Berlin: Snow and Strikes, but Bloggers come Through
March 5, 2008
Very unusual: I am the first to find the meeting room where the first informal get together is taking place.
I have seen some fairs. I am not impressed by the way Berlin Messe provides road signs.
As to snow: Detlef comments this is the start of ITB and the first snow of Berlin this winter.
A huge strike lames the whole Berlin public transport system, but at around 11.30 AM I count around 25 Bloggers. Chapeau to the Bloggers.
Mobile Travel Technologies - Gerry Samuels
March 5, 2008
Gerry Samuels, Founder & Executive Director, Mobile Travel Technologies Ltd.
Who are MTT’s customers?
Hotels, airlines, and intermediaries. Their core technology enables certain aspects of the customer’s mobile services. The technology can do things like deliver travel information, select seats, and even have boarding passes sent to the phone. The technology connects on the back-end with the customer systems and cherry pick the information that needs to be delivered and modifies or smart edits the information in order to be viewed on both high-end users and basic mobile devices.
Do companies need to change their websites in order to support mobile moving forward?
Yes, because the activities that mobile users do on their mobile devices is different then what they do on their PCs. It is expected that there will be 500 million mobile users by the end of the year. In many markets like India and China, mobile is the internet. In these markets there is a significant opportunity to utilize the mobile web services for transactional services.
Mobile Commerce is actually more advanced in India then they are in Europe and North America primarily because of the lack of use of credit cards in these markets.
What is the opportunity?
Mobile travel services are still primarily used by business services. We are at the point where we are looking at delivering very light travel information versus the multi-media downloads that would be provided to a more leisure market. The opportunity is delivering important key travel services that can be used and are valuable now versus trying to deliver products and services that are not well supported.
Bonjour 2-0-2-work - Tourism, Web 2.0 & 5 Myths unveiled
March 4, 2008
In 2008 I am looking forward to tourism companies putting my advice and the knowledge you and I have gathered about this so called Web 2.0 to work. Here are five reflexions on 2007 myths about tourism and the web 2.0.
Every tourism company should offer at least one blog.
No way. I remember talking to a manager of a very large Austrian tourism business last year. He complained that their CEO did not have what it took for a corporate blog. My take: While a blogging CEO does have some signaling effect within the company and the industry, CEO-blogs are not mandatory. On the contrary. Companies should first think hard, before embarking on a corporate blog. I do believe in blogs, but there has to be a payoff. That said I fully encourage small companies like family hotels and museums to blog. If they have something to convey and are determined to take their time integrating this medium with their communication goals.
Nobody knows what Web 2.0 means anyway.
Recent studies in Austria prove that the term Web 2.0 is still widely unknown in my country. However, the different platforms are very popular and widely adopted. I remember asking my young students (22 - 29) last fall what they thought about Web 2.0. Only one in 30 even had heard of the term. But many of them knew MySpace, most knew YouTube, blogs and so on. Meaning that people are using what the Web 2.0 has to offer, while companies are still struggling to come up with a pragmatic integration of the different services and platforms.
Online-reviews of strangers have little or no credibility.
Think again. Austrian studies have shown that 80 % will rather believe an unpolished online-review written by a total stranger than elaborate claims agencies came up with.
Every national destination should start their own social network.
Not at all. There are quite some examples of national tourism networks that do not work. This does not mean, that Web 2.0 was a no-good-hype in the first place. The challenge is to integrate these new “points of communication” (borrowing the term from “point of sale”) into your strategy. I am pretty sure, Canada has been the smartest so far.
Virtual worlds like Second Life are dead.
This one is just as untrue as claiming they were the future before. I guess it will take more time. Maybe it will be the digital natives that will fully embrace virtual worlds in a corporate environment.
What is your opinion? Feel free to comment or mail me.
Original post January 21, 2008 on FastenYourSeatbelts.at
Alternatives to Hotels - powered by Web 2.0
March 4, 2008
If crashing on a stranger’s couch for free in your vacation is beyond your imagination (www.couchsurfing.com), try the Austrian alternative www.prooms.com. This new Web 2.0 - or may I say Travel 2.0 - platform enables would-be hosts to offer their spare beds or even entire apartment. The prices are pretty reasonable. Unfortunately, so far limited to the Austrian and Swiss host cities of the Euro 2008 . As of now, I can only detect a German language version. Update: The English version is due by the end of February. Hm, I do have a spare room. Will talk this over with my husband.
Destination Marketing: It’s about service, stupid
March 4, 2008
Let’s recall how quickly things are changing these days. Remember the times when you had to actually go see your local travel agent to book a flight and when airlines had large offices in the capitals? Then came low-cost-carriers and ticket-free online-booking. A model that was quickly adopted by the traditional carriers in the aftermath.
Then hostels started adopting the low-cost-first-come-first-serve booking-model. Many even send confirmation SMS to make things easier for you. A free service! See the SMS AirBerlin sent me after I booked my flight to the ITB Bloggers Meeting. And I also got a free SMS plus a customised sightseeing and shopping brochure by the hotel booking platform I chose. All without ever coming near to Berlin’s official tourist website.
Official tourist board sites “failed” me again, when I was planning my summer hiking vacation a couple of weeks ago. I wanted to hike in the Attersee region, a breathtakingly beautiful Austrian lake and mountain region where I spent a week in summer 2006. I was unable to find information on the official site of the Austrian Tourist board.
So I checked out the website of the regional tourist board www.attersee.at for B&B and apartments in the village of Unterach. I know there are dozens of places that rent rooms and apartments. Nevertheless, the online-results were so meager, that we decided to go hiking in South Tyrol (Italy) instead.
We will be staying in the wonderful hotel Schönblick Belevedere in St. Genesio where I gave a speech last October. I called their reception desk - using Skype - and checked the best dates, while screening the booking engine of the LCC Skyeurope at the same time. I loved knowing who I was talking to and where I will be arriving to. Again their tourist board’s website is bad - but Flickr offers lovely views (here are my pictures).
Now don’t get me wrong. This is not about Web 2.0, it is about giving the potential visitor what they need to support the decision, planning, booking (and bonding) process.
I have not mentioned this before, but the website of the village of San Pedro de Atacama in the desert of Chile made me decide to travel to South America in March 2004 within seconds. The term Web 2.0 had not even been coined then. And no, the site has not really changed since then. Why? Because they had already done a wonderful job without any Web 2.0 hocus pocus in the first place. But, and this is the message, they already made use of old fashioned tools to integrate pictures and comments of happy travelers. Social Web 1.0 so to speak! And they already featured short easy to stream videos back then. In 2004!
I recently read that online travel sales are decreasing. Given my experience I do not find it hard to believe. What is your opinion? Do you know any good tourism sites?
Posted at 01:22 PM in a) English+posts, b) Travel 2.0, e) Destinationmarketing | P
Travel 2.0 - not only an issue for hotels anymore
March 4, 2008
Gone are the days when only hotel managers and some destination marketers would bemoan authentic customer rating platforms like Tripadvisor & Co. as a potential threat to their business. Think again, more and more of these platforms have quietly added other subjects as well. It is not a matter of hotels and destinations anymore.
Would you like an example? You might know the Austrian crystals company Swarovski. More than 700.000 saw their visitor attraction Kristallwelten Crystal World in Tyrol last year - including me twice (my pics).
Their brochure and website quote CNN saying: “As beautiful as one of the Seven Wonders of the world.” Not quite in line with the opinions visitors have posted on Tripadvisor: Only 11 have reviewed their experiences online, but the message is pretty dramatic. Opinions range from “tourist scam” to “waste of time” - and what really made me laugh: “I had expected displays of how crystals were formed or how they are turned into jewellery and objects of desire. What I got was bizarre and consisted of: a zebra in a stiletto (yes, really!)”.
If you are in charge of a tourist attraction, reviews like these are exactly what you should be looking for. Could there be a grain of salt in them? Are all 11 reviewers just plain wrong? Could these reviews be a chance to set things straight or develop new strategies? This is the subject of a speech I am going to give for 200 directors and managers of tourist attractions next week.
YourTour’s trip engine technology: exclusif interview
March 4, 2008
Decizium team launches their “YourTour’s trip engine technology” , a new step for the mass-customization of travel packages and itineraries.
They have a stand at ITB (hall 6.1, stand 141). I suggest you contact them and make a appointment and business!
Emmanuel Guisset tell us more about Decizium and the YourTour technology.
> Emmanuel, can you tell some information about you and the Decizium team.
Well, Decizium started in 2005 after 10 years of R&D in collaboration with the Polytechnic Faculty of Mons. Last year, we received some private and public investments and since then we’ve been working on improving our technology, business development and creating a B2C website.
As far I am concerned, after receiving my international business degree, I traveled quite a lot and completed a few internships abroad until Decizium allowed me to stay in the travel world and be part of a new exciting challenge: changing the way Internet users buy travel packages.
Currently, Decizium, located in Belgium employs a young international team of 10.
>Can you give us some outline about your goals with YOUR TOUR!
We have spent years developing our YourTour system, under which it is no longer necessary for tourists to make a trade-off between a tailor-made holiday where he/she might need to wait days before obtaining a first trip proposition, and a pre-packaged offer that is not tuned to his/her wishes but that is immediately available. The system makes possible what seemed to be impossible: the mass-customization of travel packages and itineraries.
YourTour’s trip engine technology allows travel companies to go much further than the currently available packaging solutions by taking into account the appropriate on-site activities for the tourist and automatically arranging it all (transportation, accommodations and activities) in a coherent way, using multiple criteria.
This results in a comprehensive and detailed travel itinerary, accommodating the restrictions imposed by the tourist (trip duration, areas to visit, travel budget, etc.) and respecting the tourist’s compromise between the various costs (for transportation, accommodations and activities) and the appeal of the trip (quality of the activities, hotel comfort level, etc.).
In addition, we are currently developing a B2C website that will allow tourists to build and book their customized self drive trip in France in a few clicks. Indeed, we feel it was necessary to have something online to reach better the B2B market. You’ll have to wait until it’s online to learn more…
Happy Hotelier - Off to ITB Berlin
March 4, 2008
Before I jump in my limousine, I would like to feature two great Bloggers who I will miss at this summit, pictured here together at WTM in November where the three of us shortly met and unfortunately had no time to get acquainted better Time is an asset Bloggers have not much of, which reminds me I had not enough time to update the T-List ranking as per March 1. It is almost finished, but publication has to wait until after ITB.
To your left Guillaume Thevenot of Hotel Blogs by Guillaume Thevenot and to your right Albert Barra, author of many Blogs among which: Spanish language Blog Albert Barra Com, the Enlish version Thoughts on Hospitality Marketing and Distribution and Travel in Blogs with which he tries to build a Travel Bloggers community. More success has his Spanish Travel 2.0 portal, but I lost the link for the moment. (Update: Albert kindly provided it in a comment elsewhere).
Happy Hotelier - Where to Stay in Berlin?
March 4, 2008
I finished part 2 of of my post Preparing for the Travel Bloggers Summit on Happy Hotelier.
As it is a very lengthy post I will give you here just my conclusion:
Finally I found a moderately priced place to stay in Pension Elite through Booking.com. I have not looked into Priceline.
My conclusion is that the aggregators like Hoteltip, Hotels Combined.Com and VibeAgent are becoming stronger and offer some help, but you need the reliability of a real OTA and you cannot book something without having checked out the property on Tripadvisor.
So to my view it is still much more of a hassle than would be necessary to DIY hotel bookings if you want something special, especially when you have time constraints or are a notorious late booker like myself.
PS Who is taking care of the comments here? None of the comments that I see are visible in the blog!
Can small Social Media players compete with the Facebooks and MySpaces?
March 4, 2008
Attending the PhoCusWright Bloggers Summit is a great opportunity to learn and share. I admire all the bloggers who will participate, many of whom wrote articles for the first Tips from the T-List book. I am hoping to talk about many of you about the niche social network. We all know about the Facebooks, the MySpaces. the VirtualTourists and the TripAdvisors, but I would like to know your opinion about niche social networks. As I wrote in my introduction, I recently launched a niche social network focused around Travel and Friendship called Canadamigos Network. It’s target market is mainly comprised of Hispanics around the world interested in Canada and Canadians interested in Hispanic culture and destinations. The site encourages content in both official languages of Canada in additionto Spanish. Canadamigos was quietly launched in late December and to date has grown to over 600 members from Canada, the US, Latin America and Spain.
Why launch a niche social network site? Looking at what had been happening on the Web in the past little while and understanding that if I did not add Web 2.0 tools to my business I could be at a disadvantage I started blogging for the Hispanic traveler in my BlogdeCanada.com blog. This led naturally to social media. I had been using the Ning platform as a member of Turismo 2.0 and realized that this platform could be the one to use for my own social network site. I looked at the costs (and mostly thought about the time I would surely need to dedicate to the site) and finally decided to jump in with both feet. This first year will be a kind of Beta phase during which time I will try to determine whether the project is worth the investment or not, i.e. whether the site can make money or not.
One of the incentives for a small online business like mine is the idea that marketers may be interested in very focused targeted niches. Blogger David Wilson wrote in his Social Media Optimization blog an article entitled “Niche Social Networks Will Continue To Be Hot In 2008“ that I found encouraging:
“The niche social networking market is exploding as thousands of sites have sprang up to cater to specific interests, backgrounds, professions and age groups. Nightclub frequenters can converge at DontStayIn.com. Wine connoisseurs have formed Snooth.com, and people going through divorce can commiserate at Divorce360.com. While small in numbers these sites form intimate communities of like-minded people. And that is what attracts advertisers.
Overall, ad spending on social-networking sites is expected to grow 75 percent next year, to $2.1 billion, according to eMarketer. Of the $920 million spent this year to advertise on social networks, 8.2% went to niche sites, up from 7% in 2006. In 2008, niche sites’ share of ad revenue is expected to grow to 10%.”
“The smaller niche networks allow advertisers to focus more on ads tailored to these specific audiences.
“Companies are learning that these smaller communities may reach people that are more valuable to their brands. It will someday feel more like information than marketing,” Jeremiah Owyang, a social-networking analyst at Forrester Research.”
In the case of Canadamigos.com, I see two challenges. 1) Maintaining the integrity of the site while growing it’s membership and making sure that there is always relevant content being posted and 2) tapping into marketers who are looking or may be interested in niche vehicles to promote their destination or tourism business to influencers and “low hanging fruit” consumers.
The first challenge is a matter of time. The second challenge also involves time, but it will also be a matter of education and salesmanship. Many small destinations (DMO’s) and some not so small may still be in the dark as to how to use social media to complement their marketing efforts. Furthermore, working with conventional ROI models, they may have difficulty quantifying a social media initiative (unless it’s a straight adveritising/impressions deal). Finally, there’s the issue of time and resources. The ideal arrangement would be for DMO’s or tourism businesses to not only advertise on the site, but more importantly to participate by adding content, communicating with members, etc, developing relationship with them. But this takes time and human input. Someone needs to look after the store. Quoting David Wilson: “The first social media step that many companies take is to launch a blog. The problem with this idea is committing to producing content on a consistent basis. A company’s blog that hasn’t been updated for weeks or months is perceived worse than a company that doesn’t have a blog.” DMO’s and tourism businesses (that are not already considering) will need to create new positions like “resident blogger” or “chief social media officer” (Wilson)
I look forward to barinstorm with all of you during the summit and thank you in advance for your input.
Saludos,
Jaime
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