People sometimes ask us, ‘How long has TTG Asia been in the market?’ And all the time, we’d be pausing and scratching our heads thinking how long. We’re having so much fun covering the industry for the monthly print and the daily news online, that we don’t think about how old we are. The travel business gets more exciting year after year and, much like falling in love, the excitement keeps us feeling young and alive always.
Age really does not matter but for the sake of an answer, can you believe that we’re going to be 45 years old next year? We can’t believe it ourselves. Seems only yesterday that we celebrated our 40th anniversary with the year-long theme, 40tude.
We will of course be planning our 45th bash soon but for now, we thought we’d give you a refreshed TTG Asia – our version of a nip and tuck to iron out the wrinkles and keep us looking youthful, attractive, friendly, interesting and entertaining.
We hope you will like the new look for TTG Asia monthly, coming after last year’s relaunch of TTG Asia online and e-daily news.
But more than just a cosmetic surgery, if you look beyond the re-design, you will see that we have revamped our destination reports from this issue on and, beginning next issue, there will also be new columns, including pages dedicated to customer service and travel technology.
Our destination reports have been expanded to include coverage of more places within a destination; a new focus on innovative tours and activities; and a bigger drive to spotlight travel entrepreneurs or industry players who have a new business model or idea, just to name a few debut pages.
While we cover travel technology regularly online and through several special reports in the printed issue, we hear you – you want more, and you want it in the form of short, concise, easy-to-digest articles. Actually, you want all our articles to be shorter, more concise, easier to digest, without losing depth. You are demanding!!!
We do understand, dear reader, that you are time-starved and information-overloaded. So we’ll do our best to give you what we privately dub a ‘digestive biscuit’ experience: a read that goes down well quickly, yet is complete, wholesome, satisfying.
But of all the feedback we’ve heard from you, none is louder than your need for a dedicated focus on customer service. You’re so hungry for more guidance and information customer service.
So we’ve come up with several sections for this new column, including one called Troubleshoot – a specific issue a travel professional has faced on the job and how it was handled. And another named Say that again? – client requests that make an agency do a double take.
We’ll also take a look around the world of examples that show why travel agents are still needed – and, hey, why they aren’t – so you can learn from both the good and bad. And if we encounter a great or bad service ourselves while on the job, you can be sure we would be extracting the customer service lessons from it for you.
We want to continue to hear from you, so that we can keep improving, keep being your trusted, relevant read since over four decades and in the decades to come.
We intend to be forever young. 🙂
