May 2nd, 2006
Travel communities
Internet offers a whole lot of possibilities for travellers: Buying plane tickets, booking hotel rooms, finding info about their destination, etc. Among them, there is also the possibility to create or join travel communities. As a part of Web 2.0 concept, social networking websites are growing fast. A bunch of interest communities are being created. The travel and tourism domain is not apart. Here are 2 interesting websites to help you to figure out what kind of means there are for travellers to join communities on the web.
The World Is Not Flat
www.theworldisnotflat.com
Here is how the 2 travellers who own this website describe what is happening on their site:
“We’re blogging the trip. The front page of the site has “Our Dispatches” which are entries we write about the trip. We are the only authors of the dispatches and they are browsable via Global Map and Keywords.
We’re asking members to share their experiences. We call these “Member Travel Experiences” and they are entries written by the members and organized by Country Pages. Our hope is that these first-hand experiences will help us (and others) have a better trip.”
The communication is going both ways, travellers write about their trip and the readers help them by giving them some ideas and advices.
43 Places
www.43places.com
“Travel changes people. Whether it is finding a great new coffee shop in your city or a life altering trip around the world, finding great places can make us happier people. 43 Places helps you make a list of the great places you want to visit and share stories and photos of the places you’ve been.
What to do with these communities? Here are a couple of choices. It’s up to you to decide.
- Nothing to care.
- Evaluate who are your prospective clients.
- Join communities.
- Use that as advertising/marketing opportunities.
If you need some ideas, do not hesitate to contact us.
Just visited the blog The World is not Flat and I love it too. Exceptional content with quality pictures. This idea of real time travel diary is great and the number of comments and reads is also quite astonishing. I am guessing the only issue is to find an internet café every time you change destination to upload pictures from your camera and post as well on the blog. But so far they’ve done very well to keep us up to date where they are and what they do.
From my point of view, the post interesting thing about The World is not Flat is that they use the inputs/tips/ideas of their reader to build up their own trip. What a good way to use the knowledge of thousands of people.