel, a social media analyst and consultant. Rating portals have long established their place in the tourism industry. The importance of blogs, forums and communities is growing all the time. Claudia Gunkel will be showing tourism experts how to monitor social media traffic, with a focus on the latest monitoring and evaluation methods in this field. Workshops on video blogs and storytelling as well as numerous discussions with travel blogger associations will round off the programme of events. More details on the programme and highlights can be found at www.itb-berlin.de/blogger.
Networking with bloggers
As the world's leading travel trade show, ITB Berlin also offers bloggers a wide range of opportunities to meet and exchange views. On Friday, 7 March 2014, at 6 p.m. in Hall 17, Ms. Berry, a blogger with Tirol Werbung, will be organising a large bloggers' meeting for German speakers at ITB Berlin. Details of all the main events for bloggers can be found using the event search function at: www.itb-berlin.de/en/Events/
Once again Travel Massive, an international event, will be taking place at this year's ITB, and will be hosted by GoEuro and ExploRussia. More details will be available soon at www.travelmassive.com and at Facebook.
ITB Berlin is cooperating with leading bloggers' organisations: the Professional Travel Bloggers Association (PTBA), Reiseblogger-Kollektiv, Traveldudes and the platform for German-speaking travel bloggers (PDRB).