The Tashkent International Tourism Fair came to a climax on November 17 as experts in the field of travel media spoke at a talk titled ‘The Role of IT and Social Networks in Tourism’.
Tom Hall, vice president of Lonely Planet, was a guest speaker at the event, sharing his thoughts on the future of digital marketing in tourism as well as Uzbekistan's recent boost in digital promotion including Lonely Planet's guides.
Lonely Planet awarded Uzbekistan with their Best in Travel 2024 award, citing Samarkand’s Registan, Bukhara’s Lyabi-Hauz, Khiva's Islam Khodja Minaret, and community-based tourism in the lesser-known Nuratau Mountains as top travel destinations for 2024.
Speaking to Daryo after the event, Mr. Hall shared Lonely Planet’s plans to further promote tourism in Uzbekistan via their published content.
“Lonely Planet featured Uzbekistan as Best in Travel and when we feature a destination, we do purposefully publish more content about the destination. One of the things about travel publishing in 2023 is that we need to write about destinations much more frequently.”
“In the past, we may have come to Central Asia once every two or three years. Now we need to be writing every few months. It’s definitely true that we’ll be looking for more content on Uzbekistan as a travel destination on a more frequent basis.”
He also suggested sustainable travel and family tourism as emerging trends in Uzbekistan tourism.
"We see these as really important search terms that we know people are looking for.”
On the topic of AI in travel marketing, he was confident that digital marketers who are able to demonstrate trust and authenticity would be able to outperform mass-produced AI media.
"Some of the ways we've seen AI enter the travel content space actually give a very strong opportunity for brands, destinations, and everybody in this space to put across that they're real people with authentic local voices and have reliable information as a point of differentiation."
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