Travelblather

I just found this. It's pretty much everything you need to know about how to get blogging. 35 steps.

And all of them very important! Some basic stuff and some more advanced stuff too. I learned quite a bit from it myself. (If anyone from Typepad is reading this, your days are numbered. I am moving to WordPress soon.)

I spent an interesting evening this week at the regular Travolution Question Time event. There was a slight ulterior motive for being there as iCrossing who I'm currently working for sponsored the event.

One of the illustrious panel was Richard Carrick CEO of Hoseasons, who made some really pragmatic and insightful comments. Here's one:

"If we improved our conversion rate by 1% that would do the deal for us. We have enough visitors to our website, we just need to convert them better."

I'm paraphrasing slightly from my scribbled notes, but the point he makes is so valid. No matter how well optimised your website is if you're not converting your visitors, you're not making any money. For Richard 2009 will be "all about conversion".

And then a few days ago, an interesting news story about Thomas Cook (on Travolution too by coincidence). Thomas Cook's new starfish ecommerce platform has led to a 300% increase in bookings in the three weeks since launch. Now take this percentage with a pinch of salt... three weeks is hardly a long time, particularly at this time of year when traditionally bookings are pretty slow. But a big leap nonetheless.

According to the article, improved search and compare functionality is a core element of the new starfish platform and one area it's helped improve significantly is customer reviews. Apparently 300,000 customers have posted reviews to Thomas Cook.com in the last year.

I feel increasingly sure that Reviews (or UGC as it's often called) are a key driver for conversion.

Thomas Cook's e-commerce director Russell Gould seems to think so too: "There's nothing more powerful than endorsements
from other customers," he said in this piece. Tui's Sandra Leonhard has made similar proclamations of late.

So, Richard, in the unlikely event you are reading this... consider UGC. Not an easy thing to integrate into a site, but it should definitely be on the list.

And that was where this post was going to end... but then I started looking at the Thomas Cook site.

I have spent a good 20 minutes on it and I have found not one single review. There are lots of Ratings - but no actualy comments from customers that I can find at all.

Or was this a complete non-story? 

[Disclosure: Hoseasons is an iCrossing client]

VJAM Learning #4: Making it completely personalisable

The web is getting more personalisable by the day. I don't visit websites one by one anymore. I use my Netvibes page to pull in RSS feeds for me. Lots of other people use iGoogle, Microsoft has its equivalent, Live. (And as you see from that link, I can make my page public too and share it.)

This trend will only increase. The vast chaos of information out there in cyberspace is useless to me unless I can find the stuff that I'm looking for and organise it easily and efficiently.

You can already get lots of widgets to stick on a Netvibes page or iGoogle. A widget is smarter than an RSS feed - it's a bit of code that you can integrate into the page. It offers more customisation. You for example use a weather widget to give you weather info for the next five days for wherever you live. Other handy widgets include one that gives you your to do list from your Outlook, one that pulls in your webmail.  

So the future of websites for say Virgin Atlantic is not just about Virgin-Atlantic.com. It's also very much about creating widgets that people can stick on personal start pages too.

This is particularly true for existing Virgin customers - especially the frequent flyers. You don't need the background detail about brand and service and product if you've flown a few times before with the company. You just want routes and deals for pre-purchase, and updates about your flight post purchase and before travel.

So if I were Virgin Atlantic, I'd focus on creating a simple, elegant main site that promotes the brand, service and products for new customers (yeah not that easy I know!) and then some really smart, easy to use widgets for regular customers too.

Maybe at some point in the future websites as we know them won't exist anymore. We'll just have smart applications that we can add to our own start pages - customisable any way we want them.

Continuing my hunt for the ultimate Travel Inspiration Engine.

I just found Tripbase. It features a Destination Finder on the home page which makes recommendations based on 22 million traveller reviews and 3000 travel blogs and websites (if you believe what it says). I wonder if it queries the TripAdvisor database?

Anyway... you plug in your dates for travel, departure airport (in my case London Gatwick) and then you have five sliders - Nightlife, Dining, Shopping, Nature, Attractions. Which you set relative to the amount of each you want in your ideal holiday. Easy to use, but a tad meaningless.

I just pushed the sliders along in fairly random fashion, chose a week long trip in early January... and hit the button.

And the site returned a bunch of places in Australia. Hmmm. For a seven day trip from the UK leaving in three weeks.

According to the About page:

Cutting edge? Only information that's valuable to me? I don't think so.

VJAM Learning #3: Know me for who I am
The first session I sat in on at the VJAM was suggested by Peter Parkes who works for We Are Social specialists in helping brands engage with Social Media.

His point was simple but for me quite brilliant. Wouldn't it be great if those of us who travel often could have a data-set of our preferences that we could allow travel companies to access so we don't have to re-key the same old info all the time. A kind of v-card for travel preferences.

This problem of constantly entering personal info to gain access to websites. I don't have a Flickr account because I just never get around to opening up a Yahoo ID.  Open Id is the most widely used attempt at a solution (I think). It's an open source project and a great idea. But I've not seen that many sites using it yet.

So how about data portability for travel sites? Instead of telling your different frequent flyer clubs that you prefer a window seat on short haul and an isle seat on long haul every time you join a new one, just click on your 'TravelID' and it's done for you. Instead of having to tell a tour operator site that you don't have kids and you like adventurous holidays with a bit of beach thrown in each time you query their site for holiday suggestions, just click on your 'TravelID' and the info is pre-populated.

Ideally the user would be able to designate different levels of access too - so brands that you trust you'd give full data to about all your preferences, those you don't just the more basic stuff.

And... how about then matching my profile to similar profiles and making a few different suggestions too. I touched on the need for this 'all knowing randomness' in my Inspire Me post earlier. Sometimes trying something new is a great idea - so being offered something a little different as well as the obvious 'best' choice for me based on my profile would be great. 

A little choice is a nice thing... too much choice is totally debilitating.