I sat down with Nick today and heard his impressions on his recent trip to the industry fair. Formerly the Travel Technology Show, the name has changed to Travel Technology Europe to emphasise its focus on the continent (by which I mean Europe as a continent, not the contiguous European nations), but despite the name change all its salient features remain the same. From our team, Gordon, Nick and Craig took the trip down to London to showcase what Web Applications has to offer.

The saga begins with a dark and stormy night. Well, not night so much as midday on Monday, but the weather was definitely stormy. The team got a train from Manchester Piccadilly to London Euston Station at noon. By the time the train reached Crewe it was discovered that the line to Euston was closed and passengers were encouraged to exit the train at Crewe and find another route on their own. Option number one included a diversion to Derbyshire, but was then rejected when the connecting train was to head to Euston, thus defeating the purpose of the alternate route. Option two found the team headed to Birmingham. Once safely at New Street it was discovered that the desired train was not departing from this station, but Birmingham Moore Street; a mad dash ensued, I think you get the gist. Web Applications is very dedicated to TTE, and no amount of transport difficulty was going to hinder our eventual arrival. Five hours after the initial departure, Craig, Gordon and Nick arrived at Earls Court 2, London, completing the would-be two hour train journey.

Now that everyone arrived safely it was time to set up the Web Applications display. Our materials had arrived by courier earlier in the day (i.e. our expected arrival time) and the team’s old hands had the display set up in no time. In case you are not familiar with the Travel Technology Show, it is a dichotomous fair, split between the technology and business facets of travel. Web Applications, you may have guessed, came to demonstrate our technology along with about 60 other exhibitors. The Travel Technology Show usually gets around 3000 visitors over its two days each year which makes it a great place for us to demonstrate what we’ve been up to. We had two major demonstrations of Tr@veller, a rolling demo of our new Reporting System which has now been named br-ease, and a roll-out on our new SaaS Mercury. We’re happy with our display and the reactions we received from the visitors, but you know what we are like, we’ve got our sights set on improvements for next year. So far we have booked double our stand’s space for next year’s exhibition as well as started a plan to add a theme to our displays.

We were able to fulfil what we intended to do which is always a satisfying feeling. We showed interested parties what we were up to, we were able to meet and connect with many people in the industry, and we had the opportunity to see what other exhibitors had to offer. Web Applications has competition ingrained in our DNA.

We are very happy with the response we garnered at Travel Technology Europe. The team was able to travel home without any of the previous hassle, and get back to work. We want to say a big thank you to the clients who came by and visited us, especially due to the inclement weather. We hope to see you all there again next year!