As the worlds of technology and media collide, the same contest keeps getting played out over and over again: lumbering old-media companies take on nimble new-media upstarts, and usually the new-media guys win, since it’s easier for them to figure out the content business than it is for the content companies to figure out the techie stuff involved in launching an Internet business.

We can replace “media” with “travel” and come to pretty much the same conclusion. Twelve or so years ago when the web first started to impact business, it was the new outsider tech start-ups like Expedia and Priceline that pioneered online travel. It was way before any of the traditional travel industry players entered the fray. The same was true in Europe and Asia.

It was again the case a few years ago, when travel 2.0 – the phase we’re presently in with online travel research and planning moving online – was ushered in not by the OTAs, the traditional tour operators or destination marketing organizations (DMO) but start-up companies like Uptake, Tripbase, Travelmuse, Triporati and others.

This seems to confirm how hard it is for established companies to break out of the status quo, innovate and, if necessary, change business models. While this might be understandable, what I do not understand why there are not more ventures where these new players are being sought out by the traditionalists to cooperate. This is especially true for DMOs who do not have to fear being a competitor to these companies but a potential partner. The only thing they need to fear is becoming irrelevant in a few years time by not being innovative enough and have their role being assumed more and more by the new disruptors and innovators.

He talks about marketing not being the same as, but much more than, advertising, which I thought everyone would know by now but it seems some people apparently still don’t. To get back to the question, the product obviously comes after marketing and he cites the example of the Prius.

Now, this gets me to the issue at hand, namely that destination marketing is one of the hardest disciplines in marketing! Why, you ask? Because in almost all cases – Dubai being one well known exception – the “product” is a given. The destination exists, often has for decades or centuries or more and can’t be significantly changed to suit the marketer. You play the hand your dealt and that’s why it’s more challenging than the so often hyped packaged goods marketing for example, or vehicles or almost any product. If research shows that your soap has to smell a certain way, be a certain color and shape your product guys will produce and deliver it that way. Try that with your resort, well maybe you can add or improve some infrastructure but it essence you’re still left with the given basics.

So, destination marketing experts should really be the ones who get the accolades and I wonder why they so often aren’t. Just watch how many marketers from the DMO world cross over to other industries based on their track record and compare that with the reverse. You’ll be surprised at the imbalance. What I’ve noticed over the years, is that a large number who face the challenge of destination marketing leave the industry after a few years.

What’s this got to do with the web, you ask? Well, similar principles apply when you hire a web marketer or an interactive agency. It pays to check if they truly understand the particular challenges they face and whether they have the right experience or not.

The key elements for me are these:

NYCgo.com includes information in nine foreign languages and will feature user-generated content such as personal profiles, user ratings and reviews, and peer-to-peer recommendations.

In addition, thanks to partnerships with Travelocity and OpenTable, NYCgo.com will be transactional so that visitors can book hotels, flights, car rentals, vacation packages and restaurant reservations directly from the Web site, thereby facilitating travel bookings with convenience, according to city officials.

The site makes use of interactive tools to give the user a voice and it has integrated commercial partners to allow more of a one-stop functionality. For a major city the inclusion of restaurant reservations is for me a must.

I like where they are going with this. Others should move in the same direction and focus on the customer experience and convenience and not politically correct supplier relationships.

At last week’s Canada-e-Connect conference, I made a strong plea in my presentation for exactly such integration and co-operation in what is fast becoming the new focal point in online travel, the research and planning process that preceeds the actual booking. This is where 95% of the activity happens and it’s about much more than search, the present pre-occupation by the online players. It’s in this space, which PhoCusWright has termed the “Perfect Storm” where the most exciting developments will occur over the next few years. Today’s online travel consumers demand no less than a vastly improved experience in the pre-trip phase, an experience that integrates social media, social networks, UGC, etc. all the elements that need to be integrated to offer this improved experience.

For destinations – which are at the core of the planning process – this has important implications. Rather than trying to develop all this themselves, which most of them are not capable of doing anyway as part of their web development, new and forward looking partnerships need to be developed with the innovators who are already working on making it happen. The travel industry today still lives in too many silos without enough cross communications.

The conversation which is happening among the traveling public as consumers needs to start happening in the industry itself and that goes beyond the usual good will expressed at conferences but in the strategic planning and day-to-day tactics the various players deploy on a permanent basis. As the wisdom of crowd effect is important in the public at large, it can and should be applied more within the industry itself.

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!

Here’s who could easily offer this – or maybe are potential partners – the many destination marketing organizations and CVBs. They all sit on a ton of relevant data that is available for free on their websites but could be accessed and aggregated by Offbeat.

Another group of providers are the major online travel agencies, if they weren’t so focused on their old commission based business model and started to really innovate with a focus on customer added value, which this clearly is. Potential partners in addition to TripIt are Uptake and VibeAgent.

I like the basic idea. It’s questionable how large a market exists at the price point this is offered. Remains to be seen. As I’ve stated many times in this space before, there should be more integration among various web 2.0 based services for the online travelers and not just more and more individual efforts offering bits and pieces which don’t really improve the shopping experience of travel services.

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.

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.

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.