Travel Marketing in the Age of Web 2.0 & Beyond

This is the best list I've seen so far on this topic

it's called 50 Ways Marketers Can use Social Media to Improve Their Marketing by Chris Brogan. You can't go wrong trying to understand the subject and start using at least some, if not all, of these suggestions.

Everyone's personal web page a must?

might be a future reality according to this Real Time column in WSJ.com by Jason Fry. He raises a number of interesting points that will indeed make this a general reality as it is already for a fast increasing number of people who can easily be found on the web today. In the networked world we live in today, where radical transparency is another fact of life I can imagine this scenario.

I found this quote by Curt Monash particularly poignant: "The Internet WILL tell stories about you, true or otherwise. Make sure your own version is out there too." It's a necessity for companies today and might become one for everybody in future, who knows.

One thing seems obvious to me, this new reality will have a profound impact on how to market products and services effectively.

This is a sad state of affairs

reported in this latest survey revealing that Stressed Americans Leave 460 Million Vacation Days Unused. It used to be that the Japanese were the workaholics but now they seem to have been replaced by Americans. By international comparison the amount of vacation days in the U.S. is already very low and it seems many people don't even take those in full.

It's quite a loss to the travel industry as a whole when we imagine that at least a certain percentage of these people would spend their days away from home. Not a statistic of which we should be proud!

Technorati Tags: vacation, travel, tourism

Are we there yet.....?

"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." - Arthur C. Clarke

This quote somehow reminds me how far we still are from making the travel planning - researching and buying process on the web truly an easy and enjoyable experience based on the technology understanding and correctly interpreting customer needs and preferences. It's certainly far from being magic!