The Archives

Travel & Tourism
More Seoul
07.04.07 | Permalink | Comment?

Our time here has been very productive.

We had good meetings with our Asian marketing team in Seoul.

We went to this great vegetarian restaurant for dinner, temple food, created by a former Buddhist monk. It was excellent.

All I have to do is tell people I’m from the same country as Hiddink and they’re my friend.

After our full day of meetings we had some time to check out the sights of Seoul. It’s a great city. It’s not intimidating at all. We walked around and I felt at easy everywhere I went. Maybe the fact that I’m a foot taller than the average Korean helps.

It’s the rainy season so the day started with an insane downpour. So we changed our plans to walk around and hopped into a cab to go to a museum.

Our taxi driver was watching TV while driving! But it was a soccer game, Korea – Brazil in the Fifa U-20, held in Canada right now. It was the end of the game and Korea lost.

We went to the National Folk Museum where we learned about Korean history and customs throughout the ages. Including all about Kimchi.Above is the process of creating this famous, and delicious dish.

The rain had passed when we went back out and we explored the sights of Geyeongbokgung, the former royal palace.

I love the English that’s just a bit off you see everywhere (not that my English is much better).

Today, the city to host the 2014 Olympics will be announced. Korea is in the running. I know how they feel right now. UPDATE: Russia hosts the 2014 Olympics, sorry Korea.

Holly used the opportunity to check up on one of her Coffee House franchisees.

We walked across town and visited the Jongmyo shrine, Changgyeonggung Palace and Changdeokgung Palace, all very impressive.

So you can’t turn left, can’t turn right and can’t go straight. Where can you go? O wait, nowhere, it’s a one way street in the opposite direction!
tourism bc, Travel & Tourism
Seoul
07.02.07 | Permalink | Comment?

I’m in Seoul to meet our Asian teams about the future of our Japanese, Korean and Taiwanese websites. It’s my first time in Seoul and it’s a very cool city to visit.

I’ve always wanted to have a sign waiting for me on arrival!

Holly started taking pictures during our hour long hour taxi ride to the hotel.

We’ve only been here a few hours, we walked around the hip shopping area. Complete crazyness. Every store has a young and hip person with a speakers trying to get people into the store.

Tomoko from our Japanese office and Christine from Taiwain firing up their cell phones to explain to me how they can text, using 50+ characters on 12 keys. I get it now.

And of course I had to drink our Korean project beer Hite.
Travel & Tourism
Holland.com’s US market website – The future of Destination Websites?
06.29.07 | Permalink | 4 Comments

I stumbled upon the Netherlands Board of Tourism and Conventions’ US market website. User can be upload content direct or by using Flickr, YouTube and other websites and appears mixed in with official content from the NBTC. The website includes tag clouds, social networking tools, social rating and bookmarking and more. On top of that, the website looks very stylish. Very Dutch.

It’s definitely not perfect. I can’t figure out how to upload pictures from Flickr or movies from YouTube for example (more then a small usability issue). There’s also not real way to browse the website through navigation (or is this the new reality?).

Is this a glimpse of the future where destinations are promoted by consumers and residents alongside the tourism board? It might just be. In either case, it’s a brave step and demonstrate vision from the NTBC, not afraid to take a risk. But it’s a calculated risk, by limiting the execution to the US market, where I assume, the target audience is a younger one.

UPDATE 7/2: Karin Schmollgruber posted about Holland 2.0 as well.
Internet
Social Networks not very social amongst each other
06.18.07 | Permalink | 2 Comments

Recently I signed up with Facebook. Not to check it out because I need to stay current for my job, but because I had too. Many of my friends use Facebook actively as a communication tool. I signed up after a couple of weeks where during every real world social gathering I attended, Facebook came up during the conversation. After signing up I quickly understood the value Facebook provides. It’s a great way to communicate and share.

I’m part of a multitude of Social Networks now. I’m a member of Facebook, MSN Messenger, LinkedIn, Flickr, YouTube, Gusto, IgoUgo, VibeAgent and more.

All these systems are closed for the most part. I need to sign up for each service individually. And the friends I make on each of these networks don’t transfer into the others. Me and my friends and family have to sign up for a multitude of Social Networks in order to view each others content. And the content doesn’t transfer either. Flickr does photo’s really well. But on Facebook, you can tag photo’s with people. So I have a collection of photo’s I’m in, across my network of friends (very cool functionality). So I have photo’s in two places. Flickr, because that’s where I store my photos for easy management, and in Facebook so people can tag each other. In MSN, I display my status (where I am). In Facebook, I have to do the same thing.

So the point of my story is that these closed systems aren’t working for me. Photo’s I store in Flicker should be available in Facebook, Gusto and all other networks I’m part of. If I change my status in one place, my status should change everywhere else as well.

Dave Winer has a great posting about this.

Eventually, soon I think, we’ll see an explosive unbundling of the services that make up social networks. What was centralized in the form of Facebook, Linked-in, even YouTube, is going to blow up and reconstitute itself. How exactly it will happen is something the historians can argue about 25 years from now. It hasn’t happened yet, but it will, unless the rules of technology evolution have been repealed (and they haven’t, trust me).

Well said Dave. I couldn’t agree more, and I hope the day will be here soon.
Travel & Tourism
New Australia.com, good strategy, questionable execution
06.13.07 | Permalink | Comment?

Tourism Australia launched their new Australia.com recently. It’s a dramatic departure from the old website, both strategic and tactical.

The new strategy quickly pushes users down to the individual state and territory websites. No more in-depth content provided on Australia.com. Only few things remain, such as video, promotions and travel essentials such as climate and visa information. And of course the giant map. Users can find the details on the state and territory websites. These websites have a link back to Australia.com, so users to move to the next destination website. There is a partnership with Google to provide a search across all destination websites and includes an advertising component.

This makes a ton of sense. Australia is huge. Providing all the content required for consumers to plan their trip is a lot of work, something Tourism Australia probably won’t be able to manage themselves. But individual states and territories can. These destinations deal with the scope of information a consumer needs. It’s big enough for consumer to deal with, but not too small, so users don’t have to visit many websites. And by moving consumer down for details instead of duplicating efforts, Tourism Australia can use it’s resources for other activities.

The search functionality across all states and territories is very well done (the tabs look familiar tough). The sponsored links aren’t contextual. That’s a miss. It’s delivered by DoubleClick, a company Google recently acquired so I’m sure that will change over time when Googles Adwords algorithms are integrated.

Some of the other execution is disappointing. There ‘s no overview of what each state and territory is about. Where do you start? One paragraph for each would probably be enough for a consumer to start. The interactive execution takes long to load, the map is not very useful and the videos are commercials. The attempt to create a network of websites by bolting on an Australia.com icon the the state and territory websites that links back to Australia.com is a bit clumsy. Every time I move back to Australia.com, the whole flash thing loads again, making it very annoying to move around. The experience also changes from website to website and there’s little consistency.

I’m sure they’ll improve the tactics over time. They already changed some things. The introduction video doesn’t show every time when you move back from another destination website anymore, for example. But I hope for their 6 million visitors/year, they do it quick.

UPDATE 6/25:

Jens has additional thoughts.
Travel & Tourism
The first rule of Destination Marketing
06.03.07 | Permalink | 2 Comments

Get people to talk about your destination is the first rule of Destination Marketing.

I watched Seth Godin’s presentation at Google yesterday. It made me think about my trip to Prague and Destination Marketing.
Seth’s philosophy is that the only way to spread the word about an idea is for that idea to earn the buzz by being remarkable. The old “TV Industrial Complex” model, where mass media (TV commercials) are used to drive sales, is dead. The new model is enabling the power of word of mouth..

I have no research about what has happened from a Tourism perspective in Prague since the early 90’s, when communism ended, and Czech borders opened for tourism. But I do know that almost immediately, everybody started talking about Prague. And everybody who went there told me they loved it and that I should go “before it becomes a tourism trap”. This was true when we lived in Europe and continued when we moved to Canada. I’ve never seen a TV commercial from the Czech or Prague tourism board. I’ve never seen a newspaper of magazine ad. I can’t recall reading an article about Prague. I couldn’t even tell what some of Prague’s highlights were. Yet Prague was high on our shortlist.

When we finally visited Prague a month ago, I was shocked about the number of tourist, and the resulting tourism infrastructure. I’m convinced the success of Prague’s tourism is primarily a result word-of-mouth. Every visitor who returns from Prague is an ambassador for Prague, because Prague is remarkable, resulting in even more people wanting to visit. And as more people visited, the infrastructure developed, and as interest grew, tour operators noticed and started adding Prague to their product mix.

It doesn’t take much for a destination to get on somebodies shortlist. Forget mass advertising, a friend’s recommendation is often enough, so make sure every visitors experience is a remarkable experience. The hard part of a destination marketer’s job is moving somebody from there to the actual visit.
personal, tourism bc, Travel & Tourism
Fasten Your Seatbelts Interview
05.14.07 | Permalink | Comment?

Karin Schmollgruber provides great insights into travel and eBusiness. She also has great interviews. I found her interview with Ian Rumgay from Tripadvisor very interesting.

Karin interviewed me last week about our Blogging and User Generated Content efforts. It’s now published on her website.
Internet, Travel & Tourism
CoolAustria.com – Tourism Austria’s Social Network
05.13.07 | Permalink | 2 Comments

Tourism Austria ventured into the Web 2.0 world by partnering with a Media company in the creation of CoolAustria.com, a full fledged Social Travel Website. Karin Schmollgruber asked me for my thoughts.

Well, it’s a very ambitious effort. I have to guess what the objectives of the website are. I assume it’s to create a network of residents and past travelers who generate ideas and assist other travelers, primarily in a younger demographic.

It’s impressive from a technology perspective. It has integrated some traditional community tools such as a message board with Web 2.0. hallmarks such as a tag cloud folksonomy and a Google Map Mashup. Oddly enough, RSS/Atom feeds are missing from the party, but that’s in the works apparently.

Success for this venture will depend on the success of Metcalfe’s law (the value of a network is proportional to the square number of users of the system). There has to be a user population that’s large enough to attract and be of value to passive users and turn them into active users.

To create a large enough user population, the website needs to be useful and usable. Successful social websites on a large scale such as MySpace have reached their population in part by creating a necessity to sign up. It’s useful because can passively read your friends information, but in order to communicate with your friends (additional usefulness), you have to sign up. MySpace doesn’t look pretty, but it’s easy enough to use (usability).

I hope that CoolAustria.com is useful and usable enough to be successful. I hope that there is enough appetite for users to become part of a “traveling in Austria” community. I hope the entry barrier is low enough (e.g. allow for anonymous questions) and the usability of the site is high enough so users who want to, can easily participate. I hope there will be an active marketing campaign to kick-start the community.

CoolAustria.com is a ‘big bang’ approach to create a social network. Our strategy at Tourism BC is to take it one step at a time, and fully integrate the User Generated Content into our official website. I’m going to keep a close eye on CoolAustria.com and I wish them great success.
Travel & Tourism
Anecdotal learning through my own trip planning experience part 2, during the trip.
05.10.07 | Permalink | 2 Comments

Based on own Easter European trip planning experience while I was there, mobile devices are changing everything, guidebooks are still king, visitor centres your best friend, and hotel concierges a valuable resource (even if you don’t stay at their hotel).

As I previously posted, planning our itinerary for our month long European vacation was complicated, but I managed to nail down the dates, flights and accommodation. Most of the details, we worked out during our trip.

Communication with friends and family is always an important part of travel. I remember as a kid that once during our family vacation, my Mom got to call her sister once every trip. We had to look for a place where you could make an international phone call and while my Mom was getting updates about the dog, my Dad would be pacing around, looking at his watch and wondering how much this was going to cost him. Things have changed.

Internet Cafes are everywhere and they’re packed. People use the internet to email, IM, blog, post on their MySpace or Facebook, social travel networks and other ways more to communicate with their loved ones (and anonymous blog visitors). I’m part of this crowd. But this trip was the first time that my Blackberry took over. I was emailing, using my Gmail client, IM-ing and posting on my blog, including pictures. I only went to an internet café a few times. On previous trips, finding the internet café was the first thing This time, there was less need.

My blackberry was also my itinerary keeper. All my confirmations for accommodation and flights were stored and I used it to communicate with accommodation when I realized night trains arrive brutally early. I managed to get an early check-in every time via email. And I used the Google Maps client to find the exact location of accommodation, attractions and restaurants.

For planning our day-to-day activities, I brought my Rick Steve’s guide to Eastern Europe guidebook, I also bought an Eyewitness guidebook for Prague, and my sister gave me a Lonely Planet guide for Budapest. I also downloaded a few podcasts on my iPod.

Rick’s guidebook, proven to be very useful at home while planning my itinerary, became useless during my trip. Because it covers so many places, information about things to do and see became to generic. The long tail of guidebooks.

My Lonely Planet for Budapest was perfect, it was well written, provided more then enough information about the highlights, guided tours and special interest. But it was thin, probably so it’s easy to carry. So again, only the “head” of information was provided. But this is where the Blackberry came in. I was looking up all kinds of stuff on the internet for more information, in particular on Wikipedia. The guidebook provided an easy way to plan our day and the internet provided details on the spot.

In Prague, we had an Eyewitness guidebook. I was very excited about it because it looks so pretty. Colorful pages, with a lot of pictures, 3D overviews of buildings, pictorial maps of squares and more. But I quickly realized that the look and feel got in the way of content. There was hardly any room for information. If I’m standing and looking at the real thing, I don’t need a pictorial of the thing I’m looking at with a one sentence overview, I need more words. So I bought another Lonely Planet for the proven Lonely Planet/Blackberry combo.

In Salzburg, Ljubljana and Krakow, I had to rely on Steve and even though the book provided decent information, I felt like I missed out. In Salzburg, the front desk of the hotel had a tear-off map of Salzburg, with the main sights and attractions numbered. So we started at #1 and work our way down. On the map was an ad for a phone audio tours. Phone a number, press the number on the map and receive a guided tour. Brilliant.

When I got stuck a couple of times (Google maps didn’t work in Ljubljana and we couldn’t figure out the bus in Krakow), we went to the local Visitor Centres. I think it’s universal that people who work in Visitor Centres are the nicest people in town. In most cases, they treat you like family.

I also use hotels all the time when I travel, even when I don’t stay there. Most of their staff members are trained customer service professionals with a passion of assisting travelers. So if your request isn’t too insane, they’ll often help you. So we’ve checked our bags at hotels, used them to call taxis, asked for direction (one woman from the Marriot walked us around for 10 minutes when we were lost), and got some band aids when Sheri had a blister.

I also downloaded some podcasts. I had a Budapest podcast from Frommers, and iPod Traveler. I didn’t like them at all. The Frommers podcast was an interview with the editor of their Hungary book and didn’t do more than stating the obvious and iPod Traveler was painful to listen to. I stopped midway through. The first 10 minutes were wasted by talking about their website and trying to be funny. Then they started arguing about facts. Those are 15 minutes of my life I’ll never get back.
Travel & Tourism
Anecdotal learning through personal experiences. Part 1, pre-trip planning.
05.03.07 | Permalink | 4 Comments
Based on own Easter European trip planning experience, destination websites suck, social websites are good, paper guidebooks are very helpful, mapping services, transportation and accommodation metasearch websites rule.
When we decided on our vacation this year, the plan was to go to Eastern Europe, but we didn’t exactly know where. Our itinerary depended on time, transportation and what suits us the most. I have a lot of places I want to see in Eastern Europe and we had to visit my family in Amsterdam and meet up with Sheri’s in Austria. So we had no idea what the best itinerary would be.
Using tourism information websites to get a sense of priority for places to visit was almost impossible. According to EVERY destination website, it is THE place for culture, entertainment, and the culinary center of the universe. So I stopped visiting them in this phase of my planning. I did read a bunch of experiences on peer review websites such as IgoUgo and Gusto. That gave me a better idea of what was going on in the destinations, but it did lack a bit of authority.
Out of frustration with tourism websites, I went to my local bookstore and bought a guidebook. So I bought Rick Steve’s guide to Eastern Europe/”. This is exactly what I needed, and his website is helpful as well. Here’s somebody who has some authority (he’s been traveling to Europe forever) and is also not afraid to recommend the top things, warning about where not to go, and capture the real essence of each place. He also had some great tips and tools for transportation.
Our shortlist was long so transportation would be an important factor in finalizing our itinerary. We decided to use the train or the budget airlines in Europe. Destination websites were useless again. Just a list of airports and airlines is not helpful; it takes me 2 seconds in Google to find that information. I did find some other resources on Ricks website and message boards and found two very handy websites:< br />
- A website for train schedules in Europe. Unfortunately, they don’t tell you the prices.
- A website that aggregates flights from budget airlines. Not always 100% accurate but perfect for planning purposes.
So with the help of primarily Rick, a few message boards and a few transportation websites, I locked down our itinerary. I booked our flights, both to Europe with BA, and in Europe with Easyjet. The BA website is absolutely fantastic by the way. Booking train travel online can’t be done. There are travel agencies in North America but the message boards told me they overcharge. Rick told me to just buy tickets in Europe. And he was right, thanks Rick.
Next was accommodation. I must have looked at 40 or 50 websites. The main criteria were location, location, location. I wanted to be in the city center. Rick recommended some places but the long tail of the internet, combined with traveler reviews prevailed.
To select an accommodation, I had one tab in my browser to find an accommodation option. Another tab was reserved for (a href=” http://maps.live.com”>live.com maps (I found it easier to located addresses then Google Maps) to see the location in the city. Another tab was for Tripadvisor, although some booking services also offered traveler reviews (hostelworld does a great job).
I didn’t even bother with Expedia, Travelocity or Hotels.com anymore. It was all Kayak. Kayak became my benchmark for further exploration. I used Kayak to book a hotel in London and Salzburg. In Ljubljana and Krakow, I ended up finding good hostels on hostelworld.com, also found through Kayak. In Budapest I found a website that facilitates apartment rental and I found a similar service in Prague. This saved some money because you don’t have to pay for all the hotel amenities we didn’t really care for anyways. Another nice thing about this is that we lived in a residential building. Made us feel less like a tourist.
Now that the itinerary was locked down, planning details in each city was hard. Destination websites, again, told me everything was wonderful and tried to sell me packages and other stuff I’m not interested in. And how hard is it to put a map on a website? I gave up. I’m not much of a detailed planner so I decided to wing it and figure it out when we got there.