radar

Today, I felt in love with a travel agency. THE travel agency! Butterfield & Robinson.

Their website is okay. Some interesting ideas but I think there are some navigation, info architecture et objectives issues. Anyway, that’s not the purpose of this post (even if I’m sure I could help them with that!)

I won’t describe in details why this company is my new love but simply take a look at these amazing videos, you’ll understand.

Meet the staff videos
Explore the World videos

Mr. George Butterfield

Marco - Trip Planner

In two words : Passion and… passion!

It appears there are still hotel/hostels/tour operators who do not care about security on the Internet… or ignore the importance of it.

Los Amigos Hostel in Madrid ask people to fill their credit card information in a non-secure form while making their reservation. You can see it by yourself at: http://www.losamigoshostel.com/b/english/reservations_sol.htm. I don’t know where goes the credit card information but it doesn’t make me feel safe about it.

What should they do? They should either:
- Stop asking credit card numbers in this form.
- Buy a security certificate (SSL certificate) from Thawte, Verisign or from another provider. Install it on the server. And change the URL from http:// to https://.
- Ask people to reserve via GOMIO.com, hostelbookers.com, hostels.com or another online booking services company.
- Use PayPal Website Payments Standard to do the transaction for you.

You would not let the waiter in a restaurant tell everyone your credit card number, your online customers neither…

You are running your own bed & breakfast? A little hotel? A tour company? You are the communication director of an important hotel chain?

You probably care about customer satisfaction. If so, I’m sure that you read travel magazines and newspapers searching for reviews and comments about your company. Who’s saying what will help you fix what goes wrong and focus on what makes your company what you want it to be.

You already know that Internet is the largest source of information on earth. People already write about your company. Do you know what they are saying? On what sites could they be talking about you? How can you track this information? What should you do with it?

Where do people talk about the company?
- Blogs
- Forums
- Hotel/Tour/etc. reviews sites
- Travel websites (Wikitravel, Road66)
- Travel agencies website

How can I find people talking about the company?
- When people make links to your website, Google knows it (most of the time). You just have to ask Google by searching for

link:http://www.yourwebsite.com

- Technorati. Technorati helps you tracking the content you want in the blogosphere. Search for your company name, you’ll have an idea of who’s talking about you via blogs. Make sure to add the RSS feed of this search to your aggregator.

- Google News. Google news gathers news from 4500 different “official” sources. Just like technorati, you can search for your company and add the RSS feed to your aggregator.

- Website stats. With your own stats you could track who’s refering to your website. You’ll get almost the same results as with “link:” on Google.

With these 4 easy tricks, you will have a good overview of who said what. By subscribing to strategical RSS feeds, it will keep you up to date.

What should you do with this information?
- Understand what people dislike and improve your services/products consequently.
- Add comments on blog posts and answers on forums when people are expressing their disappointment about your services/products or when the info they said is wrong.
- Take the time to thank those who “support” you and give you free publicity.

Simple and effective.

Apple announced today its first all-in-one phone/iPod/PDA. Be prepared for tourists 2.0! Okay, I’m joking with the Web 2.0 / Travel 2.0 buzz but this new revolutionary cell phone (and all the upcoming ones) will have an incredible effect on tourists and on the industry.

What’s the iPhone exactly?
The introduction on the iPhone website goes like this: “iPhone combines three products — a revolutionary mobile phone, a widescreen iPod with touch controls, and a breakthrough Internet communications device with desktop-class email, web browsing, maps, and searching — into one small and lightweight handheld device. iPhone also introduces an entirely new user interface based on a large multi-touch display and pioneering new software, letting you control everything with just your fingers. So it ushers in an era of software power and sophistication never before seen in a mobile device, completely redefining what you can do on a mobile phone. “

More on the iPhone on Apple website.

Which features interest us the most as members of the travel and tourism industry?
Without any doubt the Wi-Fi (and Edge) support let the user connect easily to Wi-Fi networks no matter where he is. In a wireless city it is “oh so” a nice feature. Wherever you go, you can use Internet for free on your cell phone!

The other thing is that it uses Safari - Apple standard browser -, it supports widgets, it plays Mp3 and videos as well as it can take pictures. You got it, it is much more than a cell phone. Maybe they should have named it iVerySmallComputer which also can be use as a cell phone. ; )

Now let’s see what could we do with that…
There are so many things I’m thinking to actually, I’m going to give you some of them right away because the new phones (iPhone and some others) bring us an all-new bunch of opportunities.

A tourist will be able to:
- Easily search for hotels online while he’s in town instead of going to each one of them to verify if they have a room available.
- Wait a bit longer to book his activities because it’s now easier to book them online while traveling.
- Look for the bus schedule while waiting for it.
- Translate on Google Translate an English sentence into this foreign language you try to learn.
- More easily go on World66.com, for example, to get some suggestions of activities to do because “today it rains and I certainly won’t go to the beach!”

What is the most interesting opportunity, in my opinion, is the possibility to get information on request. The tourist will be able to search on the Internet for information about the park/museum/church he is actually visiting, read info on Wikipedia, download historic videos or mp3 tours, look on a map what is the nearest restaurant, find reviews about this restaurant and so on. You want to know something, no problem! Internet is in your hand.

In a couple of years…
When the GPS functionality will be integrated in most of the cell phones, do you realize that, for example, you will be able to automatically send promotions and rebates to the tourists walking in front of your business door? This day will probably come sooner than you think. Imagine the possibilities they say!

Here is the first article of a brand new article category : Fast Website evaluations. There is no perfect website so I will review, I’m not quite sure how often, websites and try to provide tips and suggestions to help them to take a better place on the net.
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New Brunswick Tourism
Website: http://www.tourismnewbrunswick.ca/
This is the official tourism website of the province of New Brunswick, Canada.

I was trying to get info about New Brunswick (I’m planning to go there this summer) on this website and I felt like I had to write this post because there are a lot of things that they could do to improve their website and grow their audience.

Search Engine tips
Here are some tips to optimize this site for search engines.
http://www.tourismnewbrunswick.ca/index.htm
1. The title of this page should be “Tourism New Brunswick - Tourisme Nouveau-Brunswick” so that search engine could read the French translation as well.
2. “Official Tourism Web site for New… ” should be written with H1 code (HTML code) because it tells the search engines this is an important text. The rest of the text should be in H2.

http://www.tourismnewbrunswick.ca/en-ca/hnhome.htm
1. The text “The Official Tourism Web site of The Province of New Brunswick, Canada” should be in text (instead of in the image).

http://www.tourismnewbrunswick.ca/en-CA/HNThingsToDo/HNActivitiesAndSports/HNASGolf.htm
1. The title of this page should be “Golf - New Brunswick Tourism”
2. The name of the page should be something like :
http://www.tourismnewbrunswick.ca/Things-Top-Do/Activities-and-sports/golf.htm
NOT
http://www.tourismnewbrunswick.ca/en-CA/HNThingsToDo/HNActivitiesAndSports/HNASGolf.htm

Usability
http://www.tourismnewbrunswick.ca/en-CA/HNThingsToDo/HNArtsAndEntertainment/HNAETopAttractions.htm
1. The sub-menu of “Arts, Culture and Entertainmenet” is shown… it should be the sub-menu of Attractions or nothing.
2. The attractions should be listed by city. There should also be the possibility to filter them by category. The listings of the packages should be done the same way.
http://www.tourismnewbrunswick.ca/en-ca/hnaboutnewbrunswick/hncontactus.htm
The “Message” field should be larger.

Photo gallery
The photo gallery is one of the things you should focus on. It should be as visually attractive as the province is. When people visit the gallery, we want to be sure they will be impressed and that it will grow their interest to visit the province.
http://www.tourismnewbrunswick.ca/en-CA/HNTopMaps.htm
As a tourist, I would really want to see a map of New Brunswick in this page (right in the page, not in PDF). Maybe I could also click on a city to make all things to do and activities appear.

Information
http://www.tourismnewbrunswick.ca/en-ca/hnhome.htm
1. The menu should maybe be split depending on who’s reading.
Example:

Visit!
- My To-Do List
- Places to go
- Where to stay
- Things to do
- Packages

Organize
- Travel Trade

Media
- Travel Media

Actually, the menu is not quite interesting to navigate. The access to the information should be simplified.

Technical tips
- The website doesn’t appear correctly in Safari (Mac). This is not a big problem, but It may hide some accessibility (Web Accessibility Initiative) problems.

Interesting
… because there are also interesting ideas!
1. “My to-do list” is an interesting approach to add a particular value to the website. On the other hand, it is not easy to find activities or things to add in the to-do list.

I took 15 minutes to write these comments. A complete report would have taken almost a day. A day of work to improve dramatically your website. If your are interested to get such comments and suggestions in a document that provides a website improve plan, contact us!

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.

A few weeks ago, I’ve been to Costa Rica. And obviously I had some pretty interesting ideas regarding the help I could give to tourism companies there. I will publish some of them in this website. Here is the first one.

Pablo - The nature tour guide
When we arrived to our hotel in Manuel Antonio, we asked to the girl at the front desk if she had some tours to suggest to us. She showed us some interesting things. We took a guess and went on a park tour “con Pablo”. Wow! Pablo was incredible. We learned a lot and had a lot of fun.

Now, I realize that we could have chose another company instead of Pablo’s. How could this company attract more customers? Simple, be in their mind before they get in Costa Rica. If Pablo’s company had a website (well indexed in search engines), there is a lot of chance that I would have find it in my research. As soon as I’m on Pablo’s website, it’s up to Pablo’s text and pictures to convince me that I must book with him. At this time, Pablo is on the top of the list. Good for him.

Do you know blogs? A blog is a website that is updated via a easy-to-use content management system. It is updated via “posts” (texts) that the author publishes. Moreover, readers can comment each post (ask questions, react, etc.). In Pablo’s situation, a blog would particularly be a good idea because it would help establishing a human relation between the potential customer and Pablo’s company. Via his blog, he could update his site with daily good experiences with customers, pictures and anything that could interest the potential customer.