Keith Nowak, Director of Marketing Communications at Travelocity, will deliver the keynote speech at the 2017 Beer Marketing & Tourism Conference.
Travelocity is an online travel agency that was founded by the Sabre Corporation but is now owned by Expedia. It provides online booking of hotels, flights, cars, and cruises but also vacation packages and activities in tourism destinations.
We were of course intrigued by the outstanding press garnered by the Travelocity Beer Tourism Index, which was completed in cooperation with the Brewers Association. It came about as a result of a survey showing more than three-quarters of those surveyed said they would like to go on a trip where they visited craft breweries and sampled local beer.
“I think that the biggest takeaway here is not as much the output of the index as the interest that we saw in it. That interest represented a lot of pent up interest in the topic of beer”, says Nowak. “That the index drove significant amounts of news coverage (especially in local markets) and discussion amongst beer aficionados seems to suggest that local and state tourism boards as well as individual and groups of local breweries can leverage that latent interest in promote their business as well.”
But Travelocity, of course, is much bigger than beer tourism and Mr. Nowak will be able to talk about tourism trends in general and how that might affect the beer industry. “The interest in local over national, handcrafted over mass produced, and unique “living like a local” experiences is well established,” says Nowak. “We are seeing this in lodging, dining and of course, beer.”
Keith’s brief bio:
With almost 20 years of communications experience, Keith has worked in PR long enough to remember faxing press releases and mailing 35 millimeter slides. In those two decades, he has worked across the technology landscape: from hardware to software to services. He began his career in the wireless industry, starting out in paging, then moving on to tenures at Nokia and HTC, where a hectic international schedule gave him firsthand knowledge of the travel industry–insight that proved invaluable when he joined Travelocity in 2014. Since then, he has immersed himself the world of travel tips, tricks and trends as he manages Travelocity’s ongoing communications efforts, and of course, to be the publicist for their superstar, The Roaming Gnome. Raised in Dallas and a graduate of Texas A&M University, Keith is excited to be back home after almost a decade in exile outside of the great state of Texas.
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