There’s a little tourism/sporting event happening in London in 2012. You may be aware of it. From what I could tell while in Docklands earlier this week, there are certainly lots of cranes and men in hard hats endeavouring to ensure the Olympic Stadium is completed on  time.  (Thanks to suburbanslice on Flickr for the image of the Olympic Park.)

But there is another 2012 milestone accelerating towards us that will have wider construction implications for travel and tourism businesses.  As Greg Dowling, Head of Analysis at Nokia, informed me at eMetrics San Jose a few weeks ago – by 2012 more than half of those accessing the internet will do so from a mobile device.

As a research geek, I like to know the sources of such eye-popping statistics.  I wanted to check for myself that I had understood what he had said correctly and (apologies for the distrust Greg!) that the amazing numbers I was being told were accurate.

And it seems they are.

Leading technology industry analysts, IDC, report in their Digital Marketplace Model and Forecast (June 2008) that:

“Users will access the Internet through more than 1.5 billion devices worldwide in 2008, including PCs, mobile phones, and online videogame consoles. By 2012, the number of devices accessing the Internet will double to more than 3 billion, half of which will be mobile devices.”

And I can tell you Nokia are taking this very, very seriously indeed.

Remember when we all stuck our brochures on the web?

I mentioned the big construction implications of the mobile web.  And like London preparing for the Olympics, tourism providers must realise that the mobile web is a similarly massive event and ask themselves, “Am I ready for these visitors?”

Like parts of London where infrastruture must be upgraded to meet the challenges of an influx of visitors, so there are web offerings that, if not changed, will not be fit for purpose come 2012.

We cannot simply throw existing website content at mobile users and think “job done”.  People will be using devices that are geographically aware.  They are looking for downloadable apps they can carry with them.  People will expect (because its already do-able) that they can use their mobile devices to locate a nearby restaurant that meets their tastes and that has a table now.

Are you ready for that?

It is not an either/or of course.  Mobile is not “replacing” the fixed web – it is augmenting it with a time sensitive, location sensitive layer – one that is arguably also more flexible for interactivity with both objects and other people.

Travel and tourism is where fixed internet users first experimented and became more confident in researching and communicating online – there is no reason to believe that their mobile internet experience will be any different.  Travel, tourism and “familiarisation” applications will lead the way as internet users add another layer of enrichment to their experiences.  In fact they already are – these three excellent posts from Stephen Joyce, Norm Rose and the New York Times give you a flavour of some of the great applications already being used by visitors to navigate their way through unfamiliar places and travel processes.  Where the early adopters lead, the bulk of visitors will soon follow.

So is there a 2012 tourism connection between mobile and the Olympics?

There sure is…  Just as the Sydney Olympics were revolutionised by digital photography technologies, distributing images globally in minutes, London 2012 will be the first heavy test of the mobile internet.  And provided London Underground don’t decide to strike rendering us thoroughly immobile, there is a compelling case (as made here by the Mobile Data Association) that London will be the “mobile Olympics of 2012“  As they explain:

“As early as 2010, all new mobile phones will be mobile internet and mobile email ready and will have sophisticated camera functionality as standard. Mobile social networking and sharing rich moments with friends and family, will be a commonplace occurrence. Therefore visitors to the 2012 London Olympics will be recording and sharing their own personal memories of the games. This “of the moment” dynamic view will provide a great opportunity to experience the Olympics in a unique way.”

They go on (and is this is where it gets interesting for the tourism/travel business):

“By 2012 we will be using our NFC (Near Field Communications) enabled mobile phones on the underground and public transport systems of London as an Oyster card replacement. There are significant opportunities to combine mobile internet, GPS location and mapping to provide visitors to the games with travel plans (using public transport), avoiding congested areas, making reservation in hotels and restaurants, tickets for the games and real-time security alerts and warnings.”

So great, the London Olympics will have even more people glued to their phones and may even edge towards being a “cashless” Olympics if the transactional kinks can be ironed out.  But why is this remotely significant to, say, a hotel in Glasgow or an attraction in Leipzig?

Well, here’s a few reasons to start with:

• Critical mass – many times we have heard that “this is the year of mobile” only for that promise not to materialise. But now a perfect storm of handset advances, content/application development, increasing wi-fi network availability and a major trigger event such as the Olympics means 2012 is a very realistic horizon for the mobile internet to become an absolutely mainstream platform in travel.
• Mobile phones are beginning to be used ‘transactionally’ – even if not quite yet as the purchase device  (booking a table for a nearby restaurant in 15 minutes time is a transaction, even if the purchase is completed in the restaurant).  At the moment, phones are typically acting as really smart guide books…but this kind of transactional development means that people should start using them to first move closer to the point of purchase, and eventually to keep and spend money.
• The combination of User Generated Content, Social Networks, GPRS and Mobiles means that information will be shared among a target group more quickly – this has benefits (eg you are shifting stock at a discount to clear it) and drawbacks (word gets out quickly if you’re product is duff).

So, peer to peer communication, as epitomized say by Trip Advisor, becomes even more rapid, even more geographically sensitive, even more context aware.   As one leading phone manafacturer who will remain nameless pointed out “not only do we know where you are right now, we know who is in you address book” – those things can be easily pulled together for custom recommendations.

Doesn’t that have the potential to dramatically increase the power of peer to peer influence and word of mouth?  And will you be ready?

Although the concepts are clearly interlinked, lets take each of these themes in turn and examine their implications.

Transparency

At a broad level, transparency works in two ways.

Firstly, there is the need of businesses to be transparent. Secondly, transparency is imposed on businesses by the consumer whether that business likes it or not. But let’s unpack those two sentences yet further.

When we are talking about transparency, it is not just a case of being honest about the building site opposite your hotel but about allowing your consumer easy access to both your product and reliable information about that market.

Ian cited both:

• the demand for the right results fast, with absolute intolerance of slowness; and
• the desire to see through the blizzard of choice to get to where we actually want to get to

Added together this means a ‘culture of convenience’ in which consumers are simply more demanding and less tolerant of the slow and vague. As Joe Buhler discussed at Canada e-connect last week, the web 3.0 nirvana for the customer is the shift from searching to finding, from ‘pile ‘em high’ to personalised.

It should be appreciated that while the blizzard of choice might seem confusing at the outset, this blizzard is actually the crowded market place in which the consumer can be seduced by a huge variety of options and so the producer therefore needs to work harder to attract the consumer’s attention.

Until the semantic web nirvana arrives (see a great little video on what that means over at Buhlerworks), customers are having to do all the hard leg work of searching and researching. No wonder they’re impatient! It was suggested last week that people typically look at 17 websites while planing a trip (I don’t have a source on this, so don’t treat that as fact!)

Even the best website has just a few seconds to speak to and successfully sign-post the prospective visitor. 7 seconds used to be the number often quoted – now (as we’ve seen in user testing) its considerably less time than that.

“People want sites to get to the point. They have very little patience.” Jakob Nielsen

So in this context, transparency is about easy provision of information.

Trust

So, why do companies also need to be transparent? (Apart from the fact that whatever you’re hiding, it’s already on the internet somewhere!)

Because, in turn, transparency engenders trust.

From focus groups we’ve done, we’ve found that there is a residual distrust that areas (especially) marketed at a national level through a tourist board are simply not going to be how they are presented. It’s as though the consumer now feels that they are not going to get the full story about what the place is really like – is the pretty old town actually just a small part of a grimy industrial city for example?

It is no wonder, as we wrote about here, that the traveller places less trust in brand marketing than they do in user reviews and ratings. In fact, reviews/ratings from other travellers were seen as twice as influential in the online travel planning process than brand and significantly more important than recommendations from friends and family.

As Ian noted, “Less and less the consumer trusts advertising. One major consequence is that every tourism organisation or business needs to work hard to preserve whatever authority and trust-worthiness it has accumulated.”

So your brand still has capital, even though you can’t control communication. An organisation has to respect the fact that it is no longer the only information source, but acknowledge that it still has the potential to influence. By embracing – and having a strategy to manage and respond to – the authentic views of others, the business has the opportunity to benefit even when those reviews reflect an image removed from perfection.

Trendwatching have coined the term Brand Butler’s to express this concept:

BRAND BUTLERS “If consumers value the authentic, the practical, the exclusive, and they’re also forever looking to make life more convenient, even save some time, then why persist in bombarding them with one-way advertising campaigns? Instead of stalking potential and existing customers, why not assist them in smart, generous, relevant ways, making the most of your products and whatever it is your brand stands for?” Trendwatch Feb 09 Briefing

Technology

Of course, technology has been at the forefront of enabling this explosion of choice and views. If you think back to as little as 15 years ago, for ‘real’ views about a place we would consult either our travel agent or read a Lonely Planet guide (which I ended up not particularly trusting!). In terms of pricing, it was a lot simpler and often a case of ‘take it or leave it’.

The internet has of course opened up much of the industry to closer scrutiny as well as offering far wider choice (not that the choice wasn’t always there – it was just harder to find).

Search, meta-search & price comparisons, user generated content, dealing with multi websites simultaneously – and the fact that none of this stuff goes away – has changed the information gathering landscape.

Clear…as mud?

Interestingly, Ian also noted that

“There is a counter trend to everything transparent, in which opaqueness is accepted by tourists. Many tourists will accept an opaque offering, if that experience consistently delivers and surprises. Also, a lot of tourists like to keep things simple. They want to save time. They don’t want to make all the decisions. In other words, if you operate and deliver in a superior way, consumers may actually be happy and they don’t want to spend valuable time researching or engaging in conversations with you. They will trust you to do the right thing. Surrender control in order to get on with more important business. If your business or destination is opaque, it means you are one of the best, but you have to work at it to maintain that trust.”

It seems to me there are two things going on here. The first is the organisation that can anticipate and over deliver – the ability to surprise, and delight is trusted, presumably due in part to great word of mouth.

The second is the “easy life” compromise and sounds like the Easyjet scenario to me. Hidden extras I have to uncheck if I don’t want them added, a fairly unlovely experience alround and I don’t want to engage with them. But they get me there, its quick and its cheap. I’m not sure that’s trust, but its certainly willingly surrendered control, in exchange for convenience.

So what do I take away from this?

I guess for me this prognosis should be read as implying that these ‘Three Ts’ are about more than saying it’s a good idea to respond to user generated content such as hotel reviews. That’s certainly part of the environment but I think this is also talking about fundamental ways of doing business.

One of the cardinal lessons I would stress from this is the importance of ensuring access to the product. I don’t mean this in terms of being able to get to a destination but rather in terms of making sure that the custsomer’s voice is heard and served amidst the cacophony.

So, on a practical level, we’re looking at usability issues, we’re looking at understanding your customers and their behaviour, we’re looking at making sure that they are able to get information and maybe convert in a style that suits them, not you.

Ultimately then, it’s about trying to create a win/win transaction and the ways of getting to this state are indeed being fully explored both at the level of the here and now (see out recent post about the Phocuswright Innovation Summit for example) and as a meaningful future concept (again, see our post on Travel 3.0). 

And, for me, one of the most exciting parts of this is the fact that these developments are aligning themselves to the fundamentals of doing business – they’re not just filling some strange need for a new fad (although there are exceptions…) but rather they’re about building trust, they’re about delivering value to the customer in a way that suits them and they about enabling  voices to be heard in an ultra-competitive and challenging environment.

Filed by Stephen (29/01/09)

I started this week at the University of Guelph, one of Canada’s most prestigious Schools of Hospitality & Tourism Management.  It was a privilege to meet with and teach the next generation of industry professionals, ranging from hospitality MBAs to first year undergraduate students. In an industry where staff recruitment and retention can be so challenging, it was wonderful to observe both the job fair and alumni/student evening as well as the very practical approach to bringing the hospitality and tourism businesses together with its bright young future employees.  This is something which must surely enhance Canada’s future competitiveness as a tourism destination.

Also contributing to Canada’s strong future focus is Canada e-connect, the e-tourism strategy conference running in Toronto this week.

Hosted by the Tourism Industry Association of Canada and organised by fellow T List blogger Jaime Horwitz, I feel e-connect day one successfully delivered attendees three critical things:

1. A dose of digital reality

Not only has the world has changed -  “deal with it” – but here are some strategies to help you deal. (Strategies, note, not just tactics as is so often the case  at tourism industry events).  This was about a grown-up approach to e-tourism and emarketing – not just a bunch of cool stuff you can do, regardless of how relevant to your business and customer.  This included:

The 4 ps of digital marketing.  Because this conference was about so much more than tactics, it was interesting to hear Dr Ian Fenwick talk both accessibly and inspiringly about the shift in marketing fundamentals that lie behind digital marketing strategy.  The traditional 4ps of marketing (price, product, promotion, place) take a shifted focus in a digital environment, a theme reiterated through the day.  The principals of digital marketing, whether we’re talking mobile devices or email communications, come down to:

• Permission (opt in, easy opt out, non interruptive/invasive, frequency as agreed by customer)
• Participation  (customer participation in content creation, what the brand stands for etc)
• Particulars (collecting customer data drop by drop)
• Personalisation (relevant, timely, valuable to customer)

What I found interesting about many of the speakers in the course of the day was that they didn’t simply focus on the 2nd P – participation – and managed to avoid getting fixated on  promotion/user generated content at the cost of everything else.  Exactly the lesson I was teaching to the marketing students at the University of Guelph earlier in the week.

Message before  medium. In one of the best analogies of the day, Adam Keats of Weber Shandwick explained that when Moses chiselled out the 10 commandments from God, it wasn’t because he had some really neat stone tablets that he wanted to fill with content – it was because he had these messages to get across and the stone tablets were the best medium to hand.

He concluded by saying let’s not ask “how do I blog successfully?” but instead ask “what stories can I tell?”In both the mobile strategies session and the blogging session, it was illuminating to hear panellists say “this may not be for you.”

Likewise, in the mobile strategies session panelists urged businesses to think about what your customer does when out and about on their phone (and other mobile devices such as in car gps) – and define where in that process you can bring them extra value that is highly relevant and timely.  If you don’t deliver extra value in that customer’s personal context – then maybe you don’t need a mobile strategy.  And if of course you do, then contextual is a word you’re going to be uttering a whole lot more in future!

2. An enhanced view of customer centricity

The travelling customer was not invisible at this conference.  Instead of being entirely supply-side or product focussed, there was talk of permission, personalisation, customer centricity etc.  But it was Diane Clarkson of Forrester that really delivered a powerful reminder of the customer’s importance in her lunchtime address on delivering the valued customer’s experience in a web 2.0 world.  Because economic conditions are meaning travellers are spending less, taking fewer trips and are reducing accommodation spend (either downscaling rooms or establishments).

“Travelers don’t care that the economy is tough on you too”  Diane Clarkson, Forrester

Diane highlighted that critical to embedding the valued customer’s experience across the organisation are the principals that the customer must feel:

• Fulfilment of their needs, both in terms of the product delivery, but also their emotional expectations
• Respect – for their time, for their money, for their experience
• Communicated with – by name, authentically, personally

Right now, 3 out of 4 people do not feel valued in the email communications they receive – they are product/supplier centric, rather than centred on delivering value to the customer as an individual.  She warned that based on the evidence of their research, it was clear that the current strategies of many tourism businesses focus inwards on the company, rather than outwards on the customer.

Fortunately, the conference content offered businesses strategies to address that!

3. A clear view forward, not a glance behind in the rear view mirror

I found, judging from day one, that e-connect was suitably forward looking and pitched very appropriately.  It didn’t take the line of “you must get into web 2.0 or be left behind.”  In many ways it took for granted that businesses were already in that space, or at least wrestling with the questions provoked by the 4 new ps listed above.  Instead the conference looked intelligently ahead – based not just in terms of technologies, but more importantly in terms of customer needs, expectations and digital usage.

While not at the bleeding edge of travel innovation in the way that the PhoCusWright conference is, it nevertheless featured the thinking of those innovators and translated it into relevant terms for the mainstream Canada tourism industry, without (in my opinion) being either too basic or too backward looking. And that is critical to getting any form of innovation embedded into the wider market place.

Good job Jaime and TIAC – I think Canada is leading the way in e-tourism in so many ways.

And to give the final quote to Sean Shannon of Expedia Canada, who talked about balancing the intelligent use of information with respect for customer sensibilities:

“It’s not always what technology can do, but what you decide to do with it”.

Just over a year ago, in sunny Orlando, we were optimistically looking forward to a Travel 2.0 future where the playing field was level for online innovators.

At the PhoCusWright Conference the travel industry met to discuss the long tail in travel, and envisaged an environment  where (in PhoCusWrights’ words):

“Little guys compete on the merits of the products and services, not the size of their marketing budgets. Big guys are all of a sudden at increased risk if they ignore too many little things.“

Thanks to the long tail in travel it seemed there was a chance for an almost infinite number of destinations and niche providers to find their perfect match online amongst the tiny minority of consumers searching for the very thing they offered.

And thanks to web 2.0 technology, revenues would be shifted along the tail, redistributed from a few big players in the head and disseminated more widely to the many, many players in the tail.  The “new market” shown in the graph.

Well, it turns out we may have been deluded – at least about that whole revenue and profit part.  Research from digital music sales, online retailers – and dare I suggest even travel industry analysts themselves – started to suggest that the long tail does not deliver on its market level revenue redistribute promise.

Google delivered what may be the knock-out blow. As Google CEO Eric Schmidt explained (interview in full here)

“It’s a 90/10 model. We love the long tail, but we make most of our money in the head”.

So Pareto’s Law (the 80/20 distribution of pretty much anything) lives on?  Certainly, an unequal distribution suggests the significant bulk of revenues continue to come from the minority of products/customers – 90% from 10% in Google’s case.  In case he wasn’t clear enough, Eric Schmidt drives it home:

“I would like to tell you that the Internet has made such a level playing field that the Long Tail is absolutely the place to be, that there’s so much differentiation, so much diversity, so many new voices. I’d love to tell you that that’s in fact how it really works. Unfortunately, it’s not.”

An exaggerated death, or the emperors new clothes?

So is the whole concept of The Long Tail dead?

The Register takes a typically sardonic view, declaring: Anderson downgrades Long Tail to Chocolate Teapot status They add that Chris Anderson, author of The Long Tail, has “downgraded it from “the future of business” to something that’s, er, not very helpful for your business at all.”  In Chopping the Long Tail down to size, another post on The Register, data from an extensive study of digital music sales is discussed – with a quote from economist Will Page that:

“Is the ‘future of business’ really selling more of less….. Absolutely not. If you had Top of the Pops now, you’d feature the Top 14, not Top 40.

Personally, I think even without the melodramatic approach taken by The Register, the evidence has been coming in from the travel and tourism sector that a handful of big players – even if they are Web 2.0 players – dominate when the wider market picture is viewed.

In their great Travel 2.0 webinar earlier this year, Hitwise and Jupiter Research demonstrated that while visits to Travel User Generated Content sites was growing (though still a tiny proportion of overall travel visits online)  – this growth was not evenly distributed along a neat long tail.  Rather than a lot of little players accounting for the bulk of  travel user generated content, instead it is just 2 players that account for almost 85% of  travel UGC market share  (Tripadvisor and IgoUgo as shown in Hitwise’s data below) and 5 players accounting for 99% of marketshare.

Not a long tail scenario.  Instead, TripAdvisor’s dominance could be explained in terms of critical mass, economies of scale, consolidation and its position at the “head” not in the “tail”.

Slide from Hitwise webinar on Travel 2.0

So, the long tail is not dead, just unprofitable?

Chris Anderson himself, writing recently in Wired, tries to square the research coming in with his predictions of more widely distributed markets.  But he has to concede that the data just doesn’t stack up for redistributed revenue:

“I’ll end by conceding a point: It’s hard to make money in the Tail. As Schmidt notes, it’s also hard to make money if you don’t have a Tail (to satisfy minority taste, which improves the consumer experience), but the revenues are disproportionately in the Head.”

So the value of all the little things combined, does not outweigh the value of the tiny minority of big things after all….

Does that mean niche products and marketing activities are over?  Or the little guys competing on merits, not marketing budgets are doomed?  Does it mean that we should forget about the low traffic, highly specific terms used in online search?

No, I don’t think so at all.  There is value in niche activity, tactical search and online marketing -  and the smaller business has to compete somewhere.  I just don’t think we’re going to see that level playing field, or the industry’s revenues shifting from the big players to the small players any time soon.

Stephen adds: Assuming that the Long tail only accounts for 10% of Google’s income, that means that it accounted for a paltry HALF A BILLION DOLLARS of revenue …in the third quarter last year! The Long Tail lives on but with companies like Amazon and Google holding virtually limitless inventory (and having the economies of scale to reduce costs still further), they still hold the dominant market position and this includes that part of the market that can be described as long tail.

Post by Vicky

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Finally, an apology to subscribers whose email/RSS feed has misbehaved this week.  Tracking Tourism was upgraded to the new version of Wordpress at the weekend and this resulted in a test message being issued to subscribers, via Feedburner (the tool we use to manage email and RSS feeds).  We apologise for any inconvenience and believe the issue is now fixed.  If you continue to encounter any problems with your email/RSS feed, please do let us know the details so we can investigate further.  Thanks,  Vicky!

But what does this mean?

Have a bunch of under-employed bloggers just got a little over-excited and made up a term that has no relevance to the rest of us but makes them look clever?  Or does it actually signify something that will have an impact on the way we do business?

Well, I think it’s a little of both – certainly at this stage.  The ambitions stated for Web 3.0 projects will have an impact on day to day life once realised but I think we’re not close to mass deployment yet so there is no need to start panicking.  However, I thought I would dedicate this week’s post to looking at some of the basic questions surrounding this potential change, starting with the two most fundamental ones, “What is 3.0″ and “So what?”

What is 3.0?

As is often the case, it’s possible to start with a Wikipedia definition of 3.0 which states:

“Web 3.0 is one of the terms used to describe the evolutionary stage of the Web that follows Web 2.0. Given that technical and social possibilities identified in this latter term are yet to be fully realised the nature of defining Web 3.0 is highly speculative. In general it refers to aspects of the internet which, though potentially possible, are not technically or practically feasible at this time.”

Which isn’t really that helpful.

However, the rest of the article goes into some more detail and, overall, the impression is that the ambition of Web 3.0 is to create an internet that is simply with fewer boundaries than we (often unconsciously) experience at the moment.  And while these ideas are mainly being considered at a technical level that baffles the rest of us, there are indicators of what this might eventually mean for how we interact.

The semantic web

For example, commenting on a recent TrackingTourism post, Phil Caines of Tourism Tide said

“As far as where we can look for the next ‘wow’ change, I can only guess, but if you asked Joe Buhler, he would undoubtedly say “The semantic web of course!’, and I think he is right.”

The Semantic Web is a key part of 3.0 ambitions.  Put simply, it is a development that would enable web sites to be able to understand the relationship between things.

Let me unpack that last paragraph a little.  At the moment, web sites can be seen a bit like an encyclopaedia.  For example, there might have entries on separate sites with the following information:

• Boston is in Massachusetts
• MIT is in Cambridge, over the river from Boston
• MIT undertakes work in Biotechnology

As a human, you understand that there is something linking these statements but a computer doesn’t.  So the aim of the semantic web is to enable computers ‘intuitively’ to understand that these three statements are linked. Simple, eh?

So what?

Ignoring the technical practicalities of this, you’re probably asking the question, ’so what?’ by now.  To my mind, this kind of advance has the potential to make the internet ‘blend together’ in a far more efficient way than it does at present.

So, it could be used, for example,  to develop sites that are able to offer best travel packages based on the question, “I live in Boston but I want to watch Manchester United at home some time in October, staying in a budget hotel with easy access to public transport.  What are my best options and when is the best time for me to go?”   This is not an impossible question to answer at the moment but you will probably need to go to 3+ sites to even start to work out an answer.

On the other hand, the semantic web should make that question a lot easier to answer.  All the separate elements of the question (Manchester United playing times, flight times, lodging info etc) would be understood seamlessly and then used to deliver a swift, comprehensive answer.

Another example of how the Semantic Web could be used in marketing is contained in the following article: What the Semantic Web — or Web 3.0 — Can Do for Marketers.

Mobiles and ubiquitous connectivity

As I mentioned earlier, Web 3.0 also seems to imply an internet that is simply more ubiquitous and less bound than at present.  This means, for example,

• The continued march of the internet onto mobiles as well as the simultaneous blurring of the boundaries between those mobiles and computers;
• The rise of ubiquitous computing where connectivity is as common as the air you breathe (see this recent MIT article on the possibility of receiving wireless as you drive for example).

But what does this all mean to travel and tourism?

That’s a difficult question to answer (but one that will seem frustratingly easy in hindsight).  In some ways, the answer could be something as simple as , ‘what we’re doing now – but a lot better’ but that ignores the possibility of developments as revolutionary as Tripadvisor and Facebook have been in the last five years.

So, dipping our toe in the quagmire of prediction, our guess is that the web as an experience will become more of a hive than a collection of isolated websites.  What I mean by this is that one site will have the the potential to blur with another and so the web will be more of a collective than previously. If you cast your mind back to an interview we conducted with travel futurologist Ian Yeoman, one of the main points made was that:

“The traveller will want more in less time or with less effort – this has implications for everything from the format of events through to booking processes and the nature of breaks.”

And, in this context, consumer demand will dictate that they want more efficient access to information than they currently get. In other words, if there are still pain-points involved in reaching your data, then customers will be less inclined to pursue your offering to the point of booking when there are easier alternatives.

Another implication is that sites will need to ‘tagged’ effectively in terms that other sites and, more importantly, customers understand. Perhaps the implication is that we are moving from ’search engine optimisation’ to simple ’search optimisation.’

But the future is still hazy so I throw the floor open to the hive mind of our readers and conclude by asking, “What do YOU think 3.0 will mean and what might it look like for travel?”

Filed by Stephen (11/12/08)

Well, a week or so ago I was in London for World Travel Market. The following week I was supposed to be in Los Angeles as a guest of PhoCusWright for their 2008 Conference. Unfortunately, work here got in the way and so, instead of the sunny streets of Hollywood, I have been in Scotland instead.

However, from all accounts, the PhoCusWright Conference delivered its usual insight and I thought I would use this blog to highlight some posts from fellow bloggers and other online reports from the conference that caught my eye.

Before I do so, I should mention that I was fortunate to be a guest blogger at the Phocuswright Conference in Berlin earlier this year and so I’ll say a quick word about their conferences as background. For those of you who have been to one, you know what they’re like. But for those of you who haven’t and feel that the conferences that you are currently going to seem to have the same old people with the same of things to say, then I think the PCW conferences might be a nice surprise. I found the level of discussion there much higher and it struck me that this is the place to go to hear from the most senior people in the industry how the travel and tourism sector is progressing.

So, I’ll start with my impressions (second hand) of their Travel Innovation Summit which showcased before the main event solutions and innovations “that significantly impact travel planning, purchasing and trending.” The presentations can be found here and an overview (also second hand!) can be found on William Bakker of Tourism BC’s blog here.

I sense in William’s post a slight sense of being underwhelmed by what was on offer and that’s a sense I share (William, if I’ve got you wrong, let me know!). But, on reflection, I think that being underwhelmed is possibly not the appropriate description – most of the innovations are solid if unshowy examples of how people are exploring niches and looking for new opportunities. So instead of looking for something revolutionary, it is perhaps more appropriate to look at these products as evolutionary.

That said, some of the themes I picked up from the presentations were:

• Consumer interfaces are increasingly trying to become more human – think visuals (TV especially)
• User generated content continues to be key
• Aggregation also remains key – whether that’s of UGC, fare data or a combination of the two and more.
• There are niches to be explored – whether its for the smaller end of the market like Rezgo or for train travel, adventure holidays, or vacation rentals.

A first-hand overview of the ‘winners’ of the summit can be found in Jaime’s post here.

The Uptake Travel industry Blog has an excellent overview of the themes of the conference ‘proper’ here and they seem to reflect notions that I have come upon in different places on them same theme. In summary:

• Look east for new customers (’cos it’s going to get a bit grim if you just rely on your usual markets…)
• Travel is seems to be increasingly embracing TV images as part of the pre-booking experience
• Mobiles really are finally becoming more significant to travel.

Interestingly on mobiles, a session I went to at WTM recently suggested that although mobiles are rising in importance, they are not yet being used for financial transactions in the travel industry but mostly in making the process of travel less painful (more destination info, barcode check-in, that kind of thing).

So, what do I make of all this? It seems that there is a greater air of caution for obvious reasons among travel innovators at the moment. The industry seems to be still changing quickly but it it seems more of a period of organic ‘natural’ evolution rather than left-field innovations suddenly seizing centre stage.

However, despite only experiencing PhoCusWright virtually, it seems to me that the innovators are still miles ahead of many of the players in markets closer to my home in Europe (I know, I know, there are exceptions, especially in London). What this surge of innovation says to me is that, even in this dark economic period, there are people out there thinking really creatively about how technology can make customers’ experiences better.

But I fear this is a spark that is still more conspicuous by its absence than presence in many areas. Despite the low and free cost of many of these technology services, I suspect too many people in the more local tourism sector will miss out.

I think the reason for this is that without exposure to the evolving technology in the context of its creators’ objectives – such as improved user experience, improved travel research processes, better customer experience through ease of booking – the ripple-out from the source gets more and more focussed on “must have” technology for the sake of it. In other words, the its reason for being gets forgotten and it moves from something that intelligently serves the customer to something that a site feels it ought to have but isn’t too sure why.

That risks leaving local tourism businesses continuing to try to play technology catch-up in the difficult years to come, rather than understanding the fundamental customer experience issues that technology was supposed to solve.

But if Web 2.0 has meant anything, it is that the technology exists to enable us to share and learn from each other, meaning that ignorance becomes more of a personal choice rather than an enforced state of affairs. The links in the post to PhoCusWright and associated commentary mean that you can experience these innovations in context and apply their insights and attitudes to your business.

WTM Global Trends Report

OK, let’s start off with an overview of the WTM Global Trends Reports prepared in partnership with Euromonitor.

Despite the talk of markets that have growth potential, it is clear that in the next few years, there is going to be, at best, a slow down in the tourism and travel sector. Beyond that, however, there are new markets and new possibilities. So here are a few of the highlights for me from the report:

• Free and cross-subsidized pricing will become increasingly used (but regular Tracking Tourism readers knew that back in March!)

• Customers are downsizing in a variety of ways – but still travelling. In some cases, this downsizing happily coincides with a desire for more authenticity (home swaps, for example, so that you get to live like a local) and in other cases it’s simply a move to cheaper alternatives (good old price elasticity of demand coming into play).

• Destinations are having to cast their nets wider to catch customers. For example, the report cites the Bahamas and the British Virgin Islands marketing beyond the traditional US market. Although not made explicit in the report, this surely means greater competition among destinations for similar pools of customers, something I’ll touch on a little later.

• The downsizing/authenticity nexus can arguably be described as resulting in a travel 2.0 experience in which ‘user generated’ social network interaction online result in real visits made to real people in real neighbourhoods as a logical extension of that way of interacting. Obviously, before we get to breathless about this, most of you will appreciate that this is a variant on ‘visiting friends and relatives’ and it’s what people do when they have less cash. But, I can see that Web 2.0 technologies can make this a more easily facilitated process than might have occurred in previous years.

• There’s an increasingly complicated pictures of inter-regional travel and tourism. For example, a Scot working in the Oil industry in Saudi and part of the large expat community there should be considered not only as a Scot in terms of travel preferences but also as a potential traveller defined by where he currently works. So, to take our example further, his circumstances mean that a jaunt to Dubai might be more appealing than a jaunt to Ibiza or somewhere similar popular with British people.

Some elements of the report I disagree with or feel that they occupy a really niche market. For example, there is a section on philanthropic tourism whereby rich westerners have a feel-good break that ethically engages with the local community (a bit like Fairtrade travel). I don’t deny that such travel exists and that there is some customer demand for it (as opposed to it being part of the Corporate Social Responsibility PR agenda of the supplier) but wonder how large such a market will be over the next torrid couple of years and their lingering aftermath. I’m not too sure how charitable I might be feeling in 18 months time!

The press release for the WTM Global Trends Report can be accessed here.

Increased competition

I also attended a press conference yesterday for Croatian Tourism and, as with most countries, there is a real recognition of the benefits of tourism for the economy and the image of the country. But seeing Croatia’s efforts also made me realise the sheer intensity of competition in some regions and the need to define a really clear proposition for the customer.

Put simply Croatia is a great Mediterranean country with a great coast that wants to get more upmarket customers. Great ambitions but I suspect that it has France, Italy, Turkey, Greece, Cyprus, Malta, the Balearics, Israel, Lebanon, Morocco, Libya, Tunisia, Egypt and the rest of the 25 countries bordering the Med. as competition and all adopting similar strategies.

This doesn’t mean that Croatia shouldn’t try but rather that each of these areas needs to have a clear USP, brand or market position to get ahead. And while ‘quality tourism’ remains an attractive prospect, I often wonder whether ‘good value’ (i.e. cheaper) tourism isn’t still a viable aspiration. Your thoughts on this one gratefully received.

Stop me!

Finally, I suspect that many of Trackingtourism.com’s UK readers are attending WTM so do email me if you want to meet up on Tuesday 11th November.

What the difference a year makes.

Europe’s Eye For Travel Social Media Strategies in Travel Summit, which kicked off today in Munich, revealed a sobered and distinctly more pragmatic industry view.  Hugo Burge, Vice chairman of Cheapflights, set the tone when he opened the conference by asking “in economic uncertainty, where do we best spend our money?”  Throughout the day there was a focus on tactics for maximising impact from efforts, strategies for evaluation and examination of tangible results.

“Good for the brand” was dismissed as bluster in leiu of real evidence of actual social media success and Blaise Fiedler, Head of e-Business at Amadeus offered strategies not only to “track, analyze and improve” but also “to control the hype”.

WAYN talked critical mass, the value of highly their targeted data and the need for systematic A/B testing to drive conversion and optimisation.  Co-Founder Jerome Touze also ventured that if they had instead launched today’s saturated online communities market, his Where Are You Now community would have been unlikely to succeed – “It’s too late.  The problem for a new community now is getting traction – it is at saturation point”.

Of course, no one was declaring social media dead or redundant – very far from it.  Its role in the consumer travel research and purchase process grows, not diminishes. But the role of social media strategies that a travel business may develop were discussed in terms of core capabilities, deliverables to expectations and hard business data, rather than in vague hopefulness.

In my view the businesses presenting – from Royal Caribbean Cruises and Derag Hotel to the UGC sites like Tripadvisor, Trivago, Boo.com and Holidaycheck – were talking in the more appropriate language of strategy, options and insight, rather than mysterious web 2.0 miracles.

Blaise Fiedler of Amadeus argued “invest in your core competence – your own website – not in the properties/competencies of others such as Facebook.”  And should you want to follow that advice, UGC content providers from Tripadvisor to WAYN are focussing on making it ever easier for businesses to pull in trusted content, rather than reinvent the wheel or get too lost in offsite activity.

I was speaking on the subject of applying metrics to user generated content in order to measure its business impact, with a case study I will post on this blog at a later date.  My suggestions included:

• focussing efforts on measuring only things you can act on
• not trying to measure all user generated content at equal depth, but instead using web analytics metrics to understand what drives conversion and revenue
• analysing the qualitative customer feedback and PR wins/losses offered by UGC

Last year, I suspect I’d have been a minority voice.  This year industry heavyweights from EasyHotel and Cheapflights to Amadeus and Trivago expressed similar sentiments with their own flavours of experiences and contexts.

Afterall, everyone measures their results more avidly in tough times, not least so they can stop wasting money.  And, of course, that includes travel consumers as well as businesses.

I give the final quote of this post to Ron Kuhlmann of Unisys, who brought new data to backup the old truism “deliver on what you promise.”  As his travel sector scorecards revealed, “if you leave a gap between expectations and delivery, that’s when the nasty reviews appear.”

Thanks to Gina and her team at Eye For Travel for the opportunity to participate in a thought provoking conference.  It was also great to finally meet fellow blogger Karin Schmollgruber of FastenYourSeatbelts.at and Passion PR. Her German language post from the conference can be found here.

Finally, thanks to a great bunch of speakers and industry participants for bringing revenues, realism and solid results evaluation back into the travel industry’s social media discussion.

My post last week was a bit of a moan – probably something to do with winter returning to Scotland and the general state of the world.  So, I thought I would balance out some of the negativity with some posts on people that are really getting things right.

Firstly, I would like to point you to William Bakker, director of eBusiness at Tourism British Columbia. As an area marketing agency, I think Tourism BC has one of the most sophisticated and advanced operations I have seen and the following paragraphs encapsulate one of the reasons why:

“We have conducted focus groups, phone interviews, card sorts and/usability tests to find the best way to organize the content on each website. We start with research about how our target audience in a particular market approach their trip planning; their mental model. We adjust our taxonomy where needed. For example, in North America a farm accommodation is called a ‘guest ranch‘. In the UK it’s called a ‘cowboy ranch‘ and in Australia a farmstay.”

What can I say apart from, ‘Wow!’  Although this approach might seem sophisticated to some, I recognise it as actually very simple at heart.  It’s the approach that says you should remember that your customers are human and need to be researched as such to get the full picture.

I particularly liked William’s comment about language.  This is something I think might be overlooked by a number of businesses and organisations but is vital if you want people to recognise what it is you are offering.  In some instances, you might get a clue to this if you are able to analyse searches made from within a site that have ‘odd’ terms but I think that the larger issue of language and its use is probably best started with real live people in focus groups.

Its an approach we always take in our tourism research projects as well – we recognise the immense value of quantitative data (whether that’s web analytics or traditional surveys) but feel that the best value is derived when you go that one stage further to probe the human element and combine it with the quant. I think this usually leads to a far more sustainable outcome.

You can read more at William’s blog here.

Another post that caught my eye was from the Karin Schmollgruber’s interview with Angela Zechmann(Director of E-Marketing and Internet for Salzburg Area Tourism) at the blog Fastenyourseatbelts.com. The interview is about about the Salzburg Area Tourism’s efforts to attract a younger audience to the area the site www.onebigpark.at and, in some ways, continues the theme from British Columbia that you need to understand that different audiences need information in a language specific to them.

But the other thing that made me sit up was that I was reminded of a conversation related to me a while ago about Austrian tourism to the effect that their ongoing research revealed that the country was having difficulty attracting young people.  I am not privy to the data for Salzburg so will assume that their research also suggests that, for mainland Europeans, Salzburg means Mozart and pretty mountains and, for people from the UK and the US, the Sound of Music – none of which suggests to me a largely younger profile of visitor (Angela, Karin – let me know if I am way off the mark here!).

And it’s not only a case of identifying an issue but doing something tactical about it with a considered Web 2.0 to help fulfil a strategy to encourage younger people back.  In other words, it’s a piece of joined up thinking and a good example of the intelligent application of 2.0.

The original is in German here and one of those rather odd internet translations for you non-German speakers can be found here.

My eye was also caught by this post at Phil Caine’s Tourism Tide on the potential conflict between Yield Management and Price Transparency.

To some of you, this might sound at best an arcane venture into a world far beyond your business.  I would disagree as it concerns something fundamental to all business – trust and transparency.  So, for example, reviews on tripadvisor at the moment just have people discussing the condition of an establishment.  What if those reviewers ever started comparing prices with one another?

Well, there are already moves that way in the accommodation sector with the likes of Farecast. This added-value price comparison site is essentially doing for the accommodation sector what price comparison sites have been doing for the transportation sector for a while.

For many establishments thismight not seem an  issue but, from experience, I know that accommodation prices can fluctuate at certain parts of the market and for much the same reasons as at the top end of the industry – such as sellers want to make a buck without having to pay an intermediary.

To that end of the tourism sector that thinks this is some far-off fad, let me say that this will happen whether you like it or not.  It doesn’t matter that you think of intercontinental air jouney is a big ticket item and your accommodation offering as small ticket item – customers will apply the same standards of transparency of value to both. Looking beyond the lowest common denominator horizon will help you prepare for changes like this.

Finally, I think the Canada-e-Connect Tourism Strategy Conference 2009 might just be the place if you are looking for intelligent debate and insight into how best to harness the new opportunities.  I don’t think the program is finalised yet but, judging on the people behind it, it won’t be looking at ‘lowest common denominator’ stuff but instead offering something for those with more vision.

To my mind, this attitude is not one of caution or inclusion. It is rather one of unwitting slow suicide.

The image on the right is a reprint of an advert that appeared in the Wisden Almanack in the 1920s (possibly earlier?). You’ll notice that all three establishments have had this new-fangled device installed called the telephone so that you can make bookings and inquires. You also notice that they sell themselves on the fact that there are ‘electric lights and bells throughout’ and no charge for attendance or lights.

The point I am making in pointing to this is that lights, telephones, internal communications mechanisms are now taken for granted in hotels. They are not optional extras. And in the same way, modern standards of service are not optional extras – they are as fundamental as electric lights and telephones.

As a colleague recently said, “I don’t expect to pay for my towels so why should I be expected to pay for WiFi?”

So, to my mind, it would be ridiculous as a DMO to overly indulge a bed and breakfast owner who was losing bookings because he wasn’t sure about having a phone line. Put brutally, he would deserve to go out of business because his business model was fundamentally flawed (note that I’m not talking here about isolation holidays or that kind of thing).

And in the same way, tourism businesses that are unsure whether they should

• respond to email enquiries;
• have a professional website;
• have online booking; or
• attempt to understand what travel 2.0 involves;

should feel the chill winds of the current climate and either step up to the plate or make way for someone who does understand these modern business fundamentals.

You might think this is an exaggeration – surely it is only a minority now who act like this? Maybe so but I fear its a larger minority that we sometimes suspect (I speak only of the UK here) and there sometimes seems excessive attention paid to their concerns which frankly seem more like indulgence that encouragement. My recent experience suggested that this was at the cost of those who had made moves to improve their businesses through adoption of these fundamentals and who now needed that little extra advice to take it to an even higher and successful level.

Whenever I am in North America, I am often impressed at how hard many travel companies work to earn your dollars. There is often a level of intelligence and aspiration that, whatever the level of the product, signals a more grown-up market with big aspirations. However, while they look to the stars, it seems that we are too often left staring at the floor.

Perhaps I’m being unfair here – let me know how I am wrong!