Following on the huge success of ionSearch over the last couple of years, Blueclaw and Linkdex teamed up and hosted an ionSearch Travel conference on 5 December 2014.

The event took place in London’s Dominion Theatre and welcomed a number of speakers discussing trends in online travel marketing in 2014.

Speakers at the ionSearch Travel conference were:

Martin MacDonald is the Inbound Marketing Director at Expedia . His talk focused on what online travel marketing will be like in 2014 and beyond. Find out more about his talk here.

John Straw is the Chairman of the Digital Advisory Board at Thomas Cook. John is a cofounder of Linkdex and joined Thomas Cook only last year. In his talk he pointed out that travel companies should be doing a lot more in terms of content creation and gave some insights in Thomas Cook’s approach to become a better content creator.

Mike McDougall is Blueclaw’s Head of Search. He has been working in search marketing for 13 years and as a specialist in Paid Search, Mike provided some useful tips for modern PPC campaigns in the travel industry.

Travel Journalist Rob Cowen writes for the Independent and the Telegraph and gave some insights in his experience in travel PR and how important it is for travel brands to become storytellers.

“All of you should be hiring journalists. If you capture some of that – well-written content that sells a place in the right way, you’re gonna be nailing!”

Gian Caprini works as an EMEA SEO and Social Product Marketing Manager for Microsoft. In his talk he discussed how people plan, book and consume their holidays and shared his experience in content optimisation.

“The travel sector is where inspiration is already there – you are selling dreams already to people.”

If you weren’t able to attend the conference and would like to know more about what was discussed, you can sign up here to get access to the full videos.