E-commerce Guest Lecture

Travel and tourism e-commerce expert Tim Williamson visited tourism and hospitality students to provide an in-depth, contemporary review of what is currently happening within the sector.

Tim, who helps run on-line activist travel company Responsible Travel talked about using e-commerce in the real world. He showed in some detail how building a good looking website may be relatively easy but the challenge of getting traffic to the site and getting customers to buy something from it is less so.

The students discussed how Google works and how you either need deep pockets to buy a slot at the top of their listings or you need to be great at content, PR and service if you are go to get people to your site using organic search. Tim also talked about the tools used at Responsible Travel such as Google’s Webmaster Tools and Alexa.com. Surprisingly he said they felt social media was a waste of time in terms of e-commerce and that as yet they had not found a way to fully monetise film content despite all the hype.

Rita Penge, a final year student said: “Tim was great – he had such depth of knowledge. I love my lectures, but it’s even better to get someone working in the sector and at such a senior level. He really brought the subject alive.”

Adam Jones, Principal Lecturer, commented: “We were so lucky to have Tim lead a session with our students. We are also fortunate that there are a number of tourism and hospitality business located near to the Eastbourne campus, where the courses are based, that are prepared to come in and share their knowledge to help students with their studies.”

You can find out more about how Responsible Travel do things differently in this short film:

https://www.responsibletravel.com/copy/an-experiment-in-business