The did you know of a PATA summit

“Raise your hand if you have more than one mobile device on the table here today”, a whiz kid from Google asked delegates attending the recent PATA Summit. I can count. I raised my hand reckoning I had around five items. My reading glasses are for ever mobile, so is my pen if it is still on the table. Then there is my Iphone, a laptop and a wrist watch, an ancient mobile device that you can strap to your wrist or hang off a chain and dangle it from your waistcoat. That’s a fob watch and I don’t have one.

I thought I played the quiz quite well and the speaker was happy as he made his point. I was hoping he would sit down and call it day, but no he had to labour the point. Considering we all raised our hands and our mobile devices you would have thought the proverbial penny would have dropped. He was preaching to the converted. But he motored on; a speech had to be Hands free access.

Do you know half the world is right now on Facebook or twittering, he said and that if you started to check out all the websites on the internet you would still be here in 350 years. I groaned. No, I was planning to leave shortly after lunch.

As PATA Summits go, it wasn’t a bad effort. Around 280 people turned up for the one-day talk fest. Unfortunately, the speakers were all cloned and programmed to repeat exactly what the first smart fellow had said over and over again at sessions that rolled out on the hour until the cocktail bell rang.

Why is it that every high tech savvy speaker representing the likes of TripAdvisor, Google and Twitter assume we need to go back to basics every time we sit in a conference hall?

We got the usual rehashed tales of once up a time the internet sparked to life and spread at the speed of light across our globe in the time it would take you to say Bob’s your uncle.

Then there was the typical “did you know” question from a speaker who thought he was talking to a row of dumb terminals. No we didn’t know that every Chinese over the age of four owns a smart phone and twitters to mum and dad to turn the sound down on the telly. But we had a sneaking suspicion after hearing the same clap trap at every travel conference since the first Iphone was sold.

Then there were thoughts on multi-tasking. Today’s consumers are sitting watching the telly in the evening and checking what their friends are doing on Facebook. They are not missing a thing. How do we work a benefit out of that information nugget? All the travel industry has to fathom is how to get on the telly and shout “read my bloody Facebook entry.” Work that one out and we will have a travel boom on our doorstep.

I haven’t yet attended a conference that closed on time. Speakers always warn us we are short of time and have heaps to cover. Then why are they repeating stuff during the first 20 minutes that we have heard a million times? We are already bedazzled by technology, overwhelmed by the thought a billion Chinese  glued to smart phones.

Yes, we are in a wonderful connected world and none of us can work out what the next development will be other than to acknowledge Google Glasses are just around the corner and who knows a high tech nose attachment will follow to dispatch the exact smells that belong to the photos forwarded to our Facebook page.

If its annual general meeting was anything to gauge the future by, then we would have to say, members were not fighting to find a seat, but those who did bother to attend witnessed discussion, even a few heated arguments; all good signs that PATA is alive and some members are kicking. It is not the time to call in the house doctor to write a death certificate for this association.  There is hope mainly because its leaders know they have to do business differently than ever before. Transparency and association democracy are the buzz words voiced by people who earlier nurtured the PATA closed shop mentality.

Mr Craigs hails from Northern Ireland, a substantial man who fills a seat and towers like a crane over a Belfast shipyard. I would venture if he is given tools and mandate from the association’s executive board, he will have his ship under full steam in a year well clear of the snipes and storms that have so far assailed PATA.

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