Why we Come Together

"They didn't want to go home," Yeoh Siew Hoon told me.

As the Founder and Editor of Web in Travel (WiT) and a self-confessed travel and tech geek Siew Hoon was in her element hosting a four day conference that started off fully online and ended yesterday with a blended real world/online event in a conference room wired for video live streaming. On so many levels it was an opportunity to reflect: about why we need to come together physically, about the limits and possibilities of online communities, and what the future holds for the interlinked travel and MICE industries. Travel Zero.O: Back To The Future took us on a trip to reconnect with what COVID-19 has left unchanged and it offered us a glimpse of a new dawn.

My experience as a speaker and startup competition judge began with the all-online segment on Tuesday. The event was live streamed on YouTube with speakers and startups eager to pitch joining via Skype. Connecting them was an editorial and technical machine that very effectively produced a live TV show lasting four days: longer than a media Marathon and more like an interactive Ironman.

It took me back to the start of my career in live television when the first show I worked on at the BBC was seen by 8-10 million people each week. The ability to pull in speakers individually, add visual branding and drop 'lower third' captions over them is, of course, something we are used to from broadcast but not something every MICE producer would do as well as the WiT team. Or as bravely because, with their partners, WiT set out, startup style, to "move fast and break things" and see how far they could push the technology. Of course it did break, sometimes for geeky reasons, with sound stuttering somewhere between Skype and the live stream going out, and sometimes for very human reasons where contributors calling in had trouble with headsets or showing slides. All very fixable next time, normal for something this complex and much better done inside the MICE family before going live with outside customers. The main takeouts for me were:

1. Streaming out from a central point usually works but having contributors join remotely brings a lot of additional potential points of failure. Technical rehearsals are essential (and were done) but if it's difficult enough to get speakers to send in slides on time, it's even harder to get them to use exactly the same setup for the rehearsal that they plan to use on the day.
2. Unpredictable connections and different laptops mean many things can go wrong when we ask folk at home to show slides and, at the same time, also talk confidently and appear on reasonably lit webcams. What passes muster on an internal zoom call with forgiving colleagues isn't good enough when hundreds are watching.
3. The baseline is that we must be able to hear speakers clearly, see their slides and keep things moving on. So while having the speaker say "Next Slide Please" sounds kind of quaint as the technical director clicks through the slides at the central production point, it's a lot less frustrating for everyone than awkward pauses between speakers, requests to start again and lots of 'can you hear me?'.

When I and my fellow panelists arrived at Marina Bay Sands yesterday I was impressed by all the thought that had clearly gone into creating a "Hybrid Broadcast Studio" in a conference room. In itself that was an example of exactly the kind of accelerated innovation-by-necessity that came up time and again. Hotels and travel businesses are re-inventing what they do based on what they have to keep revenue coming in. New partnerships are being formed to seize the opportunities opened up by all the changes that have been thrust on us.

Again from a broadcast perspective and, as a part time professor who now teaches remotely, WiT gave me an opportunity to reflect on who we favour when we mix online and real-world audiences. In TV it's simple—the viewers at home are what matter and, being brutal but honest, the studio audience are just window dressing. You really can't optimise for both and that realisation impacts the design and 'visual grammar' of the show. For example, if a contributor is calling in remotely, and being shown on a big screen, the presenter on stage needs to talk to that image on the big screen and the director has to have a camera placed to cover them doing so. For the presenter to look anywhere else looks strange, especially if there's a big image of a talking head behind someone who is talking to them facing away.

Likewise, from a set design perspective, a director has to make a choice between the real world and remote viewers. In the real world excellent sharp huge screens like those provided by MBS create the opportunity to contextualise discussions flexibly in a way that adds visual variety. However if the screens are covered with text that works for a real world audience expecting a PowerPoint presentation, it won't necessarily read on a small screen remotely.

But all these observations are just small learnings that emerged from an event that I think had more emotional impact on those of us attending than many were expecting. It taught us something valuable about what it means to come together.

Like every industry, the travel and MICE sectors are grieving right now. There's a sense of bereavement for what has been lost and so, rightly, the content for the first day of WiT was geared towards taking stock and sharing the sense that everyone is in this together. Several speakers commented that, from an outside perspective, travel might look like a race to the bottom on price but if we want to come out of this thriving we need partners to survive to remain able to offer travellers a diverse range of choices that will keep them travelling. WiT reminded me that one reason why we need to come together is to share the downs, pull ourselves together and get back to building the future.

On a personal level, I don't think I was the only physical attendee who felt slightly overwhelmed—not by the public speaking part but more by the rush of energy that comes from being with people on a scale I have missed for months. So what is it, that rush? I have a hunch it's anticipation, for serendipity and surprise. Like taking a trip to a foreign land, going to a good event puts you in a place where there's enough structure to give you physical comfort and psychological safety yet you don't exactly know what is going to happen, who you are going to meet, or what they will say. From a host at an event, to a chef at a great restaurant or the staff welcoming us to a location we want physical safety and reassurance that we belong but we also want some kind of edge. We want to trust and we want to be positively surprised.

We don't just come to conferences to share information. We seek inspiration, validation, opportunities for our next job, the chance to meet old friends and to feel part of something larger. I want to credit the team at Web in Travel and their partners for delivering all that in exceptionally testing circumstances this week. I do hope the learning from this pioneering event will inspire others in the travel and MICE industries. Human beings are physical entities, not just talking holograms, and the confidence we need to keep going through adversity today is the same as that which inspired our ancestors through much tougher times in the past. It is the confidence that comes from knowing we are not alone and that is why travel to explore new frontiers and coming together physically is so essential to being human. It's part of who we are.