Travel Marketing in the Age of Web 2.0 & Beyond

Another PhoCusWright Conference is history

and what an conference it was. Under the very appropriate theme

The Perfect Storm

applicable not only for the travel industry but the global economy itself, which despite the turmoil it is undergoing now and for some time in the near future will produce innovative winners, close to one thousand participants gathered in Hollywood and it became clear right from Philip Wolf's opening speech, that for the next few days this was the focal point of the global travel industry. All the major players were there and as is custom, represented by their CEO or senior executives. The action and conversations were non-stop, the deal making permanent across the venue. Having myself participated in a dozen of these events, this set the new standard for travel conferences in terms of quality of production value, quality of attendees, session planning and overall organization and execution. I readily admit my bias, but my own opinion was confirmed time and again by other participants. This year a new event was added,

with 32 companies, chosen from many more applicants, presenting their innovative ventures to a critical audience who voted on the presentations with hand held rating devices to decide the six finalists with the opportunity to present on Center Stage to the main audience later in the conference. The presenting companies could roughly be categorized as providers of technology solutions for vacation rentals, mobile travel and trip planning tools. Of particular interest to me were the latter as this is an area of web based travel I am most interested in.

UpTake Helps people to find out what to book not how to book which is the easy part. Statistics show that 35 sites are visited before booking. That can hardly be voluntary! There is too much content on the web to make a sensible, easy decision. There are 1000 reviews for the Hollywood Renaissance Hotel alone! They are a search and filter engine not a site that creates new UGC. Not flights based but any transport mode. UpTake has Top Google ranking for many of their destinations. Very deep database for local attractions. Aggregate / Analyze / Filter based on semantics "sentiment extraction" from data based on ontology. This helps them to get the top ranking on the search engines.

Triporati Discovery is not search! Every trip starts with the planning. Preference based selection, including rankings. 1200 destinations. Map based presentation of selections. Integration of external data like YouTube, photos etc. Live feed for events. Travel reviews from TripAdviser. Facebook application for friend preferences and suitability of possible travel companions. Collaboration engine for different personal and group profiles. Ultimately it makes the user decide which destination is most suitable.

TravelMuse 95% happens before the booking! How true, and up to now most of the online travel industry has focused on the 5%. Site looks like a magazine. Inspirational. Where & What. Excellent functionality for saving trip related information including external search results. They have added a travel widget for third party site placement. Uptake is one of these sites. Items can be drag&dropped into the travel plan and can be viewed by all trip participants. Friend's input & research can be used and added as well. Excellent tool also for travel partners.

PlanetEye This Canadian based venture is aggregating content and adding relevancy and personalization. Local travel experts are providing most of the content. Data display is based on ranking by reviews. Personal profile allows for differentiation in the results presented. Booking integration and restaurant reservations are another feature.

Your Tour.com (still in closed beta) This is a preferences based system with a price calculation engine. Reality: Manual itinerary creation even in web 2.0. Their system is a "virtual travel agent" for mass-customization based on B2B licensing. It lists DMOs as partners with hotel chains Booking.com and content provider Lonely Planet. Demo of beta version included multi-destination, dynamic packaging. Starts with a build me a tour screen. Includes activities for each day, maps based. Slider based preferences ranking. Reminds me of the EuroVacations model! True dynamic packaging.

NileGuide Personalized travel recommendations. Customized destination guide with current and relevant information can be collected and printed as a PDF. Content, search, and booking are integrated. Lots of cool tools including reviews for accommodation and restaurants, all map based. Slider based activity selector. In addition to PDF they will have an iPhone delivered guide in Q1-09

These are all innovators in what TravelMuse correctly calls the 95% of the process that happens before a leisure trip that has largely been neglected up to now by the major online travel companies who are all focused on the remaining 5%, where the transaction takes place. It remains to be seen how many will survive as the pressure to produce revenues is huge and at least the immediate prospects uncertain. What is certain, technology will continue to provide the tools essential to make the DREAM - LEARN - PLAN - GO process more integrated, less time consuming and even fun. It should be possible to monetize it to make these sites a commercial success. In a later post I will discuss the issue of the effect these developments have on the role of DMOs in this process as they traditionally have played their role here and not in the transaction of travel. It's clear that the industry moves in the direction of integrated services delivery to consumers. The perfect storm indeed!

Congrats to the Brits!

Be a Brit Different

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is a new micro-site by VisitBritain that presents the UK in a fresh new and, in my opinion, effective way to potential visitors. Not only is the tag line "different" but an appropriate word play on the British who are often known as individuals with character. To let the hosts talk about the places they live, the things they like around their town or region gives a destination a human face and also credibility that goes beyond the usual and no longer accepted marketing speak still used on too many sites.

I find the site well designed, crisp, uncluttered and easy to use. It combines map features well with the commentary so you know where these people live. Another cool feature is the "What's on top of British minds today?" Again, a way to let visitors know what's "in with the locals".

I have written about a similar approach by Tourism BC and Oregon Tourism a few months ago but this is the first site I'm aware of that is entirely focused on this approach. I can imagine more will follow.

A "Revolutionary" Campaign with wings

This award winning case study of a campaign to build viral buzz on MarketingSherpa caught my attention as not too many are from the travel industry. It explains in detail how Germanwings used web 2.0 tools to involve their audience with their brand while at the same time grow their database of new customers. A key element of the campaign was a specific micro-site. This is what I have proposed a number of years ago to DMOs to build rather than drive traffic to their main website where interaction is limited. The added benefit is that such a site can be deployed more quickly and in many cases reused, at least in part, for future similar campaigns at lower cost.

The results are an indicator of how well this campaign was received with a 26% open rate. 7.2% click-through, 45,000 profiles and 15,000 groups created. In addition their 1.4 million email list grew by 0.5%. What's equally positive is the 9.5 minutes people spent on the micro-site, longer than the average time spent per visitor on their mainsite. Looks to me like a well deserved award winner and a model that DMOs should emulate in their own campaigns, especially those that integrate off- and online elements, where a micro-site would be best suited as the core fulfillment mechanism.

GoSeeArizona

The world as you like it

looks like an interesting initiative. It's a social networking site engaging visitors to the state and giving them the opportunity to post their experiences. With a sweepstakes, they are even given a tangible incentive to do so.

The site looks very attractive and user friendly with the by now ubiquitous rotating photo panel with great shots of the destination.

The main question, as with many other new sites is how to attract a large enough audience that participates actively to make is a truly useful resource for future visitors.

One other question I have, is why was the site not integrated into the Arizona Tourism site or at least mentioned prominently on its home page?

In any case, a welcome new effort by a DMO to innovate.

The Real World Marketing Value of Virtual Events

article in Chief Marketer caught my attention.

I've long been an advocate of using webinars qualified for lead generation, which in my opinion most DMOs are still not using anywhere near enough.

Virtual events could become an even more effective tool to show off a destination and presenting key suppliers to a much wider audience than in the physical world, with all the advantages the article describes.

Of course, I can already hear the critics proclaim that face to face meetings with personal interaction are too important to ever be replaced. I don't deny that for one minute, however, the industry reality has been for quite some time the difficulty to attract enough qualified decision makers to attend all these real life shows and workshops.

Using virtual events to attract a wider initial audience more cost effectively and then select the most interested and qualified for a personal site inspection to meet with key suppliers, seems to me a much smarer use of not only marketing dollars, but more importantly everyones time.

Visit Scotland.com to close shop

reports Hotelmarketing, based on an article on Scotsman.com with the headline of "Tourist website has to be worth a visit", which sounds pretty much like a no-brainer to me. I have to admit that I'm not familiar with the details of their situation but apparently a number of local suppliers are claiming the failure of the site as a victory which seems at least somewhat odd to me. If structured and organized correctly, a site with a popular address for a well known, global brand should be a success for both the DMO and its suppliers.

At least that's the case for Switzerland, a destination I know more about, which launched Switzerland Travel Centre, a commercial, industry owned venture that since its inception ten years ago has grown to become a well established and profitable company, not only as the accommodation booking engine for MySwitzerland.com but also for local and regional DMOs in the country as well as being the largest distributor for rail products. According to Klaus Oegerli, the CEO of STC, the model is successful due to their relationships with the industry both as a technology provider and major distribution partner, including a merchant model for hotels with more than 300 properties being sold through tour operators and online travel portals. The Swiss model is proof to me, that with the right set-up and industry cooperation a successful online distribution system can be built that provides a welcome and effective marketing tool for the destination and its supplier partners that makes economic sense and a profit for both.

How Search Marketing Slays Seasonality in Travel

explains Elisabeth Osmeloski in a very illuminating article in Search Engine Watch which puts the focus on the importance of search in travel and how it can be used effectively. The strategies explained are valid not only for suppliers and OTAs but also for DMOs, especially the many who are now selling their suppliers directly on their websites.

Travel 2.0 is alive and well in Canada

at least that's the impression I got attending the very insightful Canada eConnect conference last week in Vancouver BC.

This new event was organized extremely well by Jens Thraenhart of the Canadian Tourism Commission and his very able team. Kudos to them for staging a first edition of what they hope will be an annual event. Congratulations to the CTC for offering this excellent platform to their industry partners and for presenting what was a wide range of speakers from every segment of providers of services to the online travel industry. It gave the Canadian industry players an opportunity to gauge their position in the fast changing online marketplace for travel and destination marketing and to take away impressions and valuable advice to go forward.

It will be interesting to see whether other DMO around the world will take a similar step in the right direction within their markets and educate their partners about what it takes to be successful in the very competitive world of travel 2.0 and what's coming next in enabling technology developments.

Tags: travel2.0, canada, web, travel, tourism