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2007
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personal
Deep fried cheese
Deep fried cheese
Originally uploaded by wilhelmus.We’ve arrived in Holland and the first thing we do go and get a kaassouflee; deep fried cheese!
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personal
Sunny day in London
03.27.07 | Permalink | 4 Comments
Sunny day in London
Originally uploaded by wilhelmus.Its a beautiful sunny day in London. We got off to an early start and have been walking all over the place, checking out the sights. I love this city. You can feel the history everywhere. We stopped by our office to say hi and we’re now having some lunch outside at a small sandwich shop near covent garden. This is our only full day in London and it looks like we picked the right day.
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personal
Arrived in London
Arrived in London
Originally uploaded by wilhelmus.We have arrived in London. The flight was great. We both slept most of the way. Arrival at heathrow was painfull. It took over two hours to get out of the airport. Most of that time was spent waiting for our packs at the carousel.
The tube was a new experience for Sheri. She has never been to London and the tube during rush hour with a giant pack is not that different from our public transportation experiences in Nepal. My role was to buldoze a path for Sheri. That went reasonably well although she almost didn’t get on one train I was already on. But we made it fine.
Our hotel is right at Hyde park. The sun was setting when we got there and the weather is nice so I went for a walk to get some fresh air. I came across prince Albert hall. A beautiful building. I don’t know what it is exactly but it sounded familiar and it was packed. There was also a typical over-the-top imperalistic monument. A little too much for my taste.
Its 9pm now and I think its time for a beer.
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personal
Ready for our trip
Ready for our trip
Originally uploaded by wilhelmus.We been through the pele and Nala goodbye drama session and we’re now sitting at the airport for our traditional pre-flight ‘milestones’ meal. I’m also testing my blackberry-to-blog functionality. Sheri is already impressed because it takes a while to type this up. A sign of things to come babe…
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personal
Going on vacation
03.25.07 | Permalink | 2 CommentsThe next month my blog will turn into our travelogue as Sheri and I travel to London, Amsterdam, Salzburg, Zell am See, Ljubljana, Budapest, Krakow and Prague. In my 26 years in Europe I’ve never been to Eastern Europe and I’m looking forward to travel to the cities on our itinerary. Stay tuned for updates.
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tourism bc
Morning Walk
We’re receiving some great User Generated Content on HelloBC since the launch of our Great Finds release. This entry about some Grizzlies in Quesnel is awesome. Can you imagine driving along and coming across a mother Grizzley and two cubs.
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tourism bc
Speaking at the BC Tourism Industry Conference
Two weeks ago I was invited to speak at the BC Tourism Industry Conference. Jens Thraenhart from the Canadian Tourism Commission was kind enough to invite me and Alicia Whalen from a Couple of Chicks E-Marketing Consulting to join him for an eMarketing session to show how the CTC and Tourism BC collaborate in the online space, what our roles are in the purchase cycle and what businesses can do themselves to be successful.
Jens kicked off by presenting a strategic overview of the eTourism landscape and the CTC’s eMarketing efforts to sell consumer on Canada. Next, I took the audience through our eBusiness Technology and eMarketing efforts where we take the consumer down to the product level. Alicia then gave some great hand-on tips on how tourism operators can improve their individual websites.
I thought the session went well and I received some great positive reactions. Below is a Google Video of my presentation with audio. Jens also wrote about the event on his blog.
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tourism bc
Mapping Tourism Businesses on HelloBC
03.08.07 | Permalink | 2 CommentsA few months ago, we launched our Kokanee release (the code names for our website releases are named after beer brands). The most significant improvement on the end user side is the inclusion of our new HelloBC Listing Program. This gives consumers the ability to find tourism products on our websites. Businesses can list their products through our TourismBC.net website.
The listing program offers a lot of flexible ways to provide information to consumers. It allows for the many different types of businesses to build in in a way that makes sense for the product they offer. The one thing I’d like to highlight here is the concept of how we use experience locations on our interactive maps.
Most tourism related websites offer maps just like the one below. The location of the business is highlighted. The user can zoom-in, zoom-out, move, etc. One thing we display I haven’t seen before is the location of the closest airport (as indicated by the tourism business). This is a requirement that comes straight out of our research. BC is a large place and the location of a tourism product related to the nearest airport is important.
We have a lot of smart people at Tourism BC who have been working in the tourism industry, or working with tourism businesses for a long time. One of the things that was identified is that the location of a companies office is not necessarily where the experience takes place. To accommodate that, we created the concept of an experience location. Here are some examples of how tourism businesses are using this concept.
Below is an example of a cruise company. Besides the office location, it also shows the cruise destinations. Very useful for a consumer looking to cruise to a specific location, regardless of the port of departure.
And here’s another great example. These are all the locations of a bus tour. Consumers can hop on at any of these locations. So the location of the office is irrelevant. This business chooses not to display it on the map.
By collecting this kind of geo-location information, we have the ability to do some very cool things in the future. We can plot the location of cruise destination from all companies on one map, for example. The creative juices are already flowing. -
personal
Happy Birthday to me
03.07.07 | Permalink | 2 CommentsI’m in Toronto for planning sessions. It’s minus 15 outside. The freeway was closed because sheets of ice were falling of the CN tower. Happy Birthday to me…
UPDATE:
Things picked up later. Rob and myself had a chance to celebrate our latest CW “Leffe” Release by grabbing a Leffe beer.
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tourism bc
User Generated Content and HelloBC
People love to talk about travel and share their stories with their friends. On the internet, people can now do this in a global context. BC residents love our province and they’re passionate about the way we market BC as a holiday destination. I have plenty of emails to prove it.
Throughout all the research we do, we keep hearing from our website users that they like our website and content. But they’re missing to hear about the things you only know if you live here. Nobody wants to be a tourist and they like to know from BC residents about what they like to do and the hidden gems we don’t mention in our official content. We call this insider information.
2005
To facilitate this insider information, we started a blog in 2005 where some of our staff at Tourism BC could share their own experiences and tips with our website users. It didn’t take very long before this became a great success. Our users liked the content and we received healthy traffic.
2006
In 2006, we expanded the scope of our writers. We have a network of over 110 Visitor Centres in the province, covering as many communities. We asked the staff at these Visitor Centres to join the blogging efforts, and many did. This expanded the content of the site beyond just Vancouver and Victoria, where Tourism BC’s offices are located. This made the blog website even more successful.
2007
The next logical step is to extend the party to the next group of stakeholders; out BC residents and past travelers. Today we’re launching the first phase a significant new release on HelloBC.com today. We’re asking people to share their BC Great Finds. These can be anything, from an awesome viewpoint after a four hike, to a great little restaurant in Chinatown.
We’re posting these Great Finds as regular blog entries. But we’re also categorizing every entry with a location and an activity. So a Great Find about a fishing trip in Ucluelet will be categorized accordingly. These categories mirror the website structure on HelloBC.com. This allows us to present relevant great finds alongside the official information. It will add credibility and depth to all content on the website.
In addition, we also post all entries with a photo on our Flickr photostream. This way, we’ll be able to reach a new audience who might not be aware of the great experiences in British Columbia.
In order to seed some great finds, we send an email blast to a select group of consumers in our database. The entries we have received are of great quality. This is exciting stuff, have a look yourself and submit your own Great Find.
Next
What’s next? The one thing I’ve learned it to be clear about your objectives and core strategies, but leave room in the tactics for learning and new technology developments. Our intent is to develop a community of past travelers and BC residents assisting new visitors plan their vacations to British Columbia over time. What that exactly will look like will be based on what we’re going to learn over the next while.
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William Bakker's Destination Marketing blog
William Bakker is Chief Strategist at Destination Think!. These are my personal thoughts.
