This past Spring, at the Amex Luxury Summit, I had a chance to visit with Jim Taylor, President of  Harrison Group, and get beyond the Summit Agenda. “How much interest among your  research clients in Word of Mouth ?,” I asked,

“There's an enormous supplier desire  to understand the storytelling issue in travel, and how people craft the stories they tell, “ Jim said. “And there's a lot of mythology about when people come home from a vacation, what they do with their story. Everybody wants to talk ‘word of mouth’ without really understanding how a person comes to be responsible for a recommendation that important.

“ Luxury marketers want to understand how it is a person comes to engage a property, not as a room and a bed, but as a story. And then they want to understand the circumstances under which the person will pass the story on to another. And I think that it's difficult for marketers to understand how risky it is to make a travel recommendation to a friend.

“It's one of those things where if you're wrong it can really hurt a relationship, so you do it with a lot of care. You really have to know what you're doing. And then it's not quite as cut and dried as it might seem ...buzz networks and all that…as though the consumers are willing subordinates in their travel marketing job. And consumers are not. They are is doing it as a real favor to a friend, and they're really careful about it.”

Hershel Sarbin