Luxury Travel, Cool Canapes, Castle Views: Travel Massive Edinburgh May 2015

The May 2015 Travel Massive Edinburgh event kicked off in style on Thursday 28th, at the offices of sponsors 80 Days, An Occupancy Marketing Company.

Guests from the Edinburgh travel community enjoyed drinks and stunning views from our venue across to Edinburgh Castle – even a rainbow appeared, enhancing the postcard-perfect backdrop.

After a warm welcome to guests from Edinburgh Chapter Leader Katy Duncan, our 10 minute talks kicked off with Mark Forrester, Managing Director of 80 Days, An Occupancy Marketing Company, and our venue sponsor for the evening, on the state of luxury travel in the UK.

Guests learned that a typical online purchase journey in travel takes 24 days and 21.6 visits to 9.4 sites (from Google via Occupancy) and that search queries in the luxury travel category (UK) grew by 8% in the first quarter.

We were fortunate to have Edinburgh School of Food and Wine sponsor some beautiful canapés for our guests to enjoy during the evening – guests enjoyed Marinated Bocconcini watermelon, smoked salmon with pickled cucumber, quail egg with celery stick, and roast cinnamon pear en croute  – all stunning.

The school’s founder, Ian Pirrie, gave an interesting talk about the school, its development and activities and how it works with others in the industry.

As for the delicious canapés, the only sharing that was involved seemed to be in photo and in Tweet form – they certainly made an impact on our guests – thank you again, Ian and ESFW!

Our final speaker, Natalie Allera, Marketing Manager for The Bonham Hotel Edinburgh and Starwood Capital/Hayley Principal Hotels, updated the travel community on recent developments for the hotel group in Edinburgh and Glasgow, meaning that a new group of hotels has been formed, comprising The Bonham, The George Hotel and The Roxburghe Hotel in Edinburgh, together with Blythswood Square and The Grand Central Hotel in Glasgow.

Natalie kindly sponsored a tasty prize of dinner for two at The Bonham Hotel Edinburgh and she was delighted to congratulate the prize winner, Eva Sturm (@trvlresponsibly) of New Edinburgh Tours (@neweditours) who won the prize in our Twitter contest, using the hashtag #bonhamlux.

Thanks again from Katy, Julie and Lesley at Travel Massive Edinburgh to all of our very generous sponsors, 80 Days, An Occupancy Marketing Company, for offering us a brilliant venue, great atmosphere, drinks and more, to the Edinburgh School of Food and Wine for memorable canapés and to The Bonham Hotel Edinburgh for a great prize – our guests agreed that they all made our May event special.

Thank you also to the Travel Massive community in Edinburgh who have been incredibly supportive, attending our events, offering suggestions and ideas for future events and coming up with great offers of sponsorship. We are really enjoying building on this as well as seeing people connect and network, and it’s encouraging to see new faces at each event.

We look forward to engaging with the Edinburgh travel community at more #TravelMassive #Edinburgh events planned for this summer – the next event is scheduled for August.

Find out more about Travel Massive at www.travelmassive.com

Register in the Travel Massive Edinburgh chapter

Tweet the chapter leaders: @katyonthego @lesleyjudge @zurika – or email editravelmassive@gmail.com