Travel 2.0 is simply the translation of Web 2.0 in the travel industry. I don’t like buzzword very much but I think it could be a very good idea to regroup all travel 2.0 websites.
I invite all of my readers (yeah you!) to help me complete a list of travel 2.0 websites. Please add comments and I will add the link in this little directory.
Travel 2.0 articles
Discover Travel 2.0
… please comment to add links here.
Travel 2.0 examples
BootsnAll Travel
Farecast
Kayak
Mobissimo
Travellerspoint
Travelowl
Tripadvisor
TripConnect
Tripmates
Wikitravel
World66
Zoomandgo
… please comment to add links here.
Marriott has launched Marriott Virtual Tour which is a new micro-marketing-website. (Sorry for this too short introduction.)
All made with Flash, it has a pretty nice look. Flash is an interesting technology for those who want to put animation on their website. On the other hand, it is not perfect. When we think in terms of search engines, it’s worth nothing else than a big zero. Search engines can’t interprete/index the texts in a Flash animation. In this case, the text is integrated in the Flash animation… and, you’re right, not indexable by search engines, you got it. Graphic design is an important part of websites but it’s not a reason to forget the good practices of web design. It would not be very hard to adapt the concept to make the text “readable” in basic HTML. The designer could have split the page, some of the parts in Flash and the text parts in HTML. As simple as that (for web designers!).
By the way, text-images are not better. On the Check In page the text in this page is an image instead of simple html. There is NO reason why it is like that.
The biggest problem caused by all this is that the website won’t be well ranked in search engines (Google, Yahoo, MSN), less visitors will get to the website and the return on investment (ROI) will be less than it should/could be.
As most of the travel & tourism industry, you probably deal with many languages each day.
Depending on many factors (targets, budget, geographical situation, etc.), you will probably want to translate your website in 2, 3 or more languages.
The translation of each page should be accessible directly.
Take this page about the Cabot Trail (which you should see once in your life!) of the Nova Scotia tourism official web site. If you click on “Français”, you will be redirected to the French homepage. Ok now, try to find the French translation of the Cabot Trail… Not that easy. On the Internet, you should always try to provide the good info to the visitor at the right time. In this case, we should be redirected to the translated page of the Cabot Trail. If a French visitor wants to get to the homepage, it’s easy for him. The opposite (from the homepage to the Cabot Trail page) isn’t that easy.
You really should remember that if the visitor gets to a specific page, it’s probably because he searched for it so the translated version should be accessible easily.
Better less than nothing
I often say that less is better than nothing. Well, it’s also good when it’s time to translate your website. If you do not have the budget to translate all your website and to keep it up-to-date, you should consider creating a micro-site which would be a summary-like website that should contain the most requested information of your primary website as long as the language related information (Good example - the right column)
The last couple of weeks I’ve been traveling in Nova Scotia and New Brunswick. It was our first visit in those canadian maritime provinces for my girlfriend and I. Usually, we plan all or at least a part of our trip before leaving home. This time, we decided to take the car (even if gas price is pretty high!) and drive. A real road trip.
12 days of B&B, motels, restaurant, museum, attractions, outdoor activities, tours… and a lot of ideas for this blog.
First of all, here is some of the reflexions I’ve had during my vacations.
1. Travelling without taking the time to reserve or to get info about B&B’s / hotels / motels in advance will grow your expenses.
2. “Visitors Information Centres” have a lot of pamphlets and staff members try to help you as much as there are able to.
3. Signs on the side of the road do a pretty good job.
Yeah… we went on a road trip without a lot of preparation. No booking on the Internet, no printed map, no info sheets, nada! Even if I think that Internet is a good way to get info about your destination, it doesn’t mean that every tourist use that source of info. Sure, this tourism blog is the space I’ve created to write about technology and Internet in a domain that I like which is tourism and travel but I want to be sure to remind everyone that Internet is one of many ways to reach tourists and travelers. It’s growing fast and its importance will grow fast in the next weeks/months/years but it will continue to be one of the many ways. It’s up to you to decide which proportion each ways should take in your marketing strategy depending on the reality of your business.
Update : Here is an interesting French article http://www.veilletourisme.ca/fr/titre_resume_article.aspx?sortcode=1.5.13&id_article=560 giving some statistics
Today, I’ve discovered Tourist Tracks. Tim and Warren write and record audio guided tours of some cities of England and sell them on the Internet. Once you’ve bought a tour, you can download it and transfer it on your iPod (or any other mp3 portable reader) format and print out the map. Quick and simple. I like that idea. I’m not quite sure of the concept of selling it, but there is obviously something to do there.
A quick post to give you the link to Five Rules for Great Websites as described by James Archer of Forty Media.
Here they are :
- Challenge Assumptions
- Provide Rich Content
- Make it “Sticky”
- Bring a Pro
- Love your Website
- Build your website accordingly to the reality of search engines (as Michaël suggested)
Via lesbonnesfrequentations.com, a French blog on which I wrote as well.
Hi!
As many of you know (or noticed), I’m a French blogger located in Quebec city. I’ve start blogging in English because I knew it would be easier to start in English and translate my articles after than the opposite.
In a couple of weeks, Radar will be translated in French. We’ll be able to reach more French people and companies this way. I hope you’ll like it!
According to this article of Radio-Canada, Quebec City Tourism is pretty slow this summer.
I’ve made some requests on Google Trends and here is what I got for “Quebec tourism“. I bet you can see that 2006 is not gonna be a good year for “Quebec tourism” searches on Google.
Well, we do not have enough data to be sure of anything… but that’s a good indicator of the relation between Internet traffic and tourism industry real data.
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About Google Trends
With Google Trends, you can compare the world’s interest in your favorite topics. Enter up to five topics and see how often they’ve been searched for on Google over time. Google Trends also displays how frequently your topics have appeared in Google News stories, and which geographic regions have searched for them most often.
“[…] Forrester Research VP and analyst Henry Harteveldt expects the online travel leisure industry to fetch EURO 30.7 billion of transactions this year !
The forecast for 2007 is EURO 39 billion.”
Via Guillaume from Hotel Blogs.
Even if I think that some parts of the strategy should be modified and that there are some usability issues to fix, Sheraton, with its all new Web approach (http://www.starwoodhotels.com/sheraton/index.html) giving a place to customers to describe their experiences in the Sheraton hotels, understood that the Web is now ready to let visitors create and publish contents. Sheraton decided to give a big place to their customers in their new Web strategy. We so like this iniative.
Be prepared, it is just the beginning.
radar