I attended my first travel and adventure show on March 7, 2020. I walked into the Convention Center with open eyes, ready to take everything in. My main interests were to listen to a few speakers discuss different aspects of travel. This event occurred before the Coronavirus shut everything down. There was no strict social distancing yet, but there were many stations of hand sanitizer throughout the floor.
The first speaker that I enjoyed was, Pauline Frommer. She is known for creating and curating travel guidebooks for every continent. What I really appreciated about her panel was that she gave many websites and tips for different types of travel. If you were interested in finding a tour, short term work abroad, booking a hotel versus a rental, or finding travel insurance she told you exactly where to look. She showed how travel could be accessible to everyone and I will definitely use the many resources that she mentioned!
The second presentation that I enjoyed was from three popular DC travel bloggers about starting a blog! The biggest takeaway that I got from them was that fear would be the biggest hurdle to overcome and to just publish my first post. Fear has been holding me back for years. The other things that I need to learn, I will learn along the way. I really appreciated their honest insight, advice, and tools that will help me with my process.
Between presentations, I did walk along the floor to see the different booths. Multiple travel companies, tours, airlines, countries, and cities had their own booths. I also saw booths for luggage, food, random travel tools, and scuba diving. Of course, I visited the booth that was for the US Virgin Islands. It’s always nice to run into someone from my hometown area. My other booth highlight was for Portland, Maine. I’ve been trying to visit for years and I really enjoyed talking to the representative about the many beaches to visit during the summer.
It was anxiety inducing for me to have people attempt to entice me to come up to their booth. I just wanted to walk around, see what was there, and approach when I was interested. I did not want someone to yell at me to get me to talk to them.
Overall I enjoyed my time at the travel show. It did feel somber at times when discussing the coronavirus, but still positive about the future. They knew the travel industry would be hurt, but that the world wasn’t going anywhere. I might go to another travel show in the future if there are good speakers. I won’t be going to just visit the booths. I realized that is not my thing.