Back to professionally produced video content for third parties.



Cathy Bartrop of travelguru.tv says the days of a big budget producers – say, for example, a TV channel – coming along with a huge film crew, shooting footage for days on end, throwing a five-minute segment into a travel programme and disappearing with the copyright are over.



Nowadays – mostly because of the emergence of the web as a significant and valuable distribution channel – tour operators and tourist boards will rather pay for an independent production company to come along, hand over varying lengths of footage and do as much as they can to retain the copyright.

Nobody likes a show-off, but when a travel company has a dedicated department for creating what can be loosely described as “other cool stuff”, then online video is clearly the best way of showcasing it.



Take lastminute.com and its Labs department.



The division within the UK-based online travel agency has spent much of the past year developing a handful of neat applications for mobiles and some interesting user experience work under the Pronto brand.