More on Travolution's guest editor

So what does a guest editor bring to a magazine, someone asked me over the weekend.

The questioned came after Travolution’s announcement last week that Cheapflights chief executive David Soskin is to guest edit our September edition.

The edition is being produced to hail ten years of online travel and David’s company is celebrating a decade in business this autumn.

His involvement with us for the edition is perfect: Cheapflights, perhaps more than any other a company, is synonymous with the entrepreneurial spirit that grabbed the travel industry in the late 1990s.

It is the gutsy determination of the early pioneers in online travel that has brought the industry to where it is now – so who better than David to act as a figurehead for our commemorative issue in September.

The Cheapflights model is not without its detractors, of course, so picking David to help steer the September edition, we hope, will be mildly controversial.

In the coming weeks the edition will start coming together: our online poll to find the Influential Ten – the innovators and trailblazers of the last decade – will be launched with a shortlist of 20 of the industry’s leaders and pioneers.

Some of you will also be invited to take part in a survey – one part of our three-pronged State of the Nation report – looking at the online travel industry and its impact on the trade.

In the meantime the results of another part of the survey – a study of online consumer buying habits, carried out for us by Metro newspaper – are in and being digested. The results are very interesting, to say the least.

Kevin May, editor, Travolution