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Travel & Tourism
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Internet, Marketing, Travel & Tourism
Hotel ‘behind the scenes’ blog
09.12.08 | Permalink | 4 CommentsI’ve started to incorporate 5 e-marketing tips for tourism operators in my presentations for a while. They were the inspiration for the “Marketing your small tourism business in the 21th century” were based on.
One of my tips is to start a blog. I always envision this blog were an operator can provide some ‘behind the scenes’ info about their property. Introduce the staff, the experience, guest comments, etc. I’m sure every business deals with hilareous moments as well that would be fun (and appropriate) to share.
The Opus Hotel here in Vancouver has an awesome blog, but I’m always looking for something a little less corporate. And I could never find one, until today. The Hawtorne Hotel is a 3 star hotel in Salem, MA. They’ve posted stories about the hotel, its gardens, the town, their staff, guest comments, special menu items from their restaurant since March 2005. In the 3.5 year, they’ve accumulated almost 2000 postings.
I think it’s a great example of using a blog to create a connection with potential visitors. I would suggest to share more stories instead of making announcements. Where people travel, stories happen.Where people work, stories happen. Somebody with a bit of wit can create a great blog that can create a following like a soap opera. People will want to visit the real deal and be part of the story.
Marketing your small tourism business in the 21th century: -
Internet, Travel & Tourism
Congratulations VisitSweden
VisitSweden launched its new website this last Tuesday. Besides that is looks very nice, provides great content and a nice Google map, it is also integrating the content it has generated from it CommunityOfSweden social network.
I like this approach. It compliments the official content with user generated content (we do the same). I also like that they take small steps and evolve. They experimented with the social network, and now feel comfortable to start tying it closer to the flagship.
Well done Sweden! -
Internet, Travel & Tourism
What Google is really going to do in the travel space
A blog posting on the Travolution blog about Google and Travel made me think. Is there going to be some big product launch, or will they simply keep connecting the dots?
This BusinessWeek article called “Google’s Travel Plans” is referenced in the posting. Google’s managing director for travel Rob Torres was interviewed. Torres says “the goal of Google’s travel division is to give users a destination where they can research travel plans, read user reviews, and see user uploaded videos and photos.”
The article also states “It’s worth noting one thing that any future Google offering won’t have—airline fares or hotel bookings.” But vertical search is the new disrupter in travel. Kayak.com will perform 45M queries this month according to its CEO, with 5M uniques in April and climbing (compete.com). Microsoft bought Farecast.com to enter into this space.
There’s no way Google will sit back and watch from the sideline. This is search, their core business. They have to make a move into vertical travel search. They won’t need to book anything. They can stay true to their advertising based revenue model, maybe complimented with a Pay-Per-Action model and they won’t alienate their customers or cannibalize their ad based revenue on their main search product.
Torres says in Businessweek “We are already so highly searched for travel. Why not give them a one-stop shop for travel information?”. Vertical Search offers a perfect possibilities to compliment travel information opportunities. The New Zealand campaign on YouTube has been widely covered, but Google Maps is probably even more relevant. Tim Armstrong, Google’s VP of advertising told us at Phocuswright in Orlando last November that “depending on the day, there could be 40% of the traffic to that goes to that service that’s travel related”. That’s huge.
Google is already starting to connect the dots. Google Maps recently integrated photos through Paronamio (a small company it acquired last year), Wikipedia content and YouTube videos. Businesses can also provide Google with their info for display on Google Maps. And the user generated maps cover a lot of tourism content.
A few months ago, Google announced Knol, a Wikipedia for experts. “A knol on a particular topic is meant to be the first thing someone who searches for this topic for the first time will want to read.” Here’s Google’s opportunity to create credible travel content, written by an expert.
Now think about Google’s massive user base of Google accounts, YouTube, Gmail and Orkut. Think about OpenID, Open Social. Think about Friend Connect. Here’s the User Generated Content piece, combined with a social network.
All Google needs to do is keep connecting dots and a strong travel product will evolve and emerge. It might not happen through a big bang approach, but simply as an organic evolution of their existing products. I’m sure there are plenty of Google engineers using their 20% pet-project time to connect dots and creating innovative travel related products. -
Internet, Marketing, personal, tourism bc, Travel & Tourism
Couple of recent panel apperances
05.22.08 | Permalink | 7 CommentsI had the opportunity to join two panel conversations the last few weeks.
The first one was at the Online Revealed conference in Calgary where I joined Terri McCulloch, Tom Wilson,
Jens Thraenhart and Stephen Joyce. Alicia Whalen and Phil Caines did a great job moderating. I particularly like Phil’s live web servicing to show the websites we talked about. This was the third time we took the Tips from the T-List on the road and it was another great session where we discussed and debated the opportunities blogs, User Generated Content and Social Networks provide for the tourism industry. I like these sessions because I represent myself as a travel blogger and Tourism BC for our HelloBC Blogs initiative. It was the first time I met Terri and Tom, and they provided great insights. I’ve been a fan of Terri’s blog for a while now and Tom’s work is a great example of maximizing the medium with limited resources.
Thank you Patricia and Alicia from a Couple of Chicks marketing for inviting me. You’ve done a great job again.
Today I joined Ben Stringfellow (Director of Internal Communications, McDonalds USA), Thierry Hay-Sabourin (Senior Ecommerce Manager, Future Shop), William Azaroff (Interactive Marketing & Channel Manager, Vancity) on a panel called ‘Giving Your Brand Away’ at the Convergence 2008 conference. It was a pleasure to share the stage with this diverse group who’ve all done great things with building communities.
Ben gave us the story and result from a brand new closed community for McDonalds’ staff, reducing cost of printing newletters and creating efficiencies through shared learning between the restaurants. William gave us the remarkable story behind the Change Everything community while Thierry provide insights into Futureshop message boards, including Aaron, the search guy.
The biggest take-away I got from the session was that the first 500 members of your community will set the tone. So it’s important that the first members set the right tone, otherwise it will be hard to recover from that. Thierry shared that the tone on the English boards is very different from the French boards for example. At our HelloBC Blogs, we accidentallyThak did the right thing by starting our efforts with staff and our visitor centres, who set the right tone for consumers. Sometimes you need a bit of luck.
Thank you Sandy from Fjord Interactive for inviting me and a great conference. -
Internet, Management, Travel & Tourism
Kayak CEO Steve Hafner Interview
05.20.08 | Permalink | 4 CommentsExcellent video of an interview PhoCusWright president Philip Wolf conducted with Kayak CEO Steve Hafner during the Travolution Summit. I’m a big fan of Kayak. Both their business model and their Interface are things envy. A must watch for strategists in the travel industry.
My favourite quotes:
About his OTA days: We all build great companies. None were great websites, they don’t search everything, they don’t show you everything. there is a bias in how you display the results, in particular on the Hotel side. Wouldn’t it be interesting to build a website that we wanted to use. And we weren’t biased about what we sold and we would allow you to build supplier direct or agency direct cause that’s what we do as consumers. So as executives, why don’t we build a website like that.
The middle is a mostly PPA, we’ll get a commission or a referral fee.
The next phase is turning Kayak into a vertical ad network.
Our goal is simple. We want to be the number one travel side for consumers information world wide.
Conditions you need for meta search. You need fragmentation in the supplier and agency community. You need a deep penetration of online booking habits. And then you need a vibrant marketplace for monetizing that traffic.
This month we’ll do 45M queries. That more then pricelines, that’s half the size of Orbitz. We do more searches a day then United Airlines.
My observation would just be that Travelocity, Expedia, Orbitz, Kayak; we’re all websites. So the website should be were you put your efforts,; were you innovate. Where you eliminate all the friction for what the consumer wants to do. And I would warrant you that these websites haven’t changed all that much in quite a long time despite having massive human capitol and massive P&L’s.
Travelpost; if you’re going to Tripadvisor its really hard to get to the hotel review. They post lots of impressions and clutter around it. We’re going to fix that.
Our mission statement is: Number one travel site world-wide. Best place for advertisers to market their services. And do it with the lowest operating costs ever seen. We’re going up against Google, we’re going up against Expedia, and we’re doing it with a Craigslist operating philosophy. It’s crazy.
Here we are, 10 years into online travel and buying a simple airline ticket still sucks. We need to fix that part of the equation before we move definitively into the complex travel.
Microsoft is in a tough spot. They’ve gone on record to say they want to compete against Google. They’re not really going to get there with horizontal search so they’ve got a strategy to go vertical search. So they’re assembling the Microsoft Office of vertical search. You’ll see them buy a real estate site, a job site, a travel site, and weave that together into a search volume competitor to Google.
Any place that consumers goto for travel information and that advertisers spend money on is a competitor of ours. Plain and simple.
We’re small or a reason. Not because we can’t hire. We’re small because we want velocity on the website development. I want to continue that innovation stream and beat those other guys at having a great website.
There is a lot of disruption still to come on the user generated content side. If I had to start another company in this space, that’s were I would start. Nobody today has done a great job at integrated user generated reviews with data about rates and availability, what’s a deal, and what’s not, etc.
Thanks for making this available Kevin. -
Marketing, Travel & Tourism
Marketing your small tourism business in the 21th century: #7: Get your content our there
I posted about the importance of a good website. But you have other options to connect your content with potential visitors. Instead of bringing people to your website, bring your content to the people.
There are plenty of places to do this. Most DMO’s offer a listing program where you can describe your business to potential customers on a dedicated page on their website. A DMO website is a good place to start because this is the place where you can find people who are already expressing interest. At Tourism BC, we offer our HelloBC listing program at TourismBC.net.
And there are other places. Yahoo travel allows you to add your hotel or attraction. Free. Google offers you the ability to provide them information about any business for Google Maps. Free.
There are more places, including dozens of online directories. You don’t have to go crazy because some will be more relevant to your business than others. Some are free, some will charge you. You’ll have to decide for yourself and be careful where you spend your money.
A good rule of thumb is to look at the traffic the website generates and the relevancy to your business. High traffic and high relevancy is where you want to be. But check the content on tourism related websites first. The content should be relevant and accurate.
If you’re charged for a listing, it’s important to measure the results. Directly, by measuring the incoming visitors to your website (available through your website analytics). Or indirectly, by asking your customers where they found out about your business.
At Tourism BC, our listings are very detailed and often a consumer won’t visit an operator website because the information is all there. So we can tell operators how many times the listing was viewed on our websites.
The next logical step is to send your inventory out into the world. This is more complicated and could involve changes to the way you run your business. So we’ll leave that post for a later time.
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Internet, Marketing, Travel & Tourism
Marketing your small tourism business in the 21th century: #6: Be found in Search Engines
04.26.08 | Permalink | 4 CommentsThe first 5 topics have been focused on giving people a remarkable experience, encouraging people to talk about it, and give resulting interested consumers access to your website to close the sale.
And how will people find your website if there’s mention or link to your website? A Search Engine of course. Travel planning starts with a Search Engine. People don’t even bother remembering URL’s anymore (in the Japanese subway, they now advertise Search Terms instead of URL’s). You need to be found in Search Engines. The art and science of making sure you have good placement in Search Engines is called Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Paying for those little ads on the side of the results is called Search Engine Marketing (SEM).
The most important thing is when somebody searches for the name of your business, your website has to show up high. Start by testing this out. Just search for your name and check if you’re in the top results. Make sure you also check for other ways people might search for your name. Also search for your name plus the name of your city or community. Unless you have a common name, your business should be #1, #2 or #3.
If you don’t show up at all, you have a big problem. And if you don’t show in the top 5, you still have a problem. In most cases it means your web professional hasn’t considered Search Engines when building your website. For a list on how to make your website Search Engine Friendly, check our these guidelines from Google’s Webmaster Central (or send the list to your web professional). Start there, and in a later post I’ll share what else you can do to improve your SEO. If you can’t wait, check Search Engine Watch.
The second thing you can do in Search Engines is pay for placement. Create an ad in a Search Engine for specific keywords and you pay each time somebody clicks to your website (Pay Per Click, or PPC). Managing PPC campaigns is a specialist skill, but if you stick to the basics, you can experiment with this yourself. You can manage you Search Engine Ads in Google, Yahoo and MSN through self service and a credit card. There are four core tactics to consider; the keywords you target, your bid, the copy of your ad, and your landing page.
My recommendation is to start very specific and slowly broaden things out. Start with very specific keywords. If you are ACME Golf course in Someville. Target the keywords “ACME Golf” and “Golf Someville” for example. Don’t target “Golf”. If might drive a lot of traffic, but it will also drive up cost and it’s unlikely they will convert into a visitor. Choose the geographic area where your ads will show carefully. Where does your typical visitor come from? Start there. Be carefull how much you bid, and set limits so you don’t blow through your budget. And most of all, monitor the results. What’s working, what’s not working, and adjust frequently.
You probably realize that it can get complicated and time consuming quickly. So think twice before you engage in this and consider hiring a professional to manage your SEM. It’s worth it.
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Marketing, Travel & Tourism
Marketing your small tourism business in the 21th century: #4 Encourage Your Customer to Share their Experiences
04.02.08 | Permalink | 6 CommentsAs I mentioned before, word-of-mouth has always been the best marketing vehicle in travel. But unlike mass media, it has been invisible. Not anymore. People are now sharing en-mass on message boards, blogs, review sites and social networks. So this is part where we’ll save you some time and money by encouraging your customers to share their experiences online so you can reap maximum bennefits generated by word-of-mouth.
In #1 Be Remarkable I explained that you first need to give somebody something worth talking about. In #2 Get your website in order we gave consumers a place to go after they hear about you. In #3 Monitor and Respect Tripadvisor we took care of Tripadvisor, the most important place for you to invest your time. Now let’s encourage consumers to share and save you some time.
Tripadvisor is also the obvious starting place to ask your customers to share the great time they had at your business. And when I say ask, I don’t mean ‘bribe’. In the transparent online world, unethical behaviour will get caught (and punished). Some ideas are to mention Tripadvisor on checkout, or add a simple “Share your experience with us on Tripadvisor” on an invoice or receipt.
Tripadvisor is used at the end of the purchase cycle, when a consumer is close to a purchase. It’s the last check to validate what they’ve learned about your business against consumer reviews. That means a consumer found out about you someplace else, earlier in the purchase cycle. In traditional marketing, this can be a newspaper article or a guidebook. There are social networks who tailor to consumers earlier in the purchase cycle, allowing you to use your past customers to create awareness among others.
In the 21th century, this might be a specific special interest website where your target audience shares experiences, based on the business you run. There are also destination specific websites. Our HelloBC Blogs section for example. How do you find the networks most relevant for you? Ask you customers, and see if you can find a pattern. Or Google around and see if you can find a place where your target audience ‘relive and recommend’. And when you find it, encourage your customers to share. -
Internet, Marketing, Travel & Tourism
Marketing your small tourism business in the 21th century: #1 Be Remarkable
I like to investigate research, make observation and detect patterns to develop theories, create models and build strategies. But I’m very aware that a lot of people who read my blog are running a business and would like to know: What can I do today? So here’s the first post in what I hope to be a series about marketing your small tourism business in the 21th century.
1) Be remarkable
The title might not suggest it but this has everything to do with online marketing. Because it starts with the basics. In order to market something, you need a product. And when you have a product, the way to market it in the 21th century is through word-of-mouth. It’s nothing new. Travel has always been about word-of-mouth marketing. But in a Web 2.0 world, word-of-mouth is amplified through review websites and social networks.Tourism operators often offer ordinary products because conventional wisdom tells you that ordinary is safe. Serve to the lowest common denominator and nobody will complain. Maybe. But people don’t talk about something ordinary.
They forget ordinary.
What people talk about are things that are extraordinary. An extraordinary experience. Extraordinary customer service. Extraordinary value for money. Extraordinary weather.
Extraordinary experiences are remarkable experiences. A remarkable experience is something worth making a remark about. That’s why you don’t hear anybody talking about the restaurant with average food. You hear about good food or bad food. Good customer service or bad customer service. Good weather or bad weather.I stayed in a hotel in Berlin that was too expensive for what it offered. But the breakfast buffet was unreal. Guess what I tell anybody who asked me about my trip? “You should have seen the breakfast buffet!”. A couple of years ago I visited the sunshine coast with my father and sister. We never bothered to book a place to stay. We ended up at a B&B in Madeira Bay that was full. But the owner offered us her own bed and slept on the couch herself. She was super nice and treated us like family. I’ve been back twice, and so has my sister, and a few of our friends.
As a tourism operator you have a huge opportunity. An opportunity to be remarkable. Because people love to talk about their trips. And people love to hear about other people’s trips. And not just over a dinner party anymore. But via email, on a blog, on Facebook, on Flickr, on WAYN, on Tripadvisor and dozens other social networks. Read by millions that look for the extraordinary.
So be remarkable, and do it in a positive way. It doesn’t have to be hard. Start by investing in customer service. And do that little bit of extra that make something say “wow”. Achieve that and they’ll do the marketing for you.
I recommend reading online marketing guru Seth Godin’s books and blog to learn more about being remarkable. I recommend Tourism BC’s Superhost programs and workshops to become a customer service wizard.
It’s easy for me to say. But you can start being remarkable today.
Marketing your small tourism business in the 21th century:
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Internet, tourism bc, Travel & Tourism
The long tail of tourism information
03.13.08 | Permalink | 6 CommentsChris Anderson’s the long tail has inspired much of my strategic thinking the last year or so. It’s a great book that highly recommend reading. Or at least his article in Wired magazine. Recenly I was asked to speak about the changing expectations for content in the tourism industry. First thing that came to mind.. the long tail.
Traditionally (well, pre-internet), consumers had limited information about destinations and available tourism product and experiences. Guidebooks were the most common source for planning information. They do a terrific job at providing information about the most popular tourism experiences. But Guidebooks are constraint by the number of available pages and the result is that only most popular tourism experiences are included, with a sample of supporting services such as accommodation and restaurants.
Tourism websites like ours don’t have a limited number of pages. We can include much more information, in a greater level of detail. As a result, consumers have access to more information and potential experiences that could meet their specific interest. Websites have removed the physical constraints of paper pages in a guidebook and can go further down the tail. But there are constraints still. There’s only so much content publishers can create and maintain.
To go all the way down the tail, publishers need help. That’s where user generated content plays a key role. This is how you can get the information about all kinds of experiences you will never find in a guidebook, or even on a website. But these experiences can be very appealing to some consumers, and play a key part in making decisions about where to go, and how long to stay there. This how to fill the tail, provide consumers with the information they seek, and maximize benefits to tourism businesses.
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William Bakker's Destination Marketing blog
William Bakker is Chief Strategist at Destination Think!. These are my personal thoughts.
