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Travel & Tourism
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Travel & Tourism
Anecdotal learning through my own trip planning experience part 2, during the trip.
05.10.07 | Permalink | 2 CommentsBased 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.
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Travel & Tourism
Anecdotal learning through personal experiences. Part 1, pre-trip planning.
05.03.07 | Permalink | 4 CommentsBased 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. -
personal, Travel & Tourism
A Beautiful Vancouver Day
Communitywalk is an awesome website. You can build interactive maps and plot everything you want on it. So I used it today to document our walk around False Creek today.
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Travel & Tourism
Why are there still paper guidebooks
10.19.06 | Permalink | 2 CommentsJoel came back from vacation and made the observation that every tourist he saw is carrying around a guide. A Lonely Planet of some sorts. And not just backpackers, but everybody. I’ve observed the same in my travels and I do the same thing. The reality is that the far majority of travel decisions are made in the moment. It’s raining, let’s go to a museum, where is my Lonely Planet? I’m hungry, I’m in a strange city, let’s ask somebody where we can get some decent vegetarian food. You can plan a lot online before you go, but in reality you don’t even scratch the surface of the decisions that still have to be made. That’s part of the fun of traveling.
The perception that technology changes the basic tasks people need to complete is rarely true. Only the tools change. And in the case of travel, it’s the way people access information. The first revolution was during the pre-trip planning phase. Travel agent offices are out, booking online is in. Libraries, calling 1-800 numbers and picking up brochures are out, the internet is in. Asking your neighbour about his vacation is out, tripadvisor is in. With the internet also came an access of information, creating a better informed traveler, feeling more confident to travel independent and make her own travel arrangements.
The next revolution will be during the holiday experience. Information on the internet is becoming accessible anytime, any place, anywhere to everybody through mobile devices. No more Lonely Planet, no more brochure racks, no more asking the concierge or a cab driver. I’m finally be able to find a decent vegetarian restaurant.
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tourism bc, Travel & Tourism
Travel Bloggers talk User Generated Content
My colleague Janice send this article about a panel of travel bloggers organized by Budget Travel Online. There’s some great content in here about some of the things that are debated internally at Tourism BC these days.
User Generated Content, can we trust it or do we need a voice of authority?
Erik Olsen, editor of Gadling.com hit the mark:So, as far as the kind of stuff we do, which I think is more editorial in a way, more magazine feature-ish, for lack of a better term, you do need some editorial filter. But the contribution of other people is utterly necessary as well, or at least it’s utterly beneficial and it gives a sense of community in the sense of people contributing who are out there and you don’t have the voice-of-God-control over everything, which is why a lot of people have this feeling — why they don’t like mass media so much, because they feel like there’s too much control. So, it’s not quite anarchy, but it’s in the middle somewhere.Harnessing collective intelligence is a powerful thing and with an “editorial filter”, harnessing this power can be achieved within creative standards. TurnHere is a good example of this. It’s YouTube for destination videos with an editorial element. It ensures a certain quality standard. For site like YouTube, such standards are not needed. Just like any other development in the early history of the internet, the only successful strategy is to embrace change. Because in a future of user generated content, who will be the official source?
How should Tourism Boards deal with Travel Bloggers?
Mark Johnson from HotelChatter.com about how not to do it:I have a good story about that. Early on with HotelChatter.com I was trying to get advertisers so I could do this full time and make a living, and the Florida tourism board — I ran into them at some conference or something — and they said, “We love HotelChatter and we want to advertise on it.” I was really excited about that. And then they said, “But you can’t write anything bad about Florida or any hotels in Florida.” So, anyway…So what is the right approach? Erik Olsen again:
One of the dirty secrets — I speak for myself — one of the dirty secrets of blogging is you got to get stuff up all the time. It is a lot of work and finding good information for people that warrants them coming back is tough. So if somebody e-mails me stuff that is useful I will very often use it.And an unidentified person from the audience:
I can say from experience we once tried to break news using you guys because we didn’t think it was newsworthy enough to get into a newspaper. I think it is much more difficult to get into a newspaper that has limited space as opposed to online. It was just a fantastic bang. We learned a lot from it. What it did was show the influence that you guys have with mainstream media.But a word of caution from Randy Petersen from flyertalk.
I can get e-mail that is not relevant to my space, and then it goes into my rules file. And there may come a time that you may have something pertinent to my space, but unfortunately, I decided the other 800 times or 40 times or whatever it might be, you were not paying attention to whatever my space is.They also share the number of traffic they receive:
- Gridskipper.com: 18,000 pageviews/day
- Flyertalk.com: 20,000,000 pageviews/month
- Gadling.com: 15,000 pageviews/day
- HotelChatter.com: 300,000 pageviews/month
No matter how you value a visitor, that’s a lot of exposure. So tourism marketers better take bloggers seriously and play by the rules of the blogosphere. It’s like what Josh and Rob told me the other day; “consumers have taken control and they’re not going to give it back”.
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Travel & Tourism
First usage of travel journal websites
I’ve completed the sign-up process and added my first entries into my two travel journal websites Yahoo Trip Planner and MyTripJournal.com.
The sign-up process with Yahoo was dead simple. I already had an account so it was just a matter of naming my trip and the dates of travel. The tool is free as Yahoo puts advertising on the page and encourages the user to use the tool for pre-planning as well, something I didn’t do because there was almost nothing available for Ireland.
The sign-up with MyTripJournal took a bit longer because I had to create an account first, but it was very fairly standard as well. I get a few pictures and entries for free but I’ll have to start paying for the service soon.
Adding entries is very slick in Yahoo. It’s very web 2.0 and integrated with Flickr, so you use your Flickr account to manage photos. You can drag and drop your entries into the text entry field. It works very nice. A spell check is missing. MyTripJournal’s entry isn’t as fancy as Yahoo but it gets the job done. You can’t embed your pictures within the entry itself but you upload them as part of your entry. The feature that makes MyTripJournal cool is the way you can show your location. You choose from a variety of maps and you can highlight your location and showing your journey.
From an output perspective, Yahoo looks nicer. The design in contemporary and the integrated pictures make it look very pleasing. MyTripJournal looks a bit outdated. None of the two offers an RSS feed, a no-brainer in my opinion. I expected more from Yahoo. I thought that the “map view” would offer similar functionality as in MyTripJournal, for example. Maybe that’s still coming. I also expected that the journal part and the schedule part would be integrated, encouraging users to review attractions as part of their journal. Now everything I say about attractions is lost in my journal. It would be an easy way to add more content about Ireland.
So as of the moment, I like both sites, for different reasons. If MyTripJournal would integrate the pictures like Yahoo does, they would be the clear choice. If Yahoo would make a similar mapping tool, it would be my prefered choice because it’s free. -
tourism bc, Travel & Tourism
Online Revealed in Ottawa
From left to right: Jens Thraenhart – Canadian Tourism Commission, Julien Cormier – Tourism Quebec, William Bakker – Tourism BC, Daniel Cayer – Travel Alberta, Cameron Spence – Tourism Banff/Lake Louise.I spend last week in Ottawa at the Online Revealed conference in Ottawa. The conference was organized by the Canadian Tourism Commission and it included a one day session with all ebusiness strategists of the Canadian provinces and territories and a two day open conference where I participated on a panel discussing content and technology.
It was very nice to meet my counterparts at the other provinces and to hear about what they are doing. Like most conferences, the networking part was the best part although there were interesting sessions.
I enjoyed participating on the panel and I think we had a meaningful discussion. Beforehand we agreed I should talk about user generated content and HelloBCBlogs.com. So I didn’t get a change to talk about the incredible cool things we’ve done on HelloBC.com. I promise I will post some information about what we’ve done on this blog soon.
Daniel Cayer from Travel Alberta showed some of the great work they’re doing. He also shared his thoughts about technology and in particular how he favours building his own CMS tool instead of using a enterprise content management system. He was very vocal about this and his believes about how these applications are hard to implement and maintain. I mentioned I disagreed with him because we’re using Microsoft CMS and we’re happy with it. I also mentioned would like to talk about it over a beer but I never got the change unfortunately.
Afterwards, a few people asked me questions and thanked me for disagreeing (and they weren’t vendors of CMS systems) with Daniel and I even received a phone call about it. So I’ll elaborate a little further here. My main point is that Tourism BC is a marketing organisation, not a technology developer.
I agree to keep things simple and not letting technology drive your business. But to translate that into building your own systems is a risky proposition in the long run. By using a CMS tool, we can be ensured we have technology that will continue to evolve over time. And with Microsoft CMS, the tool will likely be around for a while and we have access to a variety of vendors and developers who are certified to work with the tool. A safe bet when you’re working with public money.
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tourism bc, Travel & Tourism
Travelers need for Insider Information
The internet is allowing planners to increase the awareness opportunities through word-of-mouth dramatically. Email and websites such as blogs are a great way to stay connected with loved ones.
Word of mouth is the most important source for destination awareness. Most trip ideas start by talking to friends and family about their trips or the desire to visit a friend or family member. Beside the official information, travelers consume information from a number of other sources of information while planning their trip. Word of mouth is the most important one.
The internet allows travel planners to meet the need for this information in new ways. The thorntree message board on the lonely planet website was one of the first places where travel planners would meet to discuss their trip plans. Since then, numerous websites have been created where users can write their travel stories, rate hotels and attractions, submit pictures and manage a travel guide collectively. Each of these websites either assist in creating destination awareness or assist in trip planning.
At Tourism British Columbia, we’ve learned through our focus group and usability research that travelers expect us to provide the official information but also ‘insider information’. This is the information only locals know; that cute little coffee-shop, a hidden hiking trail, a pub kayakers go to after their activities.
So about six months ago we started HelloBCBlogs.com, a blog site where a group of our staff can write about anything related to travel in BC. Most stories were related to personal tourism experiences from our staff members. But there are also tips travelers can use in their trip planning. The website was a success almost immediately with high visitation and a very high repeat visitation rate. So we knew we hit on something good.
Just a few weeks ago, we expanded our blog authors to include the staff of our Visitor Centres. There are over 110 Visitor Centres located throughout British Columbia, managed primarily by the communities and often with the help of volunteers who are passionate about their community and are also the local experts. So we invited them to join our blog and write about their communities to extend the information beyond the Tourism BC staff and provide the consumers with even more insider information. We’ve just started but I’ve already read some great entries. -
Travel & Tourism
“Call Us for our internet Rate”
OK this is funny. I’m researching some hotel websites in Vancouver and I come a cross the promotion below. I have to call to get the special internet rate.
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William Bakker's Destination Marketing blog
William Bakker is Chief Strategist at Destination Think!. These are my personal thoughts.
