As promised: The first post from the ENTER conference in Amsterdam. I’ll start slightly off topic and this post is intended as an introductory warm up all round. I arrived yesterday evening, fairly impressed with the efficiency of the Dutch public transportation system. Everything has run like clockwork until now and people have been very friendly in assisting whenever needed.

The actual conference is being held in the RAI, the largest conference center in Amsterdam. Image my surprise when I after the introductions enquired as the availability of a wifi connection (which I absolutely expected to be a formality these days) – there ain’t one. Considering the subject matter of the conference (the world wide web), this seems odd, to say they least.

However, it serves as an example of how not to treat your tourist, business or otherwise. I’m surrounded by people in suits, who obviously have emails to send – as do I.

Back to the conference. The introductory talk was held by Vincent Vanderpool-Wallace, who, despite the Dutch-sounding name, is the tourist minister at the Bahamas. The gist of the talk was how technology should serve the people, not the other way around.

The most important thing for a travel destination today is no longer word of mouth in the literal sense – it’s word of … internet. Reviews, recommendations and online answers. This is why you shouldn’t be afraid to link outside your own website or community.

Aided by GPS, internet and wifi (oh, how I miss you) the experience of travel should be entirely seamless. From the moment you step off the plane, your experience can be formed by the same effects. A voice greats you at the airport, guides you in your hire car via GPS and finally says hello from the internal hotel com-system.

Incidentally, he also mentioned how GPS guided tours will soon be taken up by the tourism board. It’s actually a fairly simple idea and the lack of use at the moment is odd. Why does your GPS have to be limited to say “turn left”? Design a small handheld unit and code the coordinates of landmarks. When you arrive there it will act as a personal guide – very clever, surprisingly simple – and most importantly, entirely doable and potentially very cheap.

Note: This entry was written during the day, but posted at my hotel in the evening. The actual time stamp is therefore 11.00 am.