What to expect at World Travel Market 2008?

World Travel Market gets a lot of stick for being too big, too unwieldy and too, er, well, based at ExCel in East London.

[Critics should try ITB Berlin for sheer scale]

But let's not take away from the fact that it's the biggest trade exhibition in the UK and attracts the great and the good of the world tourism and hospitality sector for four days and, frankly, ExCel is the only place in the capital that can host it.

So what can we expect this year?

For the uninitiated, WTM is prmarily a destination-focused showcase of tourist destinations around the globe, with a fair heap of travel providers and tech firms thrown in for good measure.

There are plenty of seminars and the like going on over the four days and promotions galore.

Our favourite - and we're not being biased here - is the Travel Weekly Passport promotion for travel agents, which is actually quite a lot of fun [Watch an agent taking part last year]

As far as news is concerned, almost every one of the hundreds of stands will have some kind of product news (we'll be including relevant ones here alongside as our Twittering, blogs, photos, etc]

The big question will be how much the downturn in the economy is in evidence in terms of visitor numbers, deals being done (impossible to tell, but you can get a feel for it) and whether people will be trying to talk/down up the current situation for company.

Some recent conferences for the UK travel sector were positively brimming with a laissez faire attitude to the whole thing. Some might call this foolhardy.

Nevertheless it will be an interesting week. It's the first time Travolution has attended for a few years as the PhoCusWright event in Orlando coincided with WTM 2007.