Smart Social Web Marketing Solutions

reads the headline of this article in Travel Weekly. While many destinations are talking about green travel and the environment, Switzerland has delivered on these points for many years and played a pioneering role in raising awareness on a global level. One of Schmid’s predecessors proclaimed back in the 1970s that “tourism should not destroy tourism” in other words with un-checked over development the very reasons for people to visit certain places disappear. Today’s reality has proven him right when more an more travelers are looking for authentic experiences far removed from the artificial ones created all too often to attract visitors. The Swiss tourism industry is positioned extremely well to capitalize on the trend in the coming years, even when visitor numbers are in a temporary downturn.

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Reads the title of the  Travolution blog post guest written by Mark Seall which I found very thought provoking.

I thought it might be useful to repeat my comments here as well:

If the major travel players are indeed aware of the fast changing environment they are operating in, it isn’t reflected in how their web presence looks like and how they market their product. It all comes along fairly conservatively.

The discussion reminds me of this recent article in The New Yorker magazine  by Malcolm Gladwell. The innovators (Davids) of the first phase have in only a few years become the legacy players (Goliaths). It seems the next group of market entrants ready to challenge them are entering the scene under the web 2.0 banner generally describing the social web and the tools it brings along.

With recommendations by friends and relatives having been a major influence factor of travel decisions for decades now, it is only normal that with these new social tools being developed and introduced in the marketplace, this key element will be turbo-charged to a new degree.

The innovators who are capitalizing on this part of the travel process are challenging the established players as they themselves did when entering the scene more than a decade ago automating the first and easier part, the transaction which we all know is not where travel process begins. The game is on. Should be interesting to watch who the new winners will be.

By the way a similar discussion on the topic of legacy OTAs has been held recently on Dennis Schaal’s blog here. Great stuff.Tweet

reports Springwise in their latest trends newsletter. YokMoK, a Spanish adventure travel operator came up with this idea and it seems to me a great example of customer involvement in product planning. At the same time it offers these past travelers a reward for recruiting others to travel with the company.

Knowing how influential recommendations by friends are in the choice of travel products and destinations this looks like an effective way to take advantage of this and also get useful word-of-mouth support. Should be a model to be copied more widely.

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is the title of a recent blog post by Seth Godin and as usual, when I read Godin, I start to think, I can’t help it!

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.
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as reported here and elsewhere, NYC & Company has launched a new site and it takes a fresh approach to market the Big Apple.
The site design is on the hip side and a departure from the norm which for a city like New York is understandable and valid.

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.
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TripIt Opens API, Third-Party Devs Pounce; Travel Sites Lag reads the headline in MarketingVOX today. What struck me most is the last part “Travel Sites Lag”. The same thing can be said about the API’s already available and being developed by the new innovators for travel planning like Tripbase, Uptake, Travelmuse as well as others and DMOs.

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.
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I really love that item #3 title and question in trendwatching.com’s December 2008 Trend Briefing as it deals with the latest developments in customer reviews and comments and has a great post from TripAdvisor’s – Management Response – feature. It is still amazing to me that not more companies are actively engaged and remain stuck in the Feedback 1.0, or should we say “denial” mode, or at best in 2.0 where they at least listen.

This last line in the article just about sums it up best:

Whatever you do in 2009, don’t wait until bad times really come knocking to kick-start the inevitable co-creation lovefest (you’ve had since 1999 to prepare!)

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During the recent conference I had the opportunity to talk to some companies that were not presenting at the Travel Innovation Summit or on Center Stage but offer innovative solutions that have already, or will in future, appear on our radar screens:

Is a site that offers a trip planning tool based on personal preferences. This is the direction sites have to go as the attention clearly shifts to the process that takes place prior to the actual booking and where the experience still too often disappoints. Tripbase takes a shot at improving this. It’s not perfect as the results often don’t change enough when preferences are adjusted but no site I’ve come across so far offers the perfect solution.

Another one is

Founded by former Expedia Europe executives, TVtrip provide professionally produced hotel videos which are by now an essential part of any trip decision, especially for leisure trips with an extended stay. Who wants to end up in a dump for the most precious days of the year? They are expanding rapidly across with properties across the globe and with the right partnerships to drive traffic could become a player in this segment.

The tag line of

is “Empowering the frequent flyer” and expertflyer certainly delivers on that, based on a demo I received from their CEO, Chris Lopinto. This is a very useful tool for the road – or should we say Air – warriors out there who hold a gazillion frequent flyer miles and want to make the best use of them for upgrades and flights. The site has real time tracking of seat availability for miles upgrades and live seat maps so you can view which seats remain available. Of course, the data can also be accessed and viewed on mobile phones, essential when you’re on the road. Looks like worth the price of admission to me, although I no longer really qualify based on my limited flying nowadays!

Last but by no means least there is

they have morphed from what initially was a restaurant booking service to a technology provider for all kinds of ancillary services that provide incremental revenue to a range of companies as diverse as Amtrak, KLM, Air Canada, Mastercard and Priceline. With major companies focusing on their core business, this seems the type of solution that has a strong position in the marketplace by delivering the platform necessary to maximize customer value.

These companies are just a few more examples of how the travel industry is undergoing constant change by having innovators adding value, or eliminating friction in what still is often an inefficient market full of complexities in the access to and distribution of services to a huge audience of increasingly savvy travelers. Exciting to be part of it and observe who will be the winners in the next phase of the web.

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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!Tweet

as so often, I can’t disagree with Seth on this point Your brand is not your logo but I’m afraid too many marketers in tourism and at DMOs still think that a great logo and tag line are essential success factors when they are at best minor elements.

Brand is one of the most misunderstood terms and the focus is too often on graphics and design rather than the customer experience at every possible touch point which are the most important brand elements. This includes in most cases the website of the organization which by now has become a key part of that experience and often the first touch point.

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