Buyers give TTM thumbs up

BANGKOK, 12 June 2014: Most of Thailand Travel Mart’s hosted buyers, who completed a post-event questionnaire, gave it a high satisfaction rating.
Tourism Authority of Thailand reported, Wednesday, that buyers found the event useful to source niche products and services.
Of the 343 buyers who attended, 177 completed the questionnaires distributed by the TAT.
Now in its 13th year the event is firmly established as a cost effective way for new tourism players to showcase their products at a fraction of the cost of a regional show.
An analysis of the responses indicated most buyers gave the TTM an overall satisfaction score of 4.36 out of 5.
On products and services that would serve their market needs the score was 4.26. On the strength of niche markets at the show the score was 4.13 and 4.03 for the range of Mekong region travel products.
The top five categories of sellers most sought by buyers were predictably hotels and reorts (65%), tour operators/travel agents (61%), weddings & honeymoons (36.7%), ecotourism (28.2%), entertainment venues and health & wellness (25.4%).
75.7% of buyers said they achieved their main purpose of attending, which was to meet sellers of new products and services.
In addition, 87% of buyers also expressed interest in developing future tourism programmes between Thailand and the Mekong Region.
This year, there were 176 buyers (51%) who were first-time participants at the TTM Plus, up from 46% first-time buyers at the 2013 mart.
On the breakdown of international buyers, the top three countries were China (30 or 10.49% of international buyers), United Kingdom (27 or 9.44% of international buyers), Australia and India (20 each or 6.99% of international buyers).
There were 399 seller organisations, an increase of 1.27% over 2013. Most sellers were from southern Thailand and Bangkok (38.48% and 34.18%, respectively), followed by the North, Central, East, and Northeast. Sellers from the GMS countries comprised just 4.05% of all sellers.
Of the exhibitors, 92 organisations or 23%, were first-time participants, up from 21% last year. Of the newcomers, hotels and resorts comprised 66.67% of the total, followed by tour operators/travel agents (6.27%); ecotourism (5.01%); entertainment venues (3.76%) and the Mekong region (3.76%).
Typically, seller satisfaction ratings were lower than buyers, as they are paying for booth space that partly subsidises invited buyers and they tend to be more critical of the oganisation. They gave the event an average satisfaction score of 3.56 out of 5.
But 46.7% of the sellers interviewed expected their sales revenue to increase over 2013, while 42.9% of sellers expected their sales revenue to remain the same as last year.
They said they would like to see a greater diversity of buyers at the next TTM, especially from emerging markets

Sourced: ttrweekly