Travelblather

Let’s call a spade a spade. A Public Relations (PR) company is there to ensure that its clients get maximum positive exposure – often at the expense of their client’s competitors (either intentionally or otherwise.) That’s what they are paid to do. I often feel that travel writers, editors and travel bloggers forget that. Ultimately a PR’s role is about influencing the supposedly ‘impartial' editor/writer/blogger to the advantage of their clients.

Right. Now we’ve got that out of the way… a little history. Fairytale or hardcore documentary? I leave it to you to decide:

A good few decades back, before PR really existed in the travel sector and way before the internet, the way travel cos got themselves into the travel sections of newspapers and magazines was advertising. They paid top whack to put ads next to relevant travel editorial. And in those days it worked. There were few other places potential customers could read about travel or find information about travel cos to book their holidays with. As a punter, I remember these days. You’d tear out and keep the travel section. Not for the features, but for the ads with phone numbers of travel cos. So you could call them up from work on your lunch hour and get quotes for your trip to Thailand or wherever. Anyone else remember?

In those days I don’t know how travel writers got their trips organised for them so they could write them up. Heck, they might have had enough budget to just pay and go on them – but I reckon that’s unlikely. I imagine that the all-powerful travel editor would choose a particular travel co whose products he liked the look of and call them and ask for a free trip so he could write about them. And with the sort of clout his publication had, I imagine they were only too happy to help. For travel editors and writers it must have been happy days. Good pay, nice trips, decent budget for creating really great looking travel sections. And they could write whatever they felt like about these trips too. (Is THIS the job that the wannabee travel writer/blogger aspires to? A dream that no longer exists?)

And then PR came along.

The new middleman (or very often, woman) sold in easily to the frustrated other travel cos who never seemed to get featured in the editorial sections of travel supplements. “Pay us and we’ll do the legwork hassling editors to get you published. And we’ll also make sure they publish the right kind of things about you too.”

Perhaps oddly, editors allowed themselves to be persuaded by the PR people. Is this testament to editors being lazy or PR people being great sales people? Maybe it’s a bit of both.

One way or another the PR pitch worked. Really well. More and more travel cos took on PR agencies to push their products at editors. PR people developed new tools – ‘press trips’; ‘press releases’ - ways to show off their clients' products in carefully controlled environments. They started to more or less write the stories themselves, doing more and more of the journalist's job. And all of it was about influencing editorial impartiality. Making sure their client got the right kind of coverage in the editorial space. Slowly but surely PR influence grew. And, nobody really took much notice. Eventually any travel co wanting to get noticed by travel editors needed to spend cash on PR. Otherwise they just wouldn’t get a look in.

And. If you were a travel co then - where would you spend your hard earned marketing budget? On really expensive adverts – which only ever seemed to get more and more pricey. Or on a PR agency who seemed able to get you the right kind of mentions in the editorial bits of the travel section relatively easily? Particularly as a mention in the editorial chunk of the paper was potentially far better - because implicitly it suggested endorsement by the publication. (It felt like a recommendation - from someone who really knew what they were talking about.)

There was no competition. PR won out over advertising hands down.

I think the net result was that travel cos switched their spending from traditional advertising to PR.

Now I’d be the first to admit that the internet has played the biggest part in killing the traditional advertising model for printed travel supplements and magazines which has led in many peoples' eyes to a deterioration in the quality and the breadth of travel editorial. But I think PR has really quickened the process.

- More money spent on PR by travel cos = less money spent on advertising.

- Less money spent on advertising = smaller editorial budgets.

- Smaller editorial budgets = travel editors all the more keen to take content written by or with help from PR agencies (because it's cheaper to do so).

- Smaller editorial budgets = less pay for travel freelancers, less cash for in-depth research.

- Ultimately… smaller editorial budgets = poorer quality travel writing.

Ever wondered why large chunks of travel sections are ‘charticles’ – Top 20 this, Top 50 that? Ever wondered why only a tiny minority of travel features are overtly critical? Ever wondered why some destinations seem to get written about time and time again whilst others hardly get a mention?

I think this is at least one of the reasons.

Do you agree?

Image: Flicker user lululemon

Many people would say that price comparison websites like say Travelsupermarket.com; skyscanner or carrentals.co.uk do customers a huge service – by allowing them to choose the cheapest deals without having to do a stack of time consuming research. At its most basic level this is absolutely the case.

But, they focus people totally and utterly on price. Mercilessly.

By exhibiting a bunch of deals side by side with virtually no branding alongside they are a brand marketer’s nightmare. (All that cash spent carefully trying to differentiate your product from a competitor’s is just stripped away and levelled down to a price with little else.) And they quickly drive customers to think about nothing but the best price. Ever found yourself thinking 'hang on we're talking about £5 difference in price here!'

Some comparison sites do add back some extras into the mix – but the ultimate aim is to smooth all the products into virtual ubiquity so that people can make swift choices between them – driven by price and nothing else.

I wonder how great they are for customers too? This really commoditised marketplace is about cutting cost rather than innovation. Everyone is effectively selling the same stuff and spending much of their energy on the supply chain – cutting costs remorselessly to be able to compete more effectively on price.

But it’s not just about price is it?

A holiday, a flight, a hire car – all of these things are about way more than just a simple product and a price. (Particularly if things go wrong!)  I think it’s time people started really thinking about customer service and what it could add back into the equation.

I look a lot at the financial services industry and laugh at the idiocy of it all at the moment. So crap, so commoditised, so tied down by regulation, so stiffled of innovation. Ironically, all the banks have to differentiate themselves with is customer service. So they try remorselessly to convince us that they are 'on our side'. And fail to deliver because they don't make real fundamental changes to the way they  do business. If you're going to do customer service you have to do it from the top to the bottom of a business and be fanatical. Not enough to trot out some old tired cliches like the banks do.

But - travel is a 'real' people business and the touch points for delighting customers on say a package holiday are myriad. Customer service should be absolutely critical. What would it cost to add proper customer service back into the mix? A price differential of say £10 onto a booking of £100? I have no idea, but if you did it the smartest possible way and used technology to do it really efficiently… how much would it really cost? And - how much harder would it be for a competitor to copy you if you did?

The internet-fueled obsession with lowest cost and lack of balls to stand out from the crowd and say in the words of certain beer brand ‘we are reassuringly expensive’ is I think slowly screwing the industry.

And you know what, price comparison sites are so DULL. Holidays should be fun, inspiring and exciting - and that includes the purchase of them. Price matters... but there should be so much more to buying a holiday.

The only brand I can think of really selling on service right now is Virgin Holidays. Can you think of others?

Would you pay more for better service or does it have little or no influence on your booking habits these days?

I just checked - I published 23 posts in 2011. Just about one a fortnight. I had some help from some great guests too.

So, looking back, which of my posts do I think are really insightful? Which ones do I think I'd tell a newcomer to Travelblather to read? Here's my top 5 for 2011. Interestingly(?) they are often posts that didn't get that many comments. Perhaps because they are more distilled and emphatic with less room for discussion? What do you think?

Free Sucks - Seriously I hate it
This theme percolates through much of my writing here on Travelblather. The idea that free is always good is frankly lazy and stupid. It typifies the mindset of the dumb consumer endlessly feeding on stuff that they are thrown - just because they can. With no thought about why it's free and what the implications are longer term of accepting it. Free is often really, really bad. This post explains why.

Forget Content - Think Curation and Connections
One of my first posts of 2011, this I think remains pretty pertinent - why create yet more content just because you can if someone else has done a great job already? With the zillions of new pages of content being added all the time online, search engines are struggling to make sense of it all. Maybe real people hold the final answer!

Choose Your 'Friends' Wisely
Many commentators suggest that social media came of age in 2011. Did it? I'm not so sure. But one thing is for certain, our online connections will have increasing importance as we go forward - in all sorts of ways. Some good, some bad. Maybe we need to think more carefully about who we are 'friends' with online and why?

Will Quality Content Beat Social Connections?
Just one comment on this post. But for me it's a bit of a call to arms for content creators. I feel strongly that the skills we possess are so undervalued in the online world. I remain convinced - as I say in this post - that quality, niche content written by experts will outlast the current excitement about social media and the social graph.

Endemic Corruption Or Just A Travel Press Trip?
OK. This one did garner a lot of comments (over 50). As often happens when the comments snowball, they went off topic quite a bit. There's some really interesting innovation going on with the travel blogging community as they seek to monetize their work more aggressively. I admire their boldness, but because travel bloggers are publishers as well as writers they risk alienating their readers if they get too caught up in chasing the bucks too overtly.

Thanks everyone who has read and commented in the last year. It's been great fun!

Any posts you found particularly useful? Anything you'd like to see more or less of in 2012? I'd love to hear what you think.

I’ve blathered a bit already about ‘free’.

I don’t buy this myth precipitated by internet companies and web savants – (Google, Chris Anderson etc) that somehow content just arrives by magic online with no cost associated with it. And somehow people make lots of money. It seems to me that almost all of the time, the people who create the free content (publishers, academics, enthusiasts) don’t make the money. It’s the tech companies that package and deliver it – think iTunes, Google again and so on.

I think 2012 is going to be a really interesting year for content and for monetization.

From my experience of talking to big media organisations and one-(wo)man blog operations alike, advertising alone usually does not pay your way. There are too many pages online chasing our eyeballs for the necessary scale to be achieved. And of course the number of pages keeps on and on growing.

As the world economy continues to slump, publishers – small and large – are just not going to be able to keep funding the creation and curation of free content in the vague hope that some day they will make money.

So... There’s pressure to monetize like never before.

Then there’s the Google panda update. For those who aren’t familiar with this, Google made quite radical changes to the way they rank pages about 6 months ago. The key reason for these changes was to try and stamp out the really poor quality content that clogged up search results. Content farms that published 100s even 1000s of pages every day using search term research to create poorly written pages of content that did just enough to make Google think they were decent. (Here’s how you do make money from advertising – by creating monstrous scale – and not giving a toss about readers.)

Panda kind of worked – a lot of the crap has dropped right off the search results. Many bonafide companies would argue they have been unfairly demoted too however, whilst big brands seem to have done rather well.

So... Quality content and a well-known, trusted brand matter like never before.

For the travel sector (and probably many others) I now see a really interesting race taking place between travel publishers and travel businesses.

Travel Publishers
The free content (aka advertising) model doesn’t work, so publishers (newspaper travel sections, travel magazines) will have to find other revenue streams for their online operations. They could put up paywalls and charge you to read. Some have done that – but general consensus would seem to be it’s hardly delivering vast revenues.

So, either the quality of their free content will have to diminish (they’ll cut costs even more to try and at least break even with what ad revenue they are achieving) or they’ll have to sell us stuff much more overtly. Maybe a combination of both. Think more Top 20-style charticles with more overt ‘buy this holiday now’ messages alongside. (We could get to a point where the website and the print editions look increasingly different as a result. In fact I’d argue for this model to work, they should be. Radically so.)

Travel Businesses
There has been much talk of brands as publishers. The idea that online, anyone can publish stuff, so why not be a publisher too? But up to now I don’t see many that have taken this idea really seriously. By this I mean doing far more than sticking up some destination guides and trying to get customers to add reviews. This could all change with the impact of Google’s panda update. Think of the typical online travel agent (OTA) (someone like Expedia) or the metasearch engine (someone like Travelsupermarket.com). I know nothing about the SEO strategy of these businesses, but I’d bet they’ve spent a lot on old school SEO over the years – using link building and all the other smart ways that SEO people know to ensure that they stay top of search results... with far, far less investment in quality content. But, me-too bog-standard content isn’t working so well now. Google is pushing people to create better, more authoritative content by implementing the panda update. The quality of its content will increasingly impact how high up the search results a website is. The smart online travel businesses (big and small) are beginning to get this. They are investing in really good, well written content. And if they are smarter still they will keep investing.

What I find fascinating about this situation is that travel companies have a huge advantage over publishers. They have a business model that works. They sell holidays/flights etc. and make money. The publishers don’t (yet).

Who is best placed to dominate in the travel sector online ultimately?

Can the publishers plug product into their online offering without giving the impression that their hard-earned reputation for impartiality is now worthless? Conversely can the travel companies publish really excellent unbiassed content without reverting to their standard mantra of buy, buy, buy?

I think 2012 could be the year we really see.

Image  aveCrosby

Twitter on a Sunday afternoon. I shouldn’t do it. But I did and found this tweet from @rafat (Rafat Ali) the guy who set up Paidcontent.

“Corruption endemic in travel industry, free travel junkets that FTC should *really* crack down on: http://bit.ly/rVlIah”

The link is to a page on Keith Jenkin’s Velvet Escape blog about a new program he has launched called iambassador.

Quoting from this page:

“The iambassador model involves a collaboration between travel bloggers and the tourism industry. The product can be utilised by tourism boards, tour operators, cruise companies, airlines and/or hotel chains to market a specific destination or travel theme (adventure, cruises, gastronomy, safaris, city trips or beach holidays to name a few).”

The benefits to the tourist board etc:
“iambassador maximises the value generated by blog trips by turning the bloggers into digital ambassadors…. The model involves a collaboration between influential travel bloggers and their blog trip sponsors and is designed to generate a social media ‘blitz’ centred on the destination as well as increase brand visibility of the sponsors.”

I pointed out to Rafat on twitter that press trips (‘junkets’ in his parlance) happen in many industries (the motoring writer gets loaned the new Porsche for a weekend, he doesn’t have to buy one to write his review – is this corrupt?). And that in travel, the cost of actually experiencing a destination is so much that if a travel writer or travel publisher paid for the trips that got covered in their publication they would run at a huge loss.

Rafat pointed to the first example of the iambassador trip – a sponsored blog trip with Visit Jordan.

I pointed out that if the bloggers disclose that their trip is hosted by Visit Jordan what’s the problem. The reader can make up their own mind.

Frankly for those of us who write about travel for a living (bloggers, travel writers whatever) this is a very old debate. If we didn’t have press trips there’d be very little good quality travel content at all anywhere. (I’m not condoning the current situation by saying this. I just don’t really see another way right now.)

But Rafat went on to say (and here I really part company with him):

“I am saying even disclosure isn't enough. corruption disclosed isn't corruption corrected”

I just don’t see corruption here. Corruption implies that the bloggers will intentionally mislead their readers – by for example saying positive things about stuff that’s actually not that good.

But then again… Keith talks explicitly about this as a ‘marketing exercise’. Here’s the text of his tweet back to Rafat:

“i appreciate your comments. However, this is a fully disclosed sponsored marketing campaign, not a free junket.”

To me as a writer employed several days a week by a marketing agency I completely get this language and approach. I can see straight away how for a tourist board like Visit Jordan it has real value.

But as someone who still thinks of himself as a travel writer I'm less sure. It’s incredibly overt. I think Keith should be applauded for his openness. But if I was a reader of Velvet Escape… how would I feel if I read that page? Maybe I'm just being an old travel writer here? Perhaps people who read blogs like Keith's (which is full of genuinely useful, quality travel features and advice) couldn't care less.

For me though this more overtly commercial approach is perhaps the final outcome for free travel content online. Reader… you come a long way down the list of priorities these days. (But what do you expect? You’re getting free content!)

This more overt commercial focus is not unique to travel bloggers. I know of at least one major UK national newspaper that is actively looking to tie sale of product (flights, hotels etc) more directly to its travel editorial – because ad revenue alone just doesn’t stack up.

So… expect to see a more ‘buy this now’ calls to action around travel content in the future.

And expect to see the divide between promotion and editorial become ever thinner.

And consider… would you prefer content farm crap written by a student who has never visited a destination (but who is of course 'impartial'!) or content written by a potentially ‘corrupt’ travel writer who got a free trip to the place?

Pic by Flickr user: Mike Licht