Legal compliance requirements continue to evolve, and it is essential that anyone involved in selling or supplying group travel stays informed. Matt Gattenby from Travlaw Legal Services outlined key regulatory changes affecting the industry, their potential impact, and what tour planners and group travel organisers should consider to ensure compliance in 2025.

Feel like it’s impossible to tap into why people actually choose a trip or experience?

Welcome to Trigger Thinking, a tour of the psychology behind what actually gets people to take action.
Spoiler: it’s not just solving their problems. The session explored why focusing on triggers, not just struggles, is the secret sauce for creating a brand strategy that converts interest into sales. Packed with relatable examples, and actionable tips, this talk demonstrated how to stop blending in and start creating scroll-stopping, trigger-driven marketing.

This session explored practical AI use cases tailored for tour operators, coach operators, and group travel organisers. Key areas included analysing data trends, streamlining supplier and vendor communication, enhancing marketing efforts, managing quote requests and optimising pricing strategies. Through real-world examples and live demonstrations, attendees gained actionable insights into how AI tools can be leveraged to apply these use cases, resulting in enhanced efficiency, increased profitability, and greater operational impact—insights that can be applied immediately to their business.

This year marks the 250th birthday of Jane Austen, one of Bath’s most famous former residents, and you’re invited to the festivities!

As you wander around this beautiful World Heritage city, you’ll find it easy to picture the Regency-era Bath Jane brought to life so vividly in the pages of her novels Persuasion and Northanger Abbey.

Combine Bath with other destinations for the perfect Austen250 trip around England. Visit Jane Austen’s House in Winchester along with the Cathedral where she was laid to rest and travel further north to the Peak District with a trip to Chatsworth House, aka Pemberley from Pride and Prejudice.

With around one in five people in the UK reporting a disability and an estimated 15 – 20% of the population being neurodivergent, the travel and tourism industry must prioritise accessibility and inclusion. This panel brought together voices in accessible tourism to provide insights and explore practical strategies to create experiences that cater to all. From personal experiences to industry best practices, attendees gained valuable knowledge to unlock the immense potential of this important segment of the market.

The goal of the presentation was to help attendees:

• Have a clearer understanding of the need for better accessibility within tourism and the benefits to their business, along with a toolkit to make this happen.
• Understand why it’s not just the right thing for organisations to support neurodivergent customers, but how it will help grow their business
• Understand the importance of the accessible tourism and travel market and the opportunity it offers, and will be able and empowered to build and deliver a plan to make their business more accessible and to take advantage of this opportunity
• Learn the difference between accessibility and inclusion and how to deliver both.

This presentation covered:

• A brief overview of inbound tourism, its value to the UK economy and the current political and economic context
• The latest visitor trends and statistics
• The challenges and opportunities facing the inbound industry from both demand and supply sides
• Why travel trade engagement is a golden opportunity for supplier businesses and destinations to boost their inbound business
• How supplier businesses and destinations can collaborate with / support the travel trade to maximise the opportunity

In this session, hosted by Association for Group Travel Organisers, the panel discussed how to deliver trips that are sustainable, responsible and benefit the local visitor economy.

Attendees gained a better understanding of how group trips can further benefit local visitor economies.

This session, organised by the Coach Tourism Association, outlined the current benefits of coach holidays and how they can be further enhanced to attract new customers to take the coach option. The panel talked about examples of what has worked for them, and what hasn’t. They also discussed the challenges they have faced and what operators need to do to attract new customers of any age.