Travel News soars on to the stage

It was thirty days of bedlam in April when we produced the 50^th birthday edition of Travel News Weekly. Ironically, it was to be our last, as COVID-19 tipped us to shut down the print edition and re-engineer the weekly newspaper into a daily online multimedia service.

When TNW started in 1970, industry news once a week was a revolution. Travelinfo had proved the need for daily updated travel reference information. Now, the urgency with which pandemic-related news was breaking, meant it was time for us to focus our efforts on a daily, online publication that agents could access from home.

The new Travel News site was ready a month after we went into lockdown, launching on May 1.

“Looking at our Google Analytics, the growth since the launch of Travel News has wildly exceeded expectations,” says Anton Marsh, md, Now Media. “When I compare a busy week on our previous online site, eTNW – March 23-29, the week in which lockdown started – to the second busiest week in June for Travel News, June 8-14, there is incredible growth in readership.”
 

*Stats from Google Analytics. Traffic under 1 second has been removed to avoid counting bots.

“It’s been a positive start, with the launch of daily news updates. I look forward to the relaunch of our features when the industry is ready, which will appear in PDF format and be emailed to readers weekly and printed at the end of the month in a compendium, which will be distributed to agents. We have already seen this work very successfully with our Freight News title, which has made the same product conversion,” says Anton.

“In the meantime, we would greatly appreciate your feedback by completing our two-minute survey to help improve Travel News. I would also like to pass on my thanks to Natasha and her team for ensuring Travel News is as strong as it is.”

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