INTERNATIONAL. The travel retail, airport and aviation sectors are ripe to bursting with various industry awards – several of strong heritage, and/or sound and transparent methodology. Others frankly lack such virtues.
In particular, we have noted the flourishing of awards that appear to play little role other than to drive advertising. Too often, criteria for judging purposes seem to be lacking.
Our practice is to report on all bona fide awards, some of which are run by rival titles to The Moodie Report. We have, for example, always covered the Frontier Awards in an in-depth fashion. These, despite some criticism down the years, have rightfully earned a place in the industry calendar and have helped to showcase excellence and raise competitive standards.
 |
The Frontier Awards are the travel retail industry’s highest-profile awards. Despite some criticism over the ‘self-nomination’ methodology employed, they deserve plaudits for employing a high-quality, neutral judging panel each year |
Whether or not one agrees with the “˜self-nomination’ procedure (we don’t and Frontier itself has debated that issue), no-one can question either the stature or the integrity of the judging panel that is selected each year to manage those awards.
Genuine awards have their place (the writer conceived the Raven Fox, now DFNI, Asia Pacific Awards in the 1990s). But we will not in future be publishing the results of any awards that a) attempt to sell advertising to nominees before the final judging process (a practice we consider inappropriate), or b) seek commercial gain from final judging that does not involve outside impartiality.
We do not agree, for example, with any award formula that is linked to advertising (pre and/or post the result) based on the winner being selected by an ‘editorial panel’ once outside nominations are received. We are not being parochial in this approach and everyone is entitled to run their business as they see fit – we are simply not prepared to encourage the practice.
It is important that we practice what we preach. For our part The Moodie Report flatly refuses to sell advertising against our annual “˜Dreamstore’ rankings (the best single store in each main category as assessed anonymously by leading suppliers and published annually at The Trinity Forum) or our annual “˜Best of’ rankings in our year-end edition.
The latter represent our opinions (albeit ones based on extensive year-round travel and much reader feedback) and would in our view be undermined fatally by the sale of advertising against the results. In the case of “˜Dreamstore’ we think it absolutely imperative that its results are neither tainted, nor perceived to be tainted, by commercialism.
We hope that our approach – one that we are glad to say is shared by our keen rivals at Travel Retail Business – will help differentiate between good and bad practice in the business, helping to encourage the former and not sustain the latter.
[comments]
