Category

Travel & Tourism

• Travel & Tourism

  Search Engine Wars inpacts for Tourism Websites

  03.17.04 | Permalink | Comments Off on Search Engine Wars inpacts for Tourism Websites

  The Search Engine war started about a month ago when Yahoo dropped Google and started using their own algorithm. Beside the regular search, smaller battles are happening in related services. Some are affecting the travel space.

  Take maps, for example. Yahoo introduced their new Yahoo Maps maps service last week. I was impressed. From a Tourism perspective, this is a very slick way of allowing users to search for Tourism related services and activities. Take this map for example where Hotels are plotted on a San Francisco map.

  Today, Google launched their own version of this functionality with Google Local. It will plot any business on a map by combining Yellow Page listings with their index of web pages. It’s equally slick. From a trip planning perspective, it might
  not be as efficient as the Yahoo map but the scope is so much bigger that users might use it for a lot more then travel planning and become so familiar with the service that they automatically will resort to this. The added benefit of using Google is that it will display web results. For example, a Hotel Search on Yahoo limits a user to the Yahoo booking system. On Google, a user has access to all websites, making it easier to compare prices. Although I wouldn’t be surprised if Google will add that to their basket of services as well soon.

• Travel & Tourism

  The new Travel Experience

  11.04.03 | Permalink | Comments Off on The new Travel Experience

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• Travel & Tourism

  Best Travel Sites part I

  09.14.03 | Permalink | Comments Off on Best Travel Sites part I

  People ask me often what the best travel/tourism website is. The answer is “it depends”. A website is a success when it is relevant to it’s users and meets the objectives of the person or organization who produces it. But there are definitely best practices out there.

  So the first best practice is New Zealand for visual design/branding. New Zealand’s PureNZ brand is very well represented on their website. The site looks pure, has stunning visuals and great content. I’ve spend a lot of time on this website over the last few years and New Zealand made it on my list of places to visit after my first or second visit. The recently launched new homepage gives me a headache though, I like the old one better.

• Travel & Tourism

  Want a sense of how savvy travelers are?

  09.03.03 | Permalink | Comments Off on Want a sense of how savvy travelers are?

  eMarketer has an interesting article today about the continuing change in behaviour of travelers because of the Internet. It’s includes demographic data and an interview with David Turnbull from Nurun.

William Bakker's Destination Marketing blog