Month: June 2023
Joint annual conference early bird tickets now available.
Tickets for the joint Tourism Alliance, Tourism Society and British Destinations Annual Tourism Conference to be held in London on Tuesday 19 September 2023 are now available. A limited number of tickets are at a discounted rate of £160 plus VAT. These can be purchased via British Destinations Annual Conference 2023 page at: https://britishdestinations.net/annual-conference-19-march-2018/
or go to the booking link directly which is:
https://app.tickettailor.com/events/thetourismalliance/943064/r/bdreferral2023conf
A high profile programme addressing current key strategic issues and looking at potential changes to the future political environment is being developed and details will be published shortly.
Don’t delay please, secure your place(s) at this important annual event now.
Calling all stations.
or the cautionary tale of the boy who didn’t bother to heed yet another one of the multiple cries of wolf.
Firstly, my sincere apologies for the recent lack of communications. It isn’t that there has been nothing to say or even that it is my style to say nothing, even when I should or could! The truth which I can now communicate to one and all is that we have been experiencing a little technical glitch, partly but understandable I would hope, of my own making.
For as long as I can remember I have been in receipt of between 20 and 30 emails a week, all proportion to come from BT, my email provider warning of some immanent and dire consequences to my email services, if I didn’t immediately do x or y. Week in week out, I have, correctly ignored them and dutifully reported them as phishing. Annoyingly after all these dutiful years, I found that up to half a dozen of the cries of wolf received during May 23 were actual from the BT; the real BT, who’d have guessed it?
Consequently, on the due date, which I had taken absolutely no notice of, the dire outcome they had in fairness to them warned of did come to pass. Overnight I unexpectedly found myself unable to send or receive emails on my trusted old PC based outlook system. Far more alarmingly, I also found that I was now also unable to access the trusty alternative back up means via the BT web-based browsers. Fortunately, and by chance only, I could still send and receive individual emails on my phone, but without the benefit of access to my address book or many saved emails or a reliable means of accessing and transferring files and documents from my laptop. Yes, I know you can do that but only if it set up for that and it isn’t because I never needed it to be.
A seemingly minor crisis then quickly became a disaster when it transpired that there had been a “bit of an oversight” on my part in transferring administration rights and recovery email addresses to me some 15 years ago (oops). As a direct result I have spent a good chunk of the last fortnight or so arguing off and on with computers and automated system unsuccessfully trying to persuade them that, unlike them I am not a computer but Peter Hampson to whom peter.hampson@btconnect rightfully belongs and to which I do genuinely need access to. In every instance the ultimate response was: OK we understand your problem and we have sent your administrator an email code/link or please get your administrator to contact us.
This PM, after masses or tears and tantrums and various contacts and correspondence, I finally got to talk to two real people. Between them, with a bit of faff and few false starts they eventually managed to restore my account and access to my web-based backup email. I am now in the process moving permanently from the defunct PC based to web-based outlook. Normal coms, both individual and group-based, will now resume. A few features, for example my signature block still need to be recreated but hopefully for now that’s not a make-or-break problem for any of you.
Whilst off air for much of early/mid-June, a lot has happened. For example, submissions to the short-term let registration consultations have been submitted and so on. However, there is little point looking back on such matters here and now.
We all now have the main summer season to look forward to, a number of consultations are either underway and or expected. The political environment frankly still remains somewhat chaotic and, with a General Election now firmly within sight, potentially increasingly fertile, offering the possibility of alternative solutions and changing long fixed red lines. We all of course still have our joint annual conference towards main seasons end on 19 September to look forward to, with the increasingly rare opportunity to discuss face to face some of the key issues. More details on this will follow shortly. I will now also look back over the last few weeks to fill in some of the recent gaps, where I think it still may add any value for you, or should be included in http://www.britishdestination.net our corporate memory.
The moral for today’s little story: always be vigilant, never fall for the obvious like opening an attachments or links unless absolutely certain they are genuine. But equally important, don’t like me become overly complacent or just auto assume because its the same old same old and assumption has by default become the easy option. Sometime when the someone in a crowd of potentially naught boys shouts “wolf”, on the odd rare occasion they might actually be right and mean it.
The alternative could of course to be able to afford a competent IT team or pay for a decent full third-party IT service and let them sort it out but that’s a different and much bigger story for another time.
British Destinations