B2B travel trade magazine title TTG is closing in print after 72 years.
However chief executive and TTG Media owner Daniel Pearce told Press Gazette the publisher is on a “clear growth path” with a strategy based around data from its tight registration wall, “fewer, larger” events, and insight reports for industry clients.
TTG began serving the travel industry, especially travel agents, as the Travel Trade Gazette weekly newspaper in 1953 after post-war travel restrictions were relaxed.
But the November edition of TTG magazine, which has been monthly since 2020, will be its last. Quarterly sister title TTG Luxury will end in its current format in December.
It had a free controlled circulation of 9,737 in July 2022 to June 2023, the latest figures available from ABC. It was on 16,233 before the Covid-19 pandemic in July 2018 to June 2019.
Pearce, a former editor of the title who led a management buyout in 2013, told Press Gazette it had not been an easy decision but that he is “100% sure it is the right thing for the future growth and resilience for the business”.
He said dropping print “has come from the fact that we have a very clear strategy as a business, and it doesn’t really fit that strategy anymore”.
He said the brand nonetheless remains “very close” to its readers and advertisers and is “part of the fabric of the industry”.
“It was that closeness really, and that understanding of our [travel] agents, and some recent research which led us to conclude that print is serving less and less of a purpose now in our market and being less well read.
“As a media business, we pride ourselves on delivering measurable outcomes, measurable responses to our advertising partners, and we do that through a new website we’ve launched recently, we can do that through events, through other platforms, but you can’t do that with print anymore. It’s just eyeballs on a page, and you never really know how many eyeballs are looking at the page.”
TTG now has a database of about 62,000 readers, among whom 19,000 are its core audience of travel agents in the UK and Ireland.
Pearce said this data helps TTG “to target different sections of the market that our advertisers tell us that they want to reach, and it’s proving pretty successful in that way”.
TTG did launch a paid-for membership option in 2020 called TTG+ but Pearce said they have been unable to “get to a critical mass of membership there”.
They still have a “small number of paying members” getting benefits like access to the full archive and event discounts, but the focus is on asking all website visitors to register.
“We think it’s a fair trade,” Pearce said. “You give us a little bit of your data and you can read all of our amazing, unique, authoritative, free content.”
TTG makes sure journalists can focus on producing ‘unique’ content
He said that in the past couple of years they have also put more focus on creating unique content and moving away from the time when they had been “competing with other media to receive press releases, rehash those press releases, send them out as quickly as possible, pumping out 20 news stories a day on our market”.
In April 2023 they launched Noticeboard, a tool through which travel companies and PRs can directly upload their press releases which is signposted as “not produced by TTG Media”.
“It means that we can carry that general news from across the sector as a matter of record, without tying up our experienced journalists to be rehashing those press releases.
“So if you looked at our site, you’d see that these days, we carry a lot more objective, unique content – that might be long reads, that might be analysis, it might be relying on our authoritative position in the marketplace to give our own take and opinions on certain things that are going on, and that’s really helped drive our growth online.” TTG has recently launched a new website to continue that growth.
TTG has also become “as much of an insight business as a straight content business”, Pearce said, and uses its audience data to inform some of its insights on the shape of the market.
It is carrying out regular insight reports for clients and has set up an insight panel with almost 400 travel agents who are paid £10 per survey to share their responses.
“That’s become an important part of the business,” Pearce said. “One of our goals is to be the number one source of information, both on and for the travel agent community in the UK and Ireland.”
TTG has a team of around 32 people (including some who are part-time), of whom nine are on the content team (including partner content).
Under the recent changes three people have been made redundant: two sub-editors and a part-time designer.
There is now investment going into partner content/content marketing, which Pearce said is “where we’re seeing real growth at the moment”.
TTG is also planning a “large-scale” luxury travel event which is being launched in October 2026.
TTG has been profitable since Pearce took over 12 years ago with the exception of the Covid years.
“You can imagine, particularly being exposed to the travel industry,” Pearce said. “Our market collapsed in 2020 and 2021, and it’s a source of great professional pride to me and to our team that we battled our way through Covid and came back to profit and learned a huge amount of lessons about the business and about ourselves during that period.”
Currently print brings in about 15% of company revenue, about 45% is from digital and around 40% comes from events (which this year included The Travel Industry Awards, the TTG Luxury Travel Awards and the Fairer Travel Event).
TTG to be ‘more resilient business’ post-print
The post-print strategy that is now underway will put TTG on a “clear growth path over the next few years”, Pearce said.
He added: “We still expect both our turnover and profit to grow next year, with more revenue coming from other areas.
“It’s my belief that no longer printing actually makes us a more resilient business and less reliant on an old media that, sadly, an awful lot of people don’t have time for anymore.”
He noted that the travel industry “will always be exposed to fluctuations up and down, and consumer confidence is low this year” and that this can have an impact on marketing spend with brands like TTG.
“But I think one thing that surprised everyone, and I think will continue to, is the strength of our travel agency market,” Pearce said.
“Twenty years ago, people were saying travel agents are dead. Everyone’s just going to use the internet in the future, but for multiple reasons, travel agents are stronger than they have been for some time at the moment.
“I think we all relate to being time-poor consumers and wanting to use a travel agent to take some of the sting out of planning for the holidays, or indeed for business travel.”
He added that although high street travel agents are in decline, home-workers selling travel in newer ways “is very much on the rise”.
Pearce remains confident in the power of human-created journalism despite the arrival of ChatGPT and other AI tools that can help people plan travel. A recent headline from The Times noted: “ChatGPT plans the perfect holiday … to places that don’t exist.”
Pearce said: “I think from a consumer point of view, not everyone is going to want to rely on ChatGPT or trust ChatGPT with their most important expenditure of the year. Your big holiday of the year, £5,000, do you really want to trust ChatGPT’s advice on that, or do you want to trust a human being?”
TTG’s B Corp status gives ‘genuine point of difference’
In 2019 TTG launched a new tagline and vision stating it exists to “promote a smarter, better, fairer travel industry”.
The publisher also has B Corp status, meaning it has been certified for high standards in social and environmental performance.
Pearce said TTG prioritises sustainability, both in its coverage of the travel industry and the way it operates, as well as people and diversity, equity and inclusion in the market.
“Those things help inform the strategy and give us a genuine point of difference in our competitive media marketplace.”
Pearce added that TTG’s mission and B Corp status “keeps us very united as a team that is trying to achieve something bigger than ourselves.
“We’re not just here to make a bit of money out of the travel industry. We’re here to try and drive change in our industry and grow our business at the same time.”
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