HOW THE AWARDS ARE WON

Consumer votes and industry opinions are sought during the months leading up to the big night of awards presentations in November. It begins with industry nominations in all categories from April until 16 June to arrive at a suggested shortlist of nominees before open consumer and industry voting begins in July.

APRIL – 16 JUNE :  E-broadcasts to 1,000 previous consumer voters and a minimum of 1,000 travel agents to encourage nominations across the categories. TravelMole to issue call to action news alerts to encourage trade nominations across the relevant categories.  PR Companies nominate their clients, and individual companies can nominate themselves.

The categories that require completion and submission of entry criteria forms are posted on the website, and companies who wish to go forward in these categories have until 30 August 2009 to complete these.  The “Of The Year” and “Environmentally & Socially Responsible” categories will only require the submission of entry criteria forms.  EG:  Airline of the Year will be judged entirely by BTA Academy panel.

JULY – END SEPTEMBER :   Consumer and Trade Media partners issue calls to vote via promotions and adverts via their various mediums.  Votes are collated online with gating systems implemented to only accept a maximum of five votes per email/postal code address configuration (consumers) and five votes per email/agency code/address configuration (trade).

SEPTEMBER :  The criteria forms received from entrants online are distributed to the individually grouped panel of judges made up from the BTA Academy for their adjudication and scoring:

The categories where no entry criteria is required and where only open voting is required means that quite simply the number of votes achieved determines the winner.  The simple method of electronic vote collation and “no-hands” counting of all votes entered via the BTA website or directly gathered via the websites of our media partners ensures integrity and transparency of the programme.  Further, Deloitte LLP will audit the mechanisms in place and the number of votes cast to independently determine the winners across the open voted categories.

Transparent Voting, Clear Results.

FOR THE OF THE YEAR CATEGORIES WHICH REQUIRE THE SUBMISSION OF A CRITERIA FORM TO SUPPORT THE NUMBER OF VOTES ACHIEVED DURING THE CONSUMER VOTING STAGE, THE SCORING PROCESS IS AS FOLLOWS:

Company A achieves 1 point for being first in open vote stage, and 1 point for being 1st  in Academy scores position.  Total 2 points.
Company B achieves 3 points for being third place in open vote stage, and 2 points for being 2nd in Academy scores position.  Total 5 points
Company C achieves 2 points for being second in open vote stage, and 4 points for being 4th in Academy scores position.  Total 6 points
Company D achieves 4 points for being 4th in open voting stage, and 3 points for being 3rd in Academy scores position.  Total 7 points.

The company with the LEAST points wins.

Where this is a tie on points, ie: where the open votes percentage positioning and the Academy points awarded create two or more companies achieving the same number of total points, an additional point is awarded for every full percentage point achieved for each of the tied companies in the open/consumer votes allocation. In the unlikely event that this could not define a clear winner, the panel for that particular category would be asked to re-judge the joint winners to find a first/second/third contender.

The full list of the 2009 BTA Academy who will judge the “Of the Year” and the “Environment” categories will be published on this page in the months ahead.