Interesting findings from PCW and Ypartnership

August 29, 2008

Ypartnership has released an expanded summary of the findings that they and PhoCusWright have found on the “Next Generation Traveler”

These findings are really inline with the projections of current online usage, here is a summary of the key stats for the next gen traveler:

They are smart (30% with a 4-year college degree; 20% with at least one year of graduate school)
Affluent (30% of households with an annual income in excess of $100,000)
Multi Generational (50% Echo Boomers (18-28 years) and 50% Baby Boomers (43 to 61 years)
71% use the Internet to search for travel information
41% have taken a virtual tour of a destination
38% have built a trip itinerary online
58% cite the “ability to check the best fares/rates” as the most important feature in a travel web site
37% report being influenced by personal comments read on social networking or travel advisory web sites, but they frequent social networking sites such as MySpace.com (56%) and Facebook (30%) more than travel advisory or review sites such as TripAdvisor (14%);
33% have authored and posted a travel review online.

The summary goes on to state that these consumers are less likely to be influenced by advertising messages. With all of these stats taken into consideration, it is no surprise that the travel industry is in a battle against comoditization.

As Jeremiah Owyang points out with Facebook’s new advertising model, there are new attempts to engage this demographic, and advertisers are striving to penetrate this attention lacking group. These trends are leading me to believe that travel has to really engage the senses and imagination of this new market in order to prompt buying action. A recent interview with Jess Butcher, head of partnerships at online travel experiences company isango!, shed some light into this area.

She was asked what was on the horizon for travel, here is what she said:

“The marriage of ‘where-to-go’ inspiration and commerce functionality is still one that no one’s quite nailed online just yet and we really believe the opportunity here could be immense. There are an increasing number of inspiration-style tools that take activity preference and demographic-detail into consideration, but they tend to culminate in standard flight/ hotel/ car booking engines. There’s a proliferation of new community style-sites, technologies, widgets and trip planning tools emerging right now – from which we expect to see a bit of boom and bust cycle – but looking forward to seeing the winners.”

I agree, there is an ever increasing decline in what hotel, which airline, and which car rental company consumers choose, and more of a focus on “I did the most crazy tour when I was in ____________, check out this amazing tour website!”

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Written by User Image Phil (Who am I?) · Filed Under Marketing 2.0 | 1 Comment

The Top 27 Free Press Release Sites

June 20, 2008

The Internet has changed how the press looks for and finds news stories. While the conservative news industry is slowly warming up to this fancy thing call the Internet, there are a number of Press Release sites that allow you electronically submit articles and even embed links!!

The fact is, the written press seams to have more credibility then online news and media distributors (for now ) and having your company featured in an official press article is still great, free publicity. So for now you have to play their game.

Here are a number of Free Press Release Sites that I use to help promote Rezgo, and hopefully get picked up by official news agencies. If you don’t get featured by a large news agency, at least these sites will help your rank with Google. They are geared for the Tour and Travel industry and some may require payment, but most are free and generalized enough to help any company promote their press releases. Enjoy, and let me know if you have any others.

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Written by User Image Phil (Who am I?) · Filed Under Marketing 2.0, Rants and Reviews | 5 Comments

What to do when selling to VCs?

June 16, 2008

I have been out of the blogosphere lately, and for good reason (read excuse ;). I have been working to promote the latest edition of Rezgo.com, the online tour and activity booking solution, and I have had some success! We were recently notified that we were selected for PhoCusWright’s Travel Innovation Summit and in B.C. we are one of 30 companies to make it to the third round of the New Ventures B.C. innovation competition. So great news all around!
Being thrown to the mercy of of lawyers, VCs and CEOs can be a tad intimidating, so a bit of research into VCs, Angel Investors and the like was needed, and here are some of my favorite resources:

http://www.vcfodder.com/
- A straightforward look at the world of entrepreneurship and venture capital.
http://www.sfentrepreneur.com/how-to-guides/
- Great how-to guides on legal, marketing, presenting etc
http://www.thefunded.com/
- An online community of entrepreneurs to research, rate, and review funding sources worldwide.
http://fundfindr.com/
- The elevator speech meets YouTube, also a NVBC competitor.

If you know of any others, let me kow, but I hope this list can help all of you out there that are in a similar situation.

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Is there life for traditional marketing?

May 20, 2008

With the level of directly traceable and testable configurations that are available with online advertising, does traditional media stand a chance?

TravelMole just brought this interesting article to light. It turns out that for the first time ever, online ad spend has ‘outpaced’ traditional spending at $8 billion last year. It is projected that this will continue to increase to $22.8 Billion by 2012.

While this article does not contrast these findings with the dollar amount spent on traditional media over the past few years, it does raise an interesting point, where does traditional media fit in?

I found an interesting article on the IAB site that displays advertising spending trends over a 13 year period. As no surprise, internet has been adapted much more rapidly than either broadcast or cable advertising. Definitely worth checking out. In 2007 Internet advertising has surpassed both Radio and Cable network ad spend.

So what will the future look like for the remaining top media providers? Here are some trends that I feel will negatively effect the penetration of traditional advertisers in the next 10-15 years:

The Attention Economy - Gone are the passive zombies media bystanders. With TV on demand, video websites and Tevo, consumers now get what they what when they want, and commercials are not part of it!
Newspapers - Great for regionalized penetration, but with no instant feedback, and a low traceableness, not to mention the lowing of readership, the skies look gray for the traditional printed newspaper.

What do you think the future of news paper and TV distribution is? Is is a good complement, or will it eventually disappear?

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Written by User Image Phil (Who am I?) · Filed Under Marketing 2.0, Rants and Reviews | 1 Comment

The long tail of travel - Niche tour operators can now unite

April 30, 2008

The longtail concept has been around for a long time. Chris Anderson popularized it in his creatively name book “The Long Tail“. The Wikipedia definition is that “The distribution and inventory costs of these [longtail] businesses allow them to realize significant profit out of selling small volumes of hard-to-find items to many customers, instead of only selling large volumes of a reduced number of popular items. The group of persons that buy the hard-to-find or “non-hit” items is the customer demographic called the Long Tail.”

This concept has been applied to the tourism industry, and there is quite a fit. PhoCusWright brought this to our attention at the Sept 2007 conference in Florida, and Alan A Lew wrote a great article on it in 2006.

In Mr. Lews article he makes some claims about the long tail market. “The long tail market has huge potential. However it is highly distributed and highly individualized. Therefore, accessing it requires marketing and distribution channels that are both broad and deep. To sell relatively less popular products requires being able to store smaller inventories and being able to minimize distribution costs.”

Being in a business that is attempting to help small and niche tour and activity operators, these books and articles have influenced my business development. In an attempt to provide a solution that encompasses all of the many facets and challenges for marketing and distributing a long tail tour providers product, we have revamped our product, Rezgo.

We are releasing Rezgo Free on June 1st, and are confident that this solution will consolidate the long tail of tour and activities.

We recognized that suppliers needed more than simple book-now functionality; we found that they need a tour management and distribution suite that centralized all of their sales channels. We found that tour operators were more concerned with power and simplicity then with a “feature rich, function less” system.

Rezgo Free eliminates all of the traditional barriers that tour operators face when trying to adapt a new technology. It is intuitive, 100% free to sell products through their website, and it also has the capabilities to increase distribution and consolidate all of their sales channels. This will help ease companies into structuring their products for online sales, and will give them a platform to grow their business with expanded Internet distribution and marketing.

Offering this solution for free is a challenging proposition for the business stake holders, but empowering tour operators to standardize their products will help the long tail of tourism flourish. What do you think? You can find more information on www.rezgo.com.

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Written by User Image Phil (Who am I?) · Filed Under Marketing 2.0, Misc, Travel Distribution, Travel Technology | 5 Comments

What are the latest buzz words?

April 25, 2008

I am not sure if it is a case of, once you hear it once you notice it more often, but I have noticed an increased frequency of Travel Industry buzz words that have been popping up everywhere. Do you know what I am talking about?

Here are a couple of terms that are really circulating on the news and at conferences. I will also give a brief definition to their intended meaning:

Perfect Storm - It now seams that everything is a perfect storm. Travel agencies needing help, airlines collapsing you name it.Â Here is the Wikipedia definition:

“The phrase refers to the simultaneous occurrence of events which, taken individually, wouldÂ be far less powerful than the result of their chance combination. Such occurrences are rare by their very nature, so that even a slight change in any one event contributing to the perfect storm would lessen its overall impact. “

Walled Garden -Â This term is of particular interest to me, I am all for breaking down the walls (I recently bought a piece of the Berlin wall This term is popping up in the context of media restrictions, inter-industry collaboration and especially the Tele-Com industry. Breaking down restrictions on collaboration is a trend that next generation businesses are going to have to adapt to. As Don Tapscott points out in Wikinomics “If you don’t stay current with customers, they invent around you”. This is in reference to restrictions on products that don’t allow for collaboration and modification.

Here is the Widipedia definition of Walled Garden:

“A walled garden, with regards to media content, refers to a closed set or exclusive set of information services provided for users (a method of creating a monopoly or securing an information system).”

So I hand it over to you, what BUZZ terms have you been hearing lately? Any interesting new ones?

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Written by User Image Phil (Who am I?) · Filed Under Marketing 2.0, Rants and Reviews | 1 Comment

Alexa Rank Spank?

April 18, 2008

Recently Alexa made a “big change” to their ranking algorithm. They now “aggregate data from multiple sources to give you a better indication of website popularity among the entire population of Internet users.”

I know this sounds like a better way of calculating an accurate rank, however, there is no knowing what “additional sources” they are using. You used to be able to calculate their bias based on the fact that you knew that their rankings came from users with the Alexa toolbar. You were able to gage the type of user that would have such a device, and have a better understanding of your ranking amongst those users.

Where do these new sources of user information come from?

Most of the sites that I work with have dropped significantly:

Alexa Rankings	Before	After
http://www.tourismtide.com	460,000	1,972,759
http://www.rezgo.com	180,000	201,794
http://www.sentias.com	320,000	304,776
http://www.tipsfromthetlist.com	260,000	314,818

Conclusions:

Where ever Alexa is getting their Internet usage stats from now, I can tell that they have less of an interest in Tourism Technology then the former data pool.
Changing your domain (tourismtide.blogspot.com to tourismtide.com) can be painful. Both my Alexa and my Technorati were destroyed.

Have you noticed a change in your rank? Do you know where Alexa is getting their new user statistics from?

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Written by User Image Phil (Who am I?) · Filed Under Marketing 2.0, Rants and Reviews | Leave a Comment

Second Life - Life for Tourism?

March 12, 2008

Marketing Travel In Second Life

Daniele Mancini, corporate E-Business Director, Costa Crociere S.p.A. had a great presentation at PhoCusWright. He opened my eyes to the level of large corporate web 2.0 marketing.

Costa is a massive cruise supplier, they have 18 ships and 11 more being built. They are pioneers (for a large company anyways) in utilizing online marketing to connect with their consumers. Their b2c marketing efforts included blogs, Youtube contests, online community interaction, and a Second Life presence including owning property and cruise ships.

This post focuses on their Second Life efforts. Costa utilized this new world in an innovative way, they reproduced a press conference and ship launch within Second Life and paired it with a real world launch, fireworks and all.

Their Second Life developments included:

B2C

Offer a virtual experience for residents
events
contests

B2B

Training for travel agents
Lesson for 15 minutes
Guided tour of the shop

Kevin May, editor of Travolution had the insight to ask â€œSo ow many people attended the launch?â€ There was not a quantitative answer, but Daniele claimed that Second Life â€œoffers good value for advertisingâ€ when compared to traditional media. Daniele then stated that he has changed his Secondlife marketing efforts from B2C to strictly B2B. This hardly seems like there was a good ROI if they have canceled their B2C campaign all together.

Gregory Turley, CEO of CarTrawler.com was discussing this online marketing phenomenon with me; we both agreed that the people who invest much time in Secondlife, are probably not likely to be interested in the Travel Industry. I pointed out that most of the people that are integrated in a Second Life may be more interested in technology and have less of an interest in real world experiences, but maybe I am wrong. What do you think? Have you found that Second Life offers a good return on your marketing investment?

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Tourism Meatball Sundae?

January 24, 2008

Yesterday I attended Seth Godin’s webinar “Meatball Sundae“, thanks to Darren Cronian for the invite! Seth has the gift of making metaphors that people can really bite into, and this one was no exception ;). His main point is that “it is not sufficient to do what you used to do (meatballs) and dress it up (sundae)”. He covered 14 current trends that are revolutionizing marketing and the internet, so I thought of how these trends could be used within the Tourism Industry. Please let me know if you have any ideas as well.

So here they are, the 14 (he actually gave 15) trends that are revolutionizing marketing, with a tourism cherry on top:

Direct Communication - Gone are the days of “if you make it, they will come” people want involvement and feedback, they want to connect and have relationships. If your company doesn’t have a way to connect with their customers, you better start!
Amplification of Consumers - “You might as well assume that everyone you meet works for the New York Times” That is a challenging thought, you have to expect customers to write about you, and give them something to write about (good hopefully)
Authentic Stories - People most often don’t buy based on stats and figures (I try to) but rather buy on stories. Your brand needs to have a consistent story that it is sharing from multiple angles. Your frontline staff has to be consistent with your advertising media.
Speed - This current generation is used to instant gratification. We want to see results now! If your company takes 3 days to go over a reservation or booking and your competitor can guarantee a booking or reservation instantly, well then your company will loose. Online reservations are a first step!
Long Tail - Unique is cool, in the travel world doing the same tour as everyone else is passÃ©. Customers want to have options that cater to their own desires and needs as opposed to a generic bulk package that is fine for the norm or average. The travel industry needs to look for ways to tap into the long tail of Tourism.
Outsourcing - If you can lower the operations cost by outsourcing components of your business, you will then have the energy to focus on the marketing of your service / product. This goes beyond developing world call-centres, the opportunities are endless.
The Dicing of Everything - The internet has broke everything into pieces. Customers access your information from multiple avenues, your main page is only one of the doors. This reminds me of my friend Norm Rose’s article on Service Oriented Architecture.
Infinite Choices - How will you stand out? Really, in the last year there are more then 30 new travel sites, what are you doing to get talked about? The internet is really a social buzz network, and if you don’t have bees (unique ‘wow’ point), then you don’t have buzz.
Consumer To Consumer - Again, people want to connect and share experiences and stories, a very successful model is to build the platform and then get out of the way. Can you imagine platform that brings suppliers together with resellers online, connecting that long tail content! (Keep tuning in for more updates…)
Scarce and Abundant - We used to have abundant spare time, now we don’t. Things that were scarce are now abundant (access to information). You again have to really work to differentiate your brand to make it clear that you have a unique selling position, that isn’t a common message.
Big Ideas - Products are now the big ideas, think iPhone, pod hotels, and other industry shakers that are pushing industries in new directions.
Connect With People - Gone are the days of mass ‘dumb’ marketing, sending flyers and spam to unsuspecting victims. People want value and if you can shape your marketing to deliver value, then you get ‘permission marketing’. This can be a witty informative newsletter with customized information, or really anything that you feel your customer will want to have.
The New Rich - Well, this on is catered to a particular segment of our society that I am personally sick of seeing on the front of newspapers and magazines, but Seth is talking about it, so we best pay attention…. If your product is targeted at the next Paris or Britney, they you better be ready for customization and appealing to strange and unique desires.
The New Gatekeepers - Being a gatekeeper isn’t as important as it used to be. It is more important to be a leader as opposed to being a leader. People will follow those that they look up to, and not wait for traditional channel to grant him/her access to mass media (think Mr Scobble).
Ubiquity or Scarcity - You need to choose, if your product or service is in between, then you will not profit. You need to have a set position to either drive demand, or make yourself a household name.