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The US president's "Who goes to a travel agent these days?" gaffe comes from this speech at an agricultural company in Atkinson, Illinois.

Illinois is a key battleground in the Midwest. Politically, it has been consistently Democrat since the late 80s, but a win is far from guaranteed outside its capital. Chicago has 76% registered Democrats vs 22% registered Republicans, but in Atkinson the split is 53% vs 45%.

In other words, Atkinson is representative of the kind of Illinois voters Obama might have to sway to keep the state blue in a difficult 2012 campaign.

As for the remarks agents take issue with, that's representative of what Obama belives matters here, and he has some justification. The Midwest has borne the brunt of the recession. In 2010 unemployment in Illinois was running at 10.6%, a full percentage point above the US average of 9.6% (the most recent monthly figures, for June 2011, are marginally better at 9.7% against 9.1%).

It's a big industrial state, so talk of loss of available jobs through 'automation' is likely to strike a chord, particularly outside of services-and-professions dominated urban centres.

In fact, Obama clearly believes it has nationwide resonance. A Republican blog points out that he used similar language back in June on the Today show. The ATM/teller reference has survived intact, but back then he referred to automated vs. manual airline check-ins instead of web vs. agent bookings.

Essentially it's an attempt to put (one of) the major pan-industrial changes affecting his audience's prosperity into an everyday context. It's fair enough for the American Society of Travel Agents to jump in and make its voice heard - it's a good publicity op and they wouldn't have been doing their job if they'd missed it - but the rest of us should relax. We might even reflect that, on an wider level, it's rather good that the president sees travel as crucial and emotive enough to bring home what he clearly believes to be a vital point.

(For a less upbeat take see The Economist, which essentially says 'harsh but fair'. It points out that the number of agencies in the US stands at around 10,000, down from 32,000 in 1998.)

Nope - not First Choice, which announced it was going all-inclusive-only last week. It's actually Thomas Cook.

A quick, unscientific, at-time-of-writing scan of the comments finds TC Facebook followers agreeing, just. Of the commenters who expressed a preference, 15 say all-inclusive against nine for self-catering or B&B.

What's actually happening here, of course, is that Cook is telling us it offers a range of board bases, which is interesting to see so soon after Tui announced it was splitting AI and SC/B&B between Thomson and First Choice.

While this is only a Facebook post, a 'choice' angle designed to make each of the Tui brands appear limited in isolation is a conceivable response to last week's news.

Quick round-up of some First Choice all-inclusive bits you may have missed:

• Lucy called the move 'shrewd and bold' in her editor's note for the mag
• Tui UK/Ireland comms director Christian Cull told us the company is 'as committed to sustainability as ever' after readers and pundits raised concerns about the effect of all-inclusives on local economies. (Here's Tui Group's board statement on sustainability.)

WorldHum has a whimsical piece on 'Post-Trip Funk', which I was discussing with a fellow holidaymaker less than a month ago as we taxied forlornly back to Gatwick North Terminal.

That 'PTF' is an act of grotesque self-pity, and is best treated by a slap round the chops, is by the by - people still feel it, and it's still a need state. Marketers know about it, and about the attendant desperation to get your next trip in the diary.

As a party of skiers/snowboarders we were likely to repeat the same category of trip next year, and that makes us a particularly tempting target - we got 'See-you-next-time?' emails within a few days of coming home.

But there are other approaches for other types of business. Both the conversation and the WorldHum article reminded me of this throwaway detail from a story about members of Elite's Ethos luxury division 'getting creative' during the worst of the downturn:

I arrange many group cruises and would normally give them a bottle of wine. However, this time I ­arranged for a 'welcome home' carrier bag containing milk, bread, butter, eggs, tea and coffee. The response I received was phenomenal. (Marion Owen, owner of Marion Owen Travel.)

I don't know if that'd cure my Post-Trip Funk, but it's great relationship-building. I remembered it 12 months later, and all I did was read the story...

I removed a bit of a conjouring trick from our story on Hotel-fairy.com's Facebook poll, which suggests that only 14% of the site's users frequent high-street travel agents.

The poll itself is basically sound. Survey of Facebook users, carried out on Facebook, covering the standard 1,000-person sample size. Fine.

But there's sleight-of-hand in the press release: 1,000 Facebook users become 'the Facebook Generation'.

'Generation' is a bit of a fuzzy word, inviting you to assume that what is true of users of a particular website is true of an entire age demographic.

It's also simply the wrong word, since stats indicate that Facebook is increasingly multi-generational, and there's no indication that the poll was targeted to a particular age group.

If anything, the assumption should be that only 14% of a fairly broad swath of the UK use high-street agents.

But that doesn't work either, since Facebook has (acc. to April 09 figures from O'Reilly Research) 18m users in a population of over 60m - and the very fact that poll respondents are Facebook users means they're the sort of people who are likely to book online.

So why publish the story at all? Well, because the point about Facebook users is useful on its own terms. If you're an agent and you're considering Facebook as a marketing tool, figures about its users' buying habits are going to help you make a decision.

Everybody loves a trend story. But sometimes extrapolation just muddies things up.

(NB: But it's fine if you're honest about it.)

Here's a video demo of a new piece of software from Amadeus leisure tech unit TravelTainment.

It uses Google Earth to create an interactive touch-screen globe for use in travel agencies, and will, according to marketing trade mag Revolution, herald 'the death of brochures'.

This is unlikely to happen anytime soon, however, since it runs on a Microsoft Surface. One of those will set you back about £8,000.

TravelTainment plans 'to roll out the app to the travel industry in the coming months', and yes, I'd love to walk into an agency and be able to play with one of these. (Our Mystery Shopper might even start rewarding long waits rather than penalising them).

For now, it seems unlikely to go further than a neat proof-of-concept that will generate some buzz about the 18-month-old TravelTainment.

But if that sounds a little negative, do bear in mind what five years can do to the price of hardware these days...

Spotted this Dixons.co.uk poster at Tottenham Court Road underground station. 

Get off at Knightsbridge, visit the discerning shopper's fave department store, ascend the exotic staircase and let Piers in the pinstripe suit demonstrate the magic of the latest high-definition flatscreen - then go to Dixons.co.uk and buy it

I wonder if Piers is considering a service fee on fully-integrated home cinema quotes...

A new survey 'shows distrust of travel agents', reports Travelmole, but a deeper reading provokes some suspicion.

...over 25% of consumers who booked a holiday through a travel agent felt their trip didn't accurately reflect the description in the brochure

The creators of the survey go on to talk about review sites, saying

Now holidaymakers ... can read honest, unbiased opinions from travellers who've recently visited the hotel

Which is all true, but how specific is it to agents? I'm not about slavishly defending Travel Weekly's readership, but try asking the same question of holidaymakers who booked direct.

So while I don't dispute the 25% figure, and don't suggest that agents shouldn't take it on board, there is no meaningful comparison with other channels here.

Indeed, the issue seems to be with product description versus reality, and that affects all of consumer marketing, from direct-sell operators' websites to Big Mac adverts.

Update: Cambuslangtravel.com now has a bare-bones announcement and a link to ABTA. But the criticisms below still stand... (2pm, August 27)

Cambuslang Travel, which isn't that well known nationally but is a sizeable Scottish agency, has gone down, leaving hundreds of potential lost bookings.

"Fear grips East Kilbride holidaymakers," says a local paper. Let's hope none of those worried holidaymakers tried going to Cambuslang Travel's website for clarification or reassurance, because they would have got this:

Bobcat.

Refresh the site and you'll get another word on roughly the same theme - cue two minutes of chatter as colleagues piped up with "I've got 'jackal'", "I've got 'elf'" and so on. What fun.

Or rather, what an insult to customers caught in the company's wake.

Chloe Berman, who covered the story for us, wrote that

Frustrated holidaymakers have been phoning the company and visiting the two retail shops in Cambuslang and East Kilbride with no success

...so things are no better outside the digital realm. So much for the new age of communication. I've said it before, but it's about the people, not the tools.

If you're affected, your best bet is to contact ABTA, or speak to your credit card provider about recovering your money.

In the profile-based social networking world, things are pretty clear - at least once you're old enough to put MySpace and Bebo out of the picture: it's LinkedIn for business, Facebook for pleasure.

Not so the status-driven world, in which Twitter controls the horizontal and the vertical.

I'll just post these real-life scenarios and leave it hanging...

Scenario 1

You've heard about problems at an airport. You're going to tweet about it anyway, but it could also affect your clients.

Whether or not you think of yourself as a 'brand', the benefits of them hearing about this through you rather than, say, the BBC are obvious.

In this scenario, you want clients following you - they get an extra bit of service at little or no cost to you.

Scenario 2

As everyone does from time to time, you need to blow off some steam. You want to do it within earshot of people who are likely to sympathise.

You're smart enough not to name clients, but you still don't want people to see you moaning about your bookings.

In this scenario, you definitely don't want clients following you.

Third-party clients like Tweetdeck, Hootsuite and Thwirl will help you manage multiple accounts.

I sat down for dinner with some independent travel agents last night, which doesn't happen often enough.

One had been in the trade for a long time - we're talking decades - and told me this story about fams:

I went on one to [CONFIDENTIAL!] and really didn't like it. I said as much to my clients, but one couple booked it anyway. When they came back they said they wished they'd listened to me.

Did they return to book with her again? "Oh yes," she said, almost as if this was a rather silly question.

And it was, of course, because honesty inspires people to trust your judgment.

So to anyone who thinks agents go on fams for a jolly, then just come home and sell the product blindly: there's a counterexample for you.

(The occasion was a Premier Holidays / Hong Kong Tourism Board event celebrating Hong Kong Food and Wine Year - see my travelhub image gallery for some vids of a dim sum cookery lesson and pics of agents having a go.)