Cinnamon set to take online influencing to new heights

ITB Berlin 2018, TBCasia 2018 gears up to be a revolution while building up on the incredible success of its previous reincarnations. 

This year’s event was launched at the iAmbassador-Travel Dudes – ITB Travel Tweet Up 2018, held at ITB Berlin, which is the world’s largest and most widely-attended tourism fair. 

Dileep Mudadeniya, Vice President John Keells Group, and Janicke Hansen, Chairperson of the Professional Travel Bloggers’ Association both launched this much-lauded event to a gathering of over 200 online influencers. 

In 2014, Cinnamon Hotels & Resorts created a mega-destination event – TBCasia 2014 – that brought together some of the world’s best travel bloggers to Sri Lanka in a global conference that explored and evaluated the impact of travel blogging in the global tourism industry. 

TBCasia 2016 turned out to be an evolution of this event, which hosted a 60-strong congregation of the world’s best wordsmiths, experiential marketers, global trend observers, geographical experts, leisurists, pleasurists, and social media gurus. A testament to the success of this mega event in 2016 can be explained by the number – 56 million; this was the collective mixed media audience that the event garnered online.

This year’s conference is particularly exciting in light of the 2018 Virtuoso LuxeReport, which lists Sri Lanka as one of the top emerging destinations this year. 

It is with this in mind that Mudadeniya went on to state: “As one of our thought-leadership initiatives, the travel bloggers’ conference and awards 2018 will delve into the trending developments that are taking place online in relation to travel and tourism. This year’s conference will discuss topics related to transformations taking place in the online sphere, and address some key developments, and how to cease the new opportunities opening up in this space with some of the most influential and thought-provoking speakers.”