Welcome Message, Meet The Media 2021, Monday April 12th 2021 - TravelMedia.ie

Welcome Message, Meet The Media 2021, Monday April 12th 2021.
The TravelMedia.ie team welcome suppliers and travel media to Meet the Media 2021.
Michael Collins, Ali Finnegan, and Niamh Waters from TravelMedia.ie run through housekeeping to welcome everyone to Meet the Media 2021, and welcome back so many of our travel industry friends and colleagues.
Over 21 suppliers have signed up for Meet the Media 2021. We've had over 80 media and over 800 appointments have been made on the system and up from 650 last year.

- Hello and Welcome to Meet the Media 2021. We are virtual today. On the screen beside me you can see my colleagues, Ali Finnegan, and Niamh Waters. I'm going to hand over to them in just a second. But first I wanted to say a big thank you to all the media for joining us. We appreciate you coming online in this virtual world and participating in Meet the Media. But in particular, I want to thank our suppliers. You will note that today we have a limited number of suppliers not as many as we usually do that is unfortunately because a lot of suppliers, tourist boards, et cetera, have their budgets frozen or on hold. So those who have joined us today we want to say a big thank you to them for being so positive and looking towards the future. We are all seeing light at the end of the tunnel. We see the vaccination programme moving in Ireland slowly unfortunately but moving very fast in Northern Ireland and in the UK and that gives us all hope. So I'm gonna hand over to my colleague Niamh Waters first. Niamh.

- Hi everybody, and thank you for joining us today. We had a great response to the event. This year, we have 21 suppliers as Michael mentioned. We've had over 80 media and we've had over 800 appointments made on the system and that is up from 650 last year. So really great to see so many of you turning out for the event and logging on and making those appointments. So just to give you a reminder of how today will work. We have an extended meeting agenda format today. So this is to facilitate the large number of tourist boards that we have who may be working in different time zones. And also media that might be working remotely. So our event kicked off at 7:00 a.m. today and will run until 9:00 p.m. Each appointment will last 15 minutes with a break in between a five minute breaks. So, to start your meeting, it's very easy, you will log on to your agenda within the platform. You will then go and click start video meeting. So as we said each meeting will last 15 minutes. And meetings will end automatically so you don't need to worry about keeping time. You can also share your screen within each video meeting if you like. So if you'd like to share a PowerPoint presentation you can do so as well. Michael, over to you.

- Thank you, Niamh. And just a reminder to all the media on today's Meet the Media, the event today is an editorial event. So it is not commercial. So we can ask you to refrain from any commercial presentations, discussing, advertising, rate cards, et cetera. We understand that we live in a commercial world and those elements are obviously very important but the purpose of today is editorial conversations. If you do have a commercial element, we would ask that you would do those in a followup via email. Now over to you, Ali.

- Hi everyone, so we would love if you could help us share it some positivity about future travel by posting about today's event on social media. So if you could take some screenshots from your meeting, post any interesting insights from suppliers and share any takeaways from today's event on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. And if you wanna use the #MTM2021. Handing over to you Niamh.


- Thanks Ali, and thanks Michael. So guys that's it we hope you have a great day and we hope your meetings go really well. If you have any problems today you can contact me or niamh@travelmedia.ie or you can text or call me on +353 86 0492394. Thanks everyone.

- Thanks everybody have a great day

- Thanks guys, bye.