Tracking Tourism: The Tourism Research Blog Archive for the ‘Travel 2.0’ Category

No longer can the Internet be viewed just as an add-on to marketing efforts - it is now an integral, critical part of travel distribution.

That was the view expressed by Diane Clarkson, Travel Industry Analysts at Jupiter Research and Bill Tancer, god of all things data at Hitwise, in this evening’s excellent webinar: Travel 2.0 Today, The Economy and the Evolving Travel Landscape.

More critically, Hitwise have found (through their clickstream analysis of internet users as they move from site to site) that traffic to the travel category of websites is actually increasing as people tighten their belts.

There has been no drop in travel website visits as fuel prices increase. People are instead researching their travel decisions more intensively online and are shifting to the online channel as they become more price sensitive.

Internet and online travel becomes more important in tough economic times.
Bill Tancer, Hitwise

Jupiter Research’s data backs this up. Their US Online Travel Consumer Survey from May ‘08 suggest that the next 12 months could see a sharp decline in travel frequency - with 39% of occasional leisure travellers and 43% of occaisional business travellers suggesting that they are planing fewer trips in the coming year. But the impact, Diane explains, is that “the Internet will increasingly become a tool as people research more intensely”.

The business implications of that are immense - while you may have cruised by on a sub-par website in good times, as things toughen up in the sector, people are looking at more websites and so it is critical you can attract and retain visitors on yours.

Bill and Diane’s webinar covered three key topics:

• The impact on travel of the economic downturn
• The impact of user generated content on travel brands and travel consumers
• The potential for travel and social network sites.

They kindly gave permission for their content to be blogged openly, which is much appreciated as it is not always the case with such industry analyst briefings. When the webinar is available online, I will add the link as its really worth a listen. In the meantime here are a few of the conclusions from their respective research efforts that really tingled some brain cells for me:

1. User generated content is used by 40% of online travel researchers

Yup, 40%. Not hardly anyone, or a bunch of geeks, or a few back packing students - but 4 out of 10 of the people researching travel. Jupiter’s US Online Travel Consumer Survey from May ‘08 found that for this 40% using user generated content, ratings were the most popular (used by 58%), followed by reviews and recommendations (49%). Next came user generated photo content (18%) and friend’s social networking websites (18%). Other travellers blogs we consulted by 12% and user generated video by 5%.

The impacts of this? Diane cited the importance of using this content regularly and systematically as a source of competitor intelligence. And as the next point will illustrate, she also highlighted the importance for the contribution of travellers to be included as part of brand strategy. Why? Because user generated content is highly trusted.

2. User generated content is nearly twice as influential as brand to accommodation researchers

User generated content is far more influential than brand or the recommendations of friends and family

After price and location, for those using ugc, reviews/ratings from other travellers was the major influence in the decision making process. 36% named it as an influential factor in their decision, compared to 21% citing brand/reputation and 14% citing that old chestnut of family/friend recommendation. (Source Jupiter as above).

Hitwise’s clickstream data shows that visits to travel user generated content have increased 40% in the year since June 2007. They also reveal (perhaps no surprises) that it is TripAdivsor that is the heavyweight, accounting for more than 75% of the Travel UGC and 2.0 market share. (IgoUgo pales into second at 9.5% and WAYN at 8.4%). Bill made the point that while standalone Travel UGC accounts for only a small fraction of travel visits online (2%), its reach and impact is in fact much wider as people engage in user generated content on traditional travel websites.

3.The Travel 2.0 heavyweights are in the mainstream research to purchase mix

With a graph to die for, Bill combined the flow of clicks from travel site to travel site, with market share of those sites. From this network map, he isolated those sites that are driving traffic to the big OTAs such as Expedia, Orbitz and Travelocity.

And a few Travel 2.0 players are having a big impact - TripAdvisor and the metasearch site Kayak and Sidestep. Metasearch, sites that search for price across muliple agency and supplier sites, before sending the search off to another site to book, are faring particularly well in these price sensitive times. Two years ago they were only used by the highly tech savvy, whereas now they are entering the mainstream as people research more intensively for the best prices.

However, what Bill’s uber-graph also shows is that outside these heavyweights, the smaller Travel 2.0 sites (from WAYN to WikiTravel) are very insular, with little cross flow of traffic and are currently outside the mainstream travel research traffic flow.

4. The social networking sites are not impacting as a travel planning resource yet

Jupiter (same source as above) found that only 8% of those online travellers who are using social networking sites do so for travel planning. 56% do not use social networks in any capacity whatsoever that relates to travel. The most common travel related uses come in the form of communication, with 23% looking at friends travel photos or videos, 22% keeping in touch while away and 19% posting photos.

Diane contrasted the high level of trust that people have in stranger generated reviews, which comes from critical mass. People can sift many reviews looking for patterns and things that resonate with them. In contrast, social networks have much lower critical mass.

Hitwise’s data has not seen significant increases in traffic being referred to travel sites from social network sites - Bill suggested that where it is appearing, it is potentially being caused by people that use their social networking site as their homepage.

And different segments and demographic profiles of travel researchers behave in different ways. The 55+ age group are more likely to use newspapers and magazines to find a new travel site that they haven;t used before, whereas younger users are more likely to use meta search. Website visitors, like travellers, can never be thought of as a single homogeneous mass.

So, thanks again to Hitwise and Jupiter Research for a great webinar and for allowing us bloggers to share their findings with the wider industry. I hope I’ve communicated some of the potential power of their data with this short round up.

I’ve presented two eMarketing workshops in as many days this week (do feel free to peruse the slides here) and a head spinning seven in the last four weeks.

In those sessions I have talked about Web 2.0, blogging, web measurement, Travel 2.0 (click for a definition), engaging in the conversation with your customer and that fact that there has been a monumental shift in how potential consumers seek, evaluate and trust information.

But from San Francisco to the Scottish Highlands, London to Swansea - as businesses absorb the implications of what this means, they generally express with some horror the exact same question. “Just how long does all this stuff take?”

And of course, it’s an absolutely killer question, right at the heart of how successfully Travel 2.0 techniques are adopted by businesses. “Just how do I blog, Flickr, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Tripadvisor etc etc and still run my business…. How do I commit enough time to make this work, but not so much time that every other aspect of my business stops?”

Like any other marketing or business function, you should invest time according to how important the results are likely to be to your business. The Travel 2.0 space is a perfect one in which to experiment and keep experimenting as you maximise results. Yes it is time consuming, but that isn’t reason enough to not get involved. The internet is now absolutely critical to travel - it is mainstream, not niche as these statistics show:

In terms of specific advice, I can only answer from my personal experience:

1) Narrow down the options:

Start with research (this post tells you how). You can’t be everywhere, nor do you need to be. Are there certain sites, communities, blogs or Flickr groups etc where your business, sector, interests or competitiors are already being actively discussed. Are there places where the key thinkers/players in your field are already meeting. Are there places you simply like to be?

You do not have to do this completely manually, as the above post shows, there are free technologies that will bring this information to you.

2) Understand your target market online:

Don’t assume that Travel 2.0 is only about young, trendy advance adopters of technology. Participation in social networking, for example, mirrors the age spread of the online population as a whole. Tripadvisor and to some extent Flickr are becoming a mainstream part of the travel selection process.

However, different sites, tools and communities do attract different profiles of people. Just as its worth paying attention to whether other people in your field are spending their time online, its also worth thinking carefully about where your potential customers are too. Hitwise, comScore and Alexa are provide some free information that help answer this.

3) Know why you’re there:

Are you there in order to create awareness of your business, demonstrate your expertise, deliver better customer service, spot opportunities and threats, learn from your peers, network, spy on the competition?

Understand the point of why you’re investing your time and just how important that is to the business. If you are driving new business and delivering better customer service, you may even be able to see quite quickly that this is so important an activity and delivery such results that you should shift resources (say a marketing assistant) away from off-line activity and into the Travel 2.0 space.

I am increasing coming across young marketing assistants for whom blogging, being active in MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, Flickr etc is a large part of their job. (Travel, public sector and charities are sectors where I have seen examples of this).

4) Assign a cash value to your time:

Engaging with the Travel 2.0 consumer is far higher in time costs than actual marketing spend. Whereas it easy to understand that a marketing campaign that cost £10,000 and drove £1,000 of business was not successful, you can’t make that correlation for time spent on MySpace until you understand the cost of what you invested.

I know, for example, how much running this blog costs me as a cash equivalent to my time - I also know that it represents a worthwhile use of my time (because I join up the dots and where possible track where new opportunities originated from).

5) Review regularly what is and isn’t working:

Web 2.0. Travel 2.0, social media - call it what you will, remains incredibly faddy at an individual site/community level. Facebook saw its first dip in traffic earlier this year and us travel bloggers, who move from community to community in pursuit of the best place to really interact with each other, are examples of how fickle visitors to individual communities can be.

There is no single best place to spend your energies - it should and probably will be a least a few sites/activities at any one time. But finding the optimum combination for you will be an ongoing experiment and will change regularly. Review frequently (using web analytics, research or good old fashioned talking to your customers and peers) and adapt!

This is my strategy and it perhaps sounds excessively calculated. In fact, I enjoy investing my time and energy in the communities I participate in. I find it personally rewarding as well as good for business and I have made many friends and travelled to wonderful places (for real, not just virtually).

The reason I need a strategy to manage my Web 2.0 efforts is simply because the opportunities are endless whereas time and energy are not.

Calling those juggling champions

I know for a fact that there are a number of people out there who successfully juggle running travel and tourism businesses with maintaining blogs, leading great industry discussions online, while answering the needs of their own and a broader swathe of potential customers in a range of communities. Guido, the Happy Hotelier is one, Rene at Greater Speyside another, so is Claude Bernard and Don at Get a Room.

There are more of you than I can mention and most of the blogs I link to on the right of this page provide examples of fantastic time and Travel 2.0 gymnastics.

Perhaps you will share with us how you do it?

How one online company found that small numbers of customer problems were often the tips of large icebergs…and turned this insight around to improve conversions and sales

I thought I would share with you one insight from the eMetrics Summit about how one travel sector company used feedback mechanisms to identify seemingly small problems…and then discovered that these were not isolated incidents but issues affecting appreciable numbers of customers each day, resulting in avoidable loses.

The company is a major Online Travel Agent dealing with a huge number of global transactions and queries each day. Their site has tools that capture (anonymously) all consumer sessions on the site so, if there is a problem, they can work to find out exactly what was going wrong in that specific instance.

In practice they have two big ways of capturing customer interaction data on site. The first is by offering the customer the ability to pass comment throughout the booking process. Therefore, if my valid UK address was not being accepted at the booking page, then I could leave a note to the site owners to do something about this.

The second way of capturing data is by effectively recording each user session for playback. The point of this is to see how the customer actually got to the position they did - something that becomes vital in those situations when the site really shouldn’t act in that way and an action seems to be failing for no apparent reason.

With this dual approach, when an issue was identified the OTA was able to define some parameters that allowed them to use all the data of previously recorded sessions to see whether other customers had also experienced similar problems but had not complained about it. Rather they had simply walked away from the site and possibly taken their business elsewhere.

What they discovered was that, in some cases, one or two people complaining were often the tip of the iceberg and that one small issue was in fact potentially affecting literally hundreds of customers. The company declined to offer figures but it is easy to imagine that if the average transaction was, say, a couple of hundred dollars, then this apparently insignificant issues would soon add up to serious money over the year.

By using the same analysis techniques that led them to discover the size of the problem, the company was able to monitor whether the problem was still occurring after a fix or whether its incidence had dropped to zero or acceptable levels.

So what?

We can’t all afford the kind of systems that this company was using but the business approach they took is available to everyone and I would summarize the insights as follows:

• Always take customer comments seriously and probably indicative of a larger silent body of suffering customers
• Have systems that allow these comments to be captured
• See if you can work out how many other customers this might be affecting
• Have a system that allows you to work out what the impact is on your bottom line - this will either help you to prioritize next steps or present a convincing case to your boss if larger steps need to be taken
• Use your Research RADAR to ensure that the problem has been solved – if you are still seeing it occurring, then it hasn’t been fixed. If you don’t look to see whether it is still occurring, then you won’t know whether it has been fixed or not.

As an aside, the company this post is about stated that anything written about them had to be passed through their PR department. I think this approach is a little heavy handed and not one I’m happy to participate in. I also sensed that their heavy handedness might continue had I gone down the compliant route and, frankly, that’s not what this blog is about. Which is a pity because I think they have a great story to tell but I’m afraid they will remain anonymous is in this instance.

Industry interview with Tina Fitch of EzRez

As we recently explored in this Travel 2.0 post, many of the recent online innovations driving Travel 2.0 have been demand led and consumer facing. The “killer-app” for the supply side, the thing that will improve the lives, productivity and profitability of travel and tourism businesses has seemed more elusive.

But as I have stated before that I see massive opportunity on the supply side of Travel 2.0 in delivering:

1) Joined up visitor data at a destination level (who is visiting, where do they go, what do they do, how does the whole consumption process look across a destination)

2) Cross sector/cross destination reservation analytics (ie supercharged benchmarking, predictive analytics and responsive pricing based on what is happening in the whole market, not just at the door of one attraction, hotel or destination).

Given that I’m currently in Silicon Valley, I’ve been catching up with leading travel technologists who are working to drive supply side value from Travel 2.0 technologies in these specific areas.

It was a great pleasure to catch up with Tina Fitch co-founder and CEO of EzRez Software to kick around some ideas and enjoy some fine San Francisco cuisine.

Tina leads a company which venture capitalists claim “is disrupting the online travel market through its next generation, web-based solution.”

EzRez is in essence providing a travel market place, supplying transactional services to a network of tourism businesses, along with deep analytics across that network that allow clients to get an end to end view of a visitor’s transactional behaviour.

Its software solutions include a plug-and-play solution that enables a company to sell travel components online, plus they bring inventory providers and distributors together through a system that syncs with the existing infrastructures of both parties. They have also developed a powerful set of analysis tools that allow businesses to drive deeper understanding and metrics from their loyalty points and transactional/merchandising data - and these tools integrate with web analytics products such and Omniture and Google Analytics.

Tina and her team of developers, business data analysts and travel specialists see the value of what they can offer in terms of the power of viewing a visitors booking behaviour not simply in isolation, but across the multiple travel experience touchpoints - from booking flights and travel packages, to car hire and attractions.

Because regardless of what a visitor may say about their intent, travel plans or intended purchases or expenditure (if you can even get that information) - nothing gives a clearer picture of visitor activity than the associated purchase trail.

She has the tools, she has the transactional information - now as EzRez grows, particularly fuelled by success in the Latin American and Asian markets, Tina is demonstrating to the industry in true Travel 2.0 terms that joining up their visitor data will reap rewards for everyone.

Tina took the time to demonstrate why this is so important and what the challenges of joined up data have traditionally been for the travel industry:

Vicky: Do you think that so far the travel sector has been slow to embrace web analytics and online business intelligence, compared to say the e-commerce sectors?

Tina: We do feel it has been slow – but not for lack of interest or desire from the travel community, but due to the fragmentation and complexity of the systems that power travel.

We have observed companies who embrace the concept of web and transaction analytics, but have a difficult time weaving the two together. It involves the challenge of tying something like Omniture or Google Analytics to their reservation system, and potentially their CRM program. Many of these tools can play well together, but need technical expertise and analysis of each system to have them really hum.

Many technologies in travel developed originally as silos – some are large, like Sabre, some are extremely narrow, like a car hire company’s proprietary database – but regardless of size, they are limited by lack of a common interface, tracking tools, and definitions across the industry.

In any event, our experience in the market place is that nearly everyone is looking for an analytics solution to help drive their business forward. Understanding of not only one’s own business, but the local market, competitive set and overall network performance is critical to the success of any analytics program. Most importantly, data must lead to actionable steps to capitalize on the insight gained.

Vicky: Given that travel is a sector where many different businesses interact to deliver the visitor their end to end experience, do you think the industry has to start looking beyond its own “data island” in order to best understand visitor behaviour and boost ROI?

Tina: Travel companies are frustrated by lack of context to the data that they can collect on their own site – even if a company understands what their own conversion rates are, or what types of customer profiles are purchasing which destinations or inventory types, it can not see how that positions them in relation to the rest of their industry segment, geography or even online travel overall.

Travel companies can also have a difficult time understanding how their own customer interacts with other systems, products and services outside of their silo. This is because there are few common platforms that give visibility to performance across different verticals, different locations and product types.

Why is this important? Without measurement, there is no management of your business – and without context to more global measures of success, you are isolating yourself to limited benchmarks for performance.

Without understanding how your customer shops and books travel wherever they are, you can’t determine ways to get broader share of wallet from the customers who already shop with you. Industry-wide, or more granular sub-set analytics, will give you a lot more information that can feed into your pricing, merchandising, and marketing strategies.

While privacy will always be a consumer concern, those same consumers have come to expect that a system is intelligent enough to factor in their location, basic preferences and previous habits – even on a generic level – to deliver the most relevant results.

Vicky: Could you tell us a little about how EzRez has developed this cross-network approach?

Tina: We work with a whole range of companies - such as legacy airlines, global financial institutions and hotel chains as well as boutique resort operators, regional wholesalers and niche travel sites.

Our position as the booking, rules and transactional engine across these different verticals, markets and inventory sources allows our clients to leverage greater visibility across their own activity, but also allows them to understand how they are performing against the network as a whole.

This gives EzRez customers a new level of network transparency that enables them to see consumer and agent shopping and buying dynamics and trends more quickly. This, in turn, gives them the chance to have the right product in the right place at the right time – and at the right price. This can drive real revenue growth and customer satisfaction.

Vicky: Is EzRez only relevant to the global players or are you also targeting the smaller businesses that represent the bulk of the industry in terms of providers?

Tina: We tend to focus on companies that have an existing, captive audience since they can best leverage the range of tools and products that we offer. Large companies absolutely need business intelligence tools to learn how they can move the needle on their revenues.

However, smaller companies gain by understanding untapped potential in the market, and using data to make strategic and metrics-driven decisions on where to focus their emerging business. So, we are also relevant to local players trying to capitalize on market conditions while learning from similar companies in other markets.

Vicky: How do you think travel and tourism businesses can stop using data to “look back” and start using it to make forward looking tactical and strategic decisions?

Tina: This is the really exciting part about network analytics - when you can apply historical and current activity to predict or influence future behavior.

Imagine if you, as a travel company, knew that even though many competitors traditionally offer packages from London to Istanbul in the month of March, you have started seeing increasing patterns of search and booking activity from that origin market into Dubrovnik? What if you could further target the opportunity by understanding what the average spend is in that destination, what rating level is most popular for hotels, and then offer an automated merchandising tool to not only preference that offering to people who come to your site, but also send that package proactively to an audience from that origination point?

What if you are an airline, and you have a system that logs click-through and purchase behaviour on specific hotels in your hotel engine based on city pairs searched, or even which day of week or fare class air bookings are made. You could take that intelligence and offer a cross-sell tool in your air booking path that immediately offers up the most popular hotels for that user profile automatically and capture higher conversion and share of wallet from the same consumer.

This type of application of business intelligence not only drives more revenue to the companies who leverage it, it engenders more loyalty by way of convenience to the consumers who shop with them.

This type of business intelligence is actually already possible to obtain if you are on a platform like EzRez, and we are seeing more and more companies participate and benefit from that type of tribal knowledge.

To conclude

Predictive analytics used to be the holy grail for sectors like online retail and financial services. But tools evolved that started to allow online sellers to show first adverts then actual product offers/combinations based on likely best performance, all driven by the analytics data. Companies like Amazon have massively increased upsell by investment in their recommendation engines - essentially by pioneering predictive analytics.

What is exciting, in my view, is to see this emerging in travel in the way that EzRez are driving it - which is across a network of travel and tourism businesses operating in different touch points of the same visitors experience. Analytics is therefore not occurring in isolation (never ideal for an industry where the purchase and consumption process is as fragmented and complex as travel).

As Tina describes it, network analytics means participation in and benefit from a type of tribal knowledge. Sounds a lot like supply side Travel 2.0 to me!

Now, I appreciate that when you write for a blog with an emphasis on travel and technology, you’re supposed to be positively evangelical about new media and technology opportunities.

The man who couldn’t see the point of Twitter? Image copyight of www.hmbateman.com

But I have a guilty secret. I think a lot of the online social networking phenomena are downright silly and I generally refuse to participate in some aspects of it.

Notice that I say ‘some aspects’ though. I have embraced blogging for example. I watch clips of ancient cricket matches on YouTube when I think no-one is looking. I have checked out my accommodation on trip advisor and I follow the debates on WIWIH as well as those on sites by my fellow bloggers.

But am I the one being silly? Heavens forfend but could some of your customers feel the same way as well?

So what’s my problem?

Well, here are three thoughts to start with:

• Just because a new 2.0 site is cool, it doesn’t mean it will remain that way. Mass migrations can render them useless in months.
• Because a site is cool, it doesn’t mean I have any use for it. My own dancing badger might be pretty cool to own but I don’t actually have a use for one.
• Anyway, I don’t care about cool, I want a site or technology to have proved itself and know that it will continue to prove itself.

Let’s take those in turn:

I find the propensity for rapid mass migrations from one ‘cool site’ to another a little unnerving. There are already signs that Twitter (the yet-to-come ‘next big thing’ for some people) is old hat and that people are really just gearing up to run off to their next watering hole. Myself, if I go somewhere I like to think that can at least catch my breath before my travelling companions decide that we have to sprint from location to the next…and to the next….and to the next. And if I’m left behind or told to make my own way there…well, there’s a certain pleasure in taking things at your own pace and looking before you leap.

I was a member of Facebook for a while but ultimately can’t see any purpose for it. Despite my penchant for wearing loud tweed, I’m quite a quiet fellow and don’t feel the need to broadcast my every move. I don’t think anyone beyond me would really give a hoot knowing that my current location was a bothy in Sutherland or that I had thrown a sheep at someone I vaguely know.

Putting those thoughts together means that I will invest my time in something if it will still exist meaningfully in six months and if it has a enhanced use beyond something I am currently using.

So what?

The lesson is that although you might be wrapped up in the latest tech developments, your audience might not. They might be creatures of habit who are slow to change. Developing a marketing strategy based on the latest NEW! IMPROVED! TWOOTA! TECHNOLOGY! might sound like a good idea but you are taking a risk and people like me will ignore you.

But the refusniks are obviously not all standing athwart the Web 2.0 yelling “stop!” I’m not reinstalling a fax machine in my office and I don’t intend hand writing a letter to a hotel to enquire if they have rooms. But neither am I going to be at the bleeding edge of the next cool thing.

Eternal Verities of the business mind

For me, a business idea works if it fits into the framework of The Five P’s (click here for an overview and explanation). I’m usually a little suspicious of seemingly glib frameworks like the Five Ps but I have found this to work time and again in my experience. I’ll expand on this framework in a later post but suffice to say, new solutions for me must fall within this framework – just because we have news ways of working doesn’t mean that we have become fundamentally different types of beings.

For those of you with hazy memories, the Five Ps are:

• Product
• Price
• Place
• Promotion
• People

It is my conviction that your business decisions are all geared to getting these Ps right – Twitter, Facebook and so forth are just tools to achieving these aims. If they don’t do that, then they are irrelevant.

Now I expect some disagreement with my views – so what are you waiting for?

(Disclaimer: unlike me, Vicky is a very happy Twitter/Facebook/Xing/LinkedIn user. Luddites have not yet completely taken over TrackingTourism.com)

Terms like Travel 2.0 and Web 2.0 get thrown about in conversation and it can seem that everyone but you knows exactly what they mean.

Yet push someone for a definition and people come up with all sorts of different explanations or they struggle to define it all.

So this post attempts to give a simple working definition of Travel 2.0. But more importantly, we hope to highlight what that really means for travel and tourism businesses and why you need to care.

But given that no two people seem to agree on precisely what Travel 2.0 and Web 2.0 actually mean, we’re doing the blog equivalent of a duet. We’ll both throw our thoughts in and to avoid making you dizzy, I’ll indicate which or us is proclaiming, so you know who to argue with at the end!

So, we need to pin down Web 2.0 before we tackle Travel 2.0 …. so Web 2.0 in no more than 20 words please:

Vicky: Community, interactivity, reciprocity, two-way marketing conversation, the long tail, create, modify, self-publish, user generated content, rich media, collaboration, see Wikipedia.

Stephen: Technically: blogs, RSS, flash media (no flash = no YouTube). Economically: (almost) zero cost to entry. Socially: critical mass of chatterers.

So where does Travel 2.0 fit in?

Vicky: Travel 2.0 is a term coined by our friends at PhoCusWright, as CEO Phillip C Wolf explains in this article:

“Travel 1.0 started around 1995; it was characterized by the shift from offline to online reservations and was dominated for a decade by three things: price, price and price.…. Travel 2.0, our industry’s collective fulfilment of Web 2.0, embodies how companies can differentiate themselves in a vast, dynamic space…. New travel researching and planning approaches are empowering consumers in unprecedented ways…. Travellers are keen to take control and find/create the perfect trip, not just the cheapest trip.”

What I take from that is Travel 2.0 is moving on to be more personalized, customer centric and experience centric. At the same time user communities and online tools have evolved for the traveller themselves to share experiences, to help search and define what it really is they are looking for and to pre-experience this though levels of multimedia content before they even make a purchase decision.

Stephen: I think it’s no coincidence that this is occurring in a period of sustained prosperity unparalleled in my lifetime. Put simply, western people have the time and money to be choosy about where they go and what they do. But people always need information in order to spend wisely and Travel 2.0 has effectively been about the vastly improved information flow to people making important investment decisions.

I have this notion though that it might be useful to speak of ‘Tourism 2.0‘ in describing the (consumer) demand-side experience and ‘Travel 2.0′ when speaking of the supply-side reaction to this, although I appreciate that they must meet in the middle!

Is it just jargon or does it represent a change in consumer behaviour?

Vicky: Yes and yes. It is jargon and that can be a barrier to understanding, but it does represent a real technology-enabled shift in consumer behaviour.

It is simply now easier, more satisfying and a richer experience for travellers to interact with other and share online – be that through video, images, reviews or other forms of exchange. Online social interaction lends itself so well to travel (the anticipation, the actual experience, the reminiscences). And the technology has evolved to allow interconnectivity and aggregation of services/content from many sites meaning that the research, anticipation and purchase have become far more fluid and closely aligned.

What it isn’t about is simply a bunch of tools, those of course these play an important part. (And for Travel 2.0 tools galore visit the Web 2.0 Travel Tools blog).

Stephen: Undoubtedly jargon. Some aspects do represent a change in customer behaviour (checking out peer reviews of destinations being a case in point) but other aspects are old impulses in new clothes (Flickr is the modern equivalent of showing off your holiday snaps…but only to people who are interested!). Ultimately, though, I think it is about increasing ease of access, whether that be to information, booking or new experiences.

Why should travel and tourism businesses care?

Vicky: Because its not just teenagers, geeks and weirdos or the “more advanced” North American market in this space – it is your customers, young and old, in Europe, the Americas and Asia. This is where they’re dreaming, planning, buying and reviewing. Sometimes a little edge by participation early on delivers a big advantage, where as getting left behind can leave you dead in the water.

Stephen: Well, if you don’t understand the role of review communities or metasearch for example (price comparison sites like Kayak.com who aggregate price data) then you don’t understand where customers are going to research their travel plans and what is motivating them to do that. That makes it harder to deliver the right message at the right time.

Do businesses need to do anything different?

Vicky: For me Travel 2.0 is also about recognising a shift in the marketing process and “control” of the marketing messaging.

From TV watching to travel brochures, media channels have become fragmented to the extent that the 1% response rate you could once hope to achieve with certain types of marketing/advertising, simply doesn’t deliver the volume of respondents it once did. The one to many model of mass marketing is being replaced by the one to few or even one to one model embodied by The Long Tail.

The old cliche used to be “people who have a bad experience with a service tend to tell 6 to 10 people, but those having good experiences only tell 1 or 2 people”. Word of mouth was generally limited to how many people one person actually came into physical contact with. I don’t think that stands up any more. People have any kind of travel experience, great or terrible, they tell Tripadvisor, Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, YouTube, the blogosphere – they tell their online community.

As people are no longer limited to only telling or consulting the opinions of people they know in the real world, word of mouth has become super-charged and powerful. Your marketing, PR and advertising efforts are not the only thing shaping your reputation. As this post explains, You Don’t Own Your Brand - Your Customer Does. So, personally, I don’t think doing things the same old way is an option any longer, because technology has led customers to dictate a shift in the terms of the conversation.

Stephen: Businesses do need to behave differently but how they behave depends on a number of factors.

A small business (a bed and breakfast for example) needs to be smarter about how they are perceived in the world. Previously, they just needed to concentrate on product and manage their reputation that way but now they have a potentially global audience watching them…and they need to know how to react to that constructively if things go wrong.

Being of a more conservative disposition, I am not sure how much ‘own brand’ social networking in its current form is merely a fad or how much it will be integral to business in the future. I can imagine that things like Facebook will have their place but I’m not sure, for example, that a Hotel Chain own-brand social network really adds any value. Same goes for most attempts (not all) at corporate presences in Second Life.

But the bottom line is that these companies need to make travel easier for their customers - whether that’s at the research, booking, or experience stages.

Who are you Travel 2.0 heroes? Which companies are getting it right?

Vicky: I’m a self-confessed Tripadvisor addict, I also use Flickr for travel research and love sites that pull in Flickr images or permit users to upload their own. Community of Sweden from Visit Sweden are VirtualMalaysia are good for that. In terms of flights, I’m increasingly using metasearch site Kayak. If it was a destination I don’t know, I might consult a site like TripWiser or TravBuddy.

Stephen: I also like Kayak. At a local level I like Bob’s Blog because it is a great example of how a business should be working a blog.

Mmmm, I’m not sure how much harmony there was in that duet, but isn’t that Web 2.0 and Travel 2.0 all over?

What do you think? Should there be a distinction between Travel 2.0 and Tourism 2.0? Who are your Travel 2.0 heroes? Am I deluded in thinking this represents a shift in consumer behaviour?

Update - you may also be interested in these Travel 2.0 posts from Tracking Tourism:

Travel 2.0 - the data, impacts and business implications

Striking a Travel 2.0 balance - how much time should a business commit?

How can you convey the real feel of a place online?

Over the last few weeks of conducting web research with real site visitors, I have been reminded that while facts are important online, decisions are made with the heart.

While exploring a series of sites, the users consistently told me “it doesn’t give me a feel of the place”, “its better on facts than feelings”, “I don’t really connect with it emotionally” and “I want to be able to imagine what it is really like”.

Anticipation, imagination, emotional connections - isn’t that a pretty tall order for a humble website?

Not really - after all, we’re talking travel, not concrete, enemas or animal feed.

The Internet is full of travellers already sharing their experiences and feelings about tourism destinations and businesses. Tapping into that (or simply learning from their vocabulary and examples) will help you ensure visitors can’t help but feel their hearts flutter!

So how can you inject a bit of soul and feeling into you site? Here’s a bit of insight I can share from my recent research - and I again thank the participants for their forthrightness!

1. “Show me, don’t make me read”

100 useful words and one useless yellow button and what do you think gets all the attention? People will read when they’re ready, but it is only one way to make an impression and a fairly considered one at that. Irrational excitement and anticipation comes from engaging several senses and igniting imagination. The users I was working with said “show me,” and who could argue that this display of the Northern Lights is better watched than read.

And the same could apply to “let me listen.” (Check out this evocative audio of waves breaking on Pebble Beach, Victoria, Canada and tell me you aren’t moved just a little?)

Text isn’t the only option online and potential travellers want their senses tickled!

2. Using images and multimedia

“TVtrip films your hotel (for free!) and your hotel is then featured on TVtrip.com… You also receive a copy of the video to use on your own website, again for free.”

So tickling senses is all very well, but video, audio, high quality images - that all sounds jolly expensive. And it is true that should you wish, you can quickly blow your annual budget by making stuff look really, really pretty.

But it doesn’t just have to be your content that you use. Before you call the police, I’m not suggesting you steal anything or use any content without permission. Because the fact is your visitors, people in you area, friends and strangers are taking all photos, making videos and uploading them to the web. Flickr and Youtube are some of the most visited properties on the web. You can choose to link to that content, or you can go further and either ask if you can access the content for your site, or invite people to submit it to you directly.

There are also companies like TVTrip who will produce cheap or free multimedia content for you. They make their money on the usual affiliate model, happy in the knowledge that multimedia content has a great uplift on hotel bookings. You can (but of course) see their explanatory video here.

3. Testimony - don’t just take my word for it

I’ve already written about why you shouldn’t be afraid of Tripadvisor and should be brave enough to share your user reviews direct with potential customers. But if that is simply a leap too far, you can still tap into the power of realistic, authentic testimonials.

The wise and delightful Sean de Souza has a great article called Is There Too Much Sugar In Your Testimonials? There’s a danger of on-site testimonials seeming phoney, but a sprinkle of realism and some photos for a personal touch make them far more credible. But nothing beats unbiased, off-site comments - and you can always link direct when you earn these. ExtramileScotland is a great example.

4. Ground the place in relative terms

“So where is it then?… Where is it near?… Where in relation to London?” Pretty obvious questions when you think about it, but you can really convey a sense of place when you ground yourself relative to a better known or more evocative destinations. Not only does this improve your search engine rankings, it allows potential visitors to make a mental map of where you fit in to the wider context of their travels.

5. Cater for multiple perspectives

People like pictures of people like them.

Hence me including this entirely gratuitous photo of travel bloggers.

But what is familiar, engaging and reassuring to some (like white water rafting or travel blogging) is dreary or downright off putting to others.

To build emotional connections for different segments in your target market, it is important to carefully choose a range of people focussed images that broadly reflects these different groups, their interests and tastes. You can probably narrow your key market segments down to between 4 and 7 groups, so there’s no need to go picture crazy.

Are your senses tickled yet?

Hopefully I’ve conveyed to you that web visitors are open to sensory stimulation on multiple levels. And when they find it, the results are typically greater emotional engagement and increased likelihood to buy.

Sadly I failed in my quest to tingle all your main senses, so if anyone knows of a smelly or edible website, please let me know!

We tend to assume that other people think the same as we do. That they see things the same, even use the Internet the same.

There’s a wonderfully simple way of challenging that idea. And that is to watch (quietly!) as other people use your website. Sounds simple, doesn’t it?

I’ve spent much of the last week travelling to people’s homes and offices, observing as they use a specific website to try and achieve certain tasks. I’ve been researching what information is important to people as they explore the site, where they look for this information, the weaknesses of the site and the problems visitors have in achieving their tasks.

And even though I’ve done this kind of research many times, it still fascinates me how different people undertake the same online tasks in such different ways.

It is even more illuminating to discover how even well planned, well tended websites can still completely confound the typical visitor on a mission. You quickly discover that what is obvious to me may not be obvious to you (and vice versa).

Often I work with survey data, web analytics data and online search trends, trying to figure out what it was that the visitor was up to. But when you’re sitting in the home of a real potential customer, the realities of the problems people experience as they use a site suddenly become all to clear.

Suddenly you see how the words on your navigation tabs just don’t mean the same thing to everyone and that in-text links have this Alice in Wonderland like ability to make people click, even in the middle of a task.

Research like this is a quick sanity check that allows you a privileged glimpse of your site through the eyes of your website visitor.

You can do this yourself

So here’s a recipe for a brain tingling, eye opening research activity that will change the way you see your website forever. Just be warned - if you thought your website was perfect, you’re in for a rude awakening.

1) Identify some key aspects of your website you’d like to explore with visitors and think of some realistic tasks that relate to those aspects of the site. Think of a pretty open task (like choose a holiday that appeals to you and gather all the information you need to book it on this site).You may also want to a few very specific tasks that push people towards searching for specific facts (find out about hiring a wheelchair, or whether you can bring your dog for example). Finally, pin down a small handful of wrap-up questions you’d like to learn from people that use your site.

2) Find five people who are unfamiliar with your website. You can use five random people, however in my experience, its really worth putting the effort in to find five people that represent different segments of your web visitors. For example a trade contact, a family booker, an international customer etc. There is no point doing this with 20, 50, 100 people – five is enough for your reality check.

3) Arrange one to one sessions of up to an hour with these five people (you’ll be best to spread it over more than one day if you’re conducting the research alone). Decide whether to visit people at their home/work or in a neutral place with reliable web access and be prepared to compensate people for their time.

4) Dig out a web cam, note pad and if you have one, a voice recorder. It gets tricky trying to simultaneously listen, note what people say and check what they look at on screen, so a web cam lets you review the session afterwards (just make sure it points at the screen!)

5) Run your research session, ensuring that you do not pressure your test subjects by appearing personally invested. You’ll need to ask your participant to narrate what they’re thinking, what they’re looking for, how they’re responding to the site. That means no commenting, correcting, tutting or pointing out the obvious. If people get so lost and confused that the research is breaking down, be flexible enough to prompt them in a new direction – but the point is there is no right answer. Don’t be tempted to point out where in the site they should be looking – spend your effort trying to really see what they’re doing and hear what they’re saying.

6) Get your notes written up quickly after the session – if you’re doing five they’ll soon get confused in your mind. I like to make little pen portraits and capture information about characteristics and emotional responses, not just what they did. After all, this is qualitative research, not simply technical user testing.

7) Now the fun starts! You’ll probably have enough illumination to keep you glowing for weeks. Don’t put your notes away and think job well done – the difficult job starts here. Look at what you have discovered and start thinking of them in terms of short term quick fixes and medium to long term strategies.

Keep your five people in mind when making future decisions about your site – because you’ll know for a fact that other people don’t see things the same as you do.

New 100% online eMarketing courses for businesses

We’ve been really working hard in the background with the University of the Highlands and Islands to develop a series of ground-breaking new, practical courses aimed at organisations who want to get more value from their web activity. I’m posting about it here in case you or your colleagues might benefit from this hands-on course and because I hope to ensure the class I’ll be teaching will be packed with enthusiastic people!

The first course is in eMarketing starts w/c 12th May and runs for 15 weeks. (The date has changed). The course will be 100% online, is non-technical and is aimed at helping marketing managers, business owners, tourism organisations and web/communications managers to get more results from their online efforts. Further courses in web analytics and web value optimisation will follow later this year.

While the course is aimed at businesses and organisations of all types, it was nevertheless designed with our tourism sector experience in mind. The course reflects the challenges and issues we see tourism industry businesses and organisations facing time and time again as they try to maximise returns from their online activity.

Why take this course?

• During the sessions you’ll devise specific, actionable improvements for your website
• Understand how visitors use your site so you can improve their experience and your results
• Improve your ability to brief and manage third parties such as designers, developers and SEO agencies
• Build an online marketing strategy for your site
• Learn to optimise your paid search activity and search engine rankings
• Understand conversion and how to measure and improve the return on investment from your activity

You’ll learn from your fellow students, from me and by working closely on real-life examples from your own business sectors.

Who is the course aimed at?

• Busy people like you
• Non technical people - business owners, marketing and communications staff, web and
• Its not just e-commerce!
• Tourism organisations, destination marketers and business owners

Unlike many text books and existing courses, this is not aimed only at those in e-commerce. People in tourism, the public sector, voluntary organisations and with business to business sites will get as much value from this course as those with pure e-commerce sites.

We know you’re busy (we are too). That’s why the course is 100% online to allow you to progress in your own time. The support/teaching will be delivered online too,for maximum flexibility.

You don’t have to be based in the Highlands (or even the UK) to take part - the online approach means time zones are not an issue!

For more information

The course is being run by UHI, but has been developed and will be taught by Vicky Brock of Highland Business Research. To book or for more information about the eMarketing course is available from UHI’s department of Continuing Professional Development - or you can email cpd@uhi.ac.uk .

There is more information about the course in this 3 minute video

I’m also happy to answer any questions about course content etc if you want to email me direct, but I’m not involved in the booking/admin process, so its best to direct that kind of enquiry to UHI.

I’ve noticed that when you mention the name Tripadvisor to accommodation providers, the vast majority give an involuntary shudder.

Due to some genuine bad experiences, there seems to be a widespread assumption amongst businesses that Tripadvisor reviews accentuate the negative.

Yet I am an avowed Tripadvisor user and I have only ever given two negative reviews. I have chosen accommodation I wouldn’t have otherwise heard of based on the glowing reviews of other users - and I’m sure I am not alone.

So is there more than my anecdotal experience to demonstrate that the user reviews on Tripadvisor are not bad news for good businesses? It just so happens there is!

I’ve done some quick research for this post by looking at the user ratings of 108 local Inverness area accommodation providers reviewed on Tripadvisor. Where available, I cross-referenced these user-generated scores with the Scottish industry quality assurance/star ratings for those same businesses, using other data sources.

What I found is that Tripadvisor reviewers are not only far more generous than you might think (the most common score is four out of five) – but fewer than 20% of accommodation providers are rated lower by visitors than their quality assurance rating would suggest.

Not only that, but it’s the little guys that fare best of all.

I sliced and diced the user ratings by accommodation type and discovered that it is actually the B&Bs of Inverness who score highest on Tripadvisor.

The trends are far more positive than negative

More than 50% of accommodation businesses I looked at are rated 4 out of five or above by Tripadvisor reviewers. The average (mean) is a little lower at 3.8, pulled down by the handful of very poor performers.

More than 50% of businesses also receive a rating from user reviewers that is higher than their Quality Assurance rating. Yes, the QA rating is looking at different and very specific factors, but it is a sign of a very positive visitor experience when a two star establishment can get a 4.0 Tripadvisor rating because it delivers that 2 star experience extremely well indeed.

Whether it is a reflection on the wisdom of crowds or wisdom of the QA assessors, fewer than 20% of accommodation providers are rated lower by visitors than their star rating would suggest. So who are those establishments with Tripadvisor ratings lower than their QA scores? They were almost exclusively 5 or 4 star B&Bs. Their visitors rated them either 0.5 points or 1 point lower than the QA rating and while I haven’t done a full text analysis of comments, I suspect that poor warmth of welcome/friendliness may have been a factor in some of these cases.

So to conclude - don’t bury your head in the sand. If you have a good product and good people, have faith that the majority of Tripadvisor reviewers are not out to get you. In fact, they’re likely to be pretty generous!

Let me know if you’d like to see more of this data and I’ll do a follow up post.