Well, it was a great conference - in a great place. I stayed in Salt, near Kingscliffe and it was hard to convince me that work was more important than the fabulous pool and beach!

The Backpacker Day was excellent especially the “real” backpackers panel. We all loved the pretty Swedish girl who exclaimed that she came to Australia for a 5 week holiday with about $20,000 to spend - as it transpires she has stayed on for three months already!! One of the things I wondered about the backpackers themselves were their ultimate relevancy. All were selected from the Arts Factory Village Backpackers (which I have to say is a fantastic environment) and by their nature were perhaps a little more alternative than many of the travellers some of these commercial operators would be targetting. The lovely Canadian girl explained to us that “75% of backpackers were hippies”. I wonder if the backpacker panel had been chosen from the likes of Wake Up in Sydney or one of the base or Nomads hostels we might have heard significantly different results.

I was pleased that following my presentation they all proclaimed to be keeping blogs or social site - one in fact was managing three such sites (MySpace, MSN Spaces and Facebook).

I heard lots of interesting stuff over the subsequent days and look forward to seeing things come to fruition over the next months. Congratulations to the imminent addition to Meg from Nomads family, and their new coming Sydney hostel as well. Rick Schindler also let me know how well his Pub Tours and Booze Cruises are doing in Sydney - amazing!

Thanks to Belinda and her team for the support, and Mike at the Word for his most amusing MC role for the day.

This entry was posted on Saturday, April 21st, 2007 at 8:06 pm and is filed under Conferences. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.