Ben Vinod, Chief Scientist at Sabre Holdings (the global powerhouse Travelocity and the Sabre Travel Network) today informed the tourism industry businesses attending Scotland’s Tourism Innovation Day that user generated content is now a fact of life.
He explained that 2008 is the year that user generated content has become mainstream to travel consumers. Mainstream to the extent that many consumers now demand and expect to consult the opinions and reviews of other users and are looking to businesses to be prepared to share that information.
What does that mean for tourism businesses? As we have already discussed on the blog (for example here and here) consumers are already having conversations about your business online. The challenge is how do you use that for competitive advantage?
Sabre Holdings itself is addressing this question on many levels, because they are determined maintain their position as undisputed leader in travel and transportation and recognise that a culture of innovation is critical to that.
Ben explains: “Innovation is not an event, it needs to be in your mind at all times - you need to out-think the competition”
Looking for keywords in Haystacks
Sabre is now intensively mining consumer generated content - included that generated in their community igougo - to spot the words and themes that people use. Afterall, the community aspect is critical to travel planning and user generated content and destination/product selection is critically connected. What is being said in those communities clearly has the power to convert into travel purchases.
So Sabre Holdings is using technology to mine this content. They then use what they find to inform their key word bidding optimisation strategy. By understanding which words people use and respond to, they can match this buy buying paid search on terms that will deliver a good return at the best price.
Their whole premise behind user generated content is that you want to intercept the potential customer well ahead of the purchase chain. Ben comments “What Tripadvisor does for Expedia is drive site traffic, where Expedia can then convert that into bookings. Consumer generated media has become expected”. Integrated effectively into the shopping process.
Ben’s key reminder to businesses large and small?
“The most important thing we have to do is remain competitive in the marketplace and the landscape is changing on a daily basis”.
Innovation, technology and the themes covered today at the Tourism Innovation Day are a critical, not an optional, part of that.
This entry was posted on Thursday, February 28th, 2008 at 5:42 pm and is filed under Conference learnings, Online customer behaviour, Research tools, Social media measurement, Travel 2.0. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.