May 2006 Archives

Here is a warning to travel companies desperate to talk about the next stage of the internet’s extraordinary growth – one particularly company will try and stop you.

The internet has been heaving with comments from irate folk in the last day or so after it emerged US firm O’Reilly attempted to stop the IT@Cork event in Ireland from using the phrase Web 2.0 for one of its half-day conferences.

O’Reilly claims it “coined” the phrase during a brainstorming session in 2003 and is now trying to protect it from use in other conferences through a so-called Service Mark [read Wikipedia definition]

Cue much mirth in some quarters and incredulity in others about how a company can attempt to stop organisations using the name of what is actually just a concept, rather than brand or product name.

[Read O’Reilly’s explanation on its Blog and the dozens of – often hilarious – comments]

In the meantime O’Reilly has relented somewhat, “agreeing that IT@Cork can use the Web 2.0 name this year”.

It will be interesting to see if 1) the application for a Service Mark is turned down by the US authorities or 2) O’Reilly quietly withdraws the application in the wake of the verbal thrashing it has received in the past few days.

Right, time to continue proof reading the next edition of Travolution, number 4.0. [We’re allowed to call it that]

[More Web 2.0 on the Blog here]

Kevin May, editor, Travolution

To celebrate ten years of online travel in our September edition, Travolution is looking for the most important people in the industry over the last decade. Would Lastminute.com's Brent Hoberman or Barry Diller make your list?

[Read our original post here]

read more | digg story

Here’s a question for all those travel companies trying to boost their site in the organic search results page: what if instead of trying to figure out how search engines work, we all changed our focus to look more closely at what search engines want?

Users type queries into a search engine. A successful engine must provide the user with a list of relevant answers, because if the responses are not relevant then the user will quickly find a new search engine.

In an industry such as travel there are many competing sites, so the search engines also have to find a way to measure the quality of the sites.

Websites need to find a way to show that they are the best quality, relevant site for a particular keyword. To do this they need to differentiate themselves from their peers and stand out from the crowd.

How can a website stand out from the crowd? Well, one way for sites to stand out is through branding. Another way to do it is through what we call Industry Envy.

Industry Envy is when your site includes a unique and distinct tool or service that your peers in your industry envy. As the travel industry is notoriously incestuous, any new services or tools appearing on travel websites do tend to get picked up on by peers very fast. The more your peers acknowledge something of worth on your site, the higher the quality of your site.

So why exactly does it help a site to develop one of these tools and put it online? There are three major reasons.

Firstly, search engines, particularly Google, take incoming links as an important marker of quality. The more impressive your tool or service, the more likely people are to link to it. Google is already time stamping changes both to sites and to the footprints of sites, so that the more links your site attracts, the higher relevance and quality that search engine will attribute to your site

Secondly, if your tool is envied within the industry, then the links to your tool from other sites within your industry will have high keyword relevance. It’s important to note that it is not your consumers that are important here, but rather your envious peers.

Thirdly, a site containing a tool that the industry envies will naturally receive an increased amount of traffic. In the near future Google are likely to start using traffic patterns to determine site quality, and so the traffic coming to a particular site will gain a crucial importance for ranking, one that will become more important than the number of links on a site.

The last and most crucial question is what makes a successful industry envy tool? Sorry readers, that’s something you’re going to have to figure out for yourself! However, let’s end with a well-known example - Skyscanner.net.

This company’s great innovation was to display all the flights on the database in the form of a graph.

[Click here to see data for London to Rome flights in September]

This makes choosing dates easier for consumers and industry peers alike, and has resulted in increasing numbers of links and traffic to the Skyscanner.net site. Incidentally, the tool may have become a victim of its own success, as it has recently been moved to a page deeper within the site - perhaps due to the costs of running?

Website owners might do better to concentrate on developing the highest quality site within their industry rather than tying themselves up in knots with search engine algorithms.

Toby Kesterton, head of search engine optimisation, LeadGenerators

A letter, from Andrew Piscina, director at Hybris UK, a business software company.

He writes:

“Few people will have fallen off their seats when reading about the challenges ahead for Expedia [referring to reports following the online giant’s recent financial results].

“The situation is reversed on the high street, where agents quickly befriend consumers to get that all-important commission. Granted, the high street web presence needs investment, but it’s overcome the first hurdle in recognising changing consumer needs hungry to discover new destinations.

“Online travel agents have basked in the success of the web revolution for too long, but as consumers demand more detailed information on all aspects of a holiday, this single channel to market is insufficient.

“For most UK households, holidays constitute the single biggest annual spend. In our paranoia, we still seek that human interaction to confirm our holiday booking, whether we’ve found our dream destination online, or on the high street.

“And it’s here - the multi-channel element - where Expedia is missing a trick.”

[All Letters to the Editor are posted here, on the Travolution Blog]

Kevin May, editor, Travolution

PING! An email arrives from the Air France press office to tell us about a game on the airline’s website, aimed primarily at UK customers.

The Fly Further initiative is in fact a smart use of technology, thinly disguised as a rather addictive game, created to woo users to the Air France email shot.

Users take control of an Air France aircraft and have to steer it away from turbulence and thunderstorms, but at the same time trying to keep the passengers happy by guiding it into icons representing food and entertainment.

The game ends when the passengers get fed up due to a lack of sustenance or bad weather!

A score is then calculated by how much “distance” from Paris the aircraft managed to fly before the passengers mutinied [Travolution’s record was a dismally short hop to Berlin].

It is actually a rather clever use of e-marketing that will probably grab the airline a few subscribers to its offers bulletin.

[Play the game here]

Kevin May, editor, Travolution

Following yesterday’s post [here] about Google Base we decided to test it out and put Travolution on the system.

[In order to ward off any potential suitors, it is worth adding that Travolution is not for sale!!]

If the Base product is a potential testing ground for a Google travel vertical [commonly known as Troogle] then we wanted to see what it looks and feels like.

Alex Bainbridge from Travel UCD is right in that it allows “users” – in particular, Google members at this stage – to post an item as either a classified product or as a piece of information.

We uploaded a relatively small amount of information about Travolution onto the database, such as the various parts of our brand (magazine, website, Blog and e-news), alongside a synopsis of what we do.

The system allows users to hyperlink directly into further information (the website or the Blog) and the vendor can upload up to ten images to plug the item – in our case the aforementioned products in the Travolution stable.

[See Travolution on Google Base. This link will only work for 31 days in order for Google to ensure all items are current]

Behind the scenes the user can also add a price for the product [please do not answer that one on our behalf], payment and delivery options.

If rumours are correct then travel companies with the capability to upload package holidays [Base uses the RSS and Atom methods] could effectively post hundreds of products into the system, perhaps as a method of offloading so-called distressed inventory.

We’ll report back in 30 days...

Kevin May, editor, Travolution

It appears, perhaps disappointingly, the commotion over Troogle has died down a little in recent weeks.

[Read our most recent Troogle post]

Whether or not this is due to us hacks getting the wrong end of a long and complicated stick remains to be seen. But certainly the industry seemed to get its collective knickers in a twist over it all about a month ago.

At least two industry figures, with more than a passing interest in the Troogle issue, reported back on conversations they have had with Google. They inevitably found themselves being greeted with a stony silence whenever the dreaded T-word was mentioned.

Last week, Thomson online guru Graham Donoghue even made mention of the recent furore – jokingly referencing “some of you in the room” as conspirators in the recent speculation – when he spoke briefly about Google and its future position in the world of online travel.

But, right on cue, PING! The Travolution Blog’s most prolific respondent Alex Bainbridge from Travel UCD, writes with a curious theory of his own.

Google Base, the place where you can “put stuff on Google”, could be a taster for a Troogle-style product, he argues.

The format for Base, which is in an early Beta mode, allows Google members to sell products. It can also be used as an information portal.

Google Base allows feeds into the system for automatically uploading of “items”, such as travel excursions and packages, with a start and end date, location and other details. The sale of individual flights and hotels is currently banned the system.

Alex’s hypothesis is that Google could be testing how travel feeds work on the Base system before eventually rolling it out onto the larger, more robust Troogle platform.

He smells mischief in the air.

[Read Alex’s original post]

In the spirit of research, of course, we are in the process of putting the Travolution brand on Google Base. More to follow…

Kevin May, editor, Travolution

Where would Lastminute.com co-founder Brent Hoberman or Dinesh Dhamija, ex boss of EBookers, figure in a list of the most important people in the history of online travel?

And would David Soskin from Cheapflights, EasyJet’s Stelios Haji-Ioannou or Simon Breakwell from Expedia also make into a Top Ten?

For the September edition of Travolution will be celebrating ten years of online travel and will be producing The Influential Ten – a group of those during the last decade that have had the biggest impact on the online travel industry.

In the coming weeks we will launch an online vote to discover who will make it onto the final ten.

In the meantime you can email Travolution with any suggestions for the shortlist.

Kevin May, editor, Travolution

An interesting story popped up on the BBC News website today about the gaming world and how it also set to become another industry dominated and shaped by consumers themselves.

[Read “User-generated future for gaming”]

Gaming companies are looking to utilise the creative talents of players in order to build storylines, design graphics or create characters.

On the one hand, as one of the commentators suggests, the gaming companies will be saving money by allowing customers to get involved in the development of their multi-million pound businesses.

In the meantime users are made to feel increasingly more like part of a community.

The travel industry is going through a similar renaissance, as talk of Internet 2.0 and the importance of user-generated content gathers pace.

Obviously the likes of destination and hotel review website Trip Advisor will continue thriving on the consumer’s desire to “get involved” with the process of travel.

There are others: TravelIntelligence, which is essentially a hotel booking site that only includes properties recommended by expert travel journalists, and Igougo, to name just two.

But so many conversations tend to lead towards how Site A or Site B will be bringing in some form of user-generated content in the coming months.

It is seen as a vital tool for either establishing or enhancing the relationship between the consumer and the travel provider, whether they are a tour operator, travel agent, airlines or hotel chain.

Interestingly, at the Travolution Summit last month, BT futurologist Ian Pearson spoke of how the gaming industry could be one of the key players in the digital world.

He also said that the travel industry was another business sector that could emerge as a significant participant because of the unique connection it has with its consumers.

Allowing users to generate or influence content is one of many steps that could lead travel to such an esteemed position on decades to come.

Kevin May, editor, Travolution

Alex Bainbridge from Travel UCD [who does actually have a day job, it must be made clear] writes again with a few nominations he’s found since our call for Travolution Neophiliacs.

[See the unofficial launch here]

He writes:

“'Behavioural targeting is the new online branding' – from Hotelinteractive.com

"'Is the Web is the new Hollywood' – from CNet.com.au

"Does this win?"

Not yet. Keep them coming…

Kevin May, editor, Travolution

In the April edition [3.0] of Travolution magazine our Road Test examined eight travel websites and how well they catered for users with disabilities.

[Read the Road Test and our reasons for producing the article]

It would be reasonable to say that the sites in question did not come out of the exercise particularly well.

Reaction has been mixed – in fact, just one of the websites in question responded, privately, to say they thought it was a useful exercise – but Alex Bainbridge from Travel UCD left a post on the Blog to highlight a few issues.

Henny Swan, from the Royal National Institute for the Blind, who carried out the Road Test for us, left this response:

“You are correct in saying that Firefox does re-size font sizes. While it addresses the issue of fixed fonts for users of this particular browser it is still not considered a "pass" in terms of making a site accessible as fixed fonts act as a barrier to access for other browsers.

“The issue here is really around standards compliance and following the internationally and universally accepted guidelines on web accessibility the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines version 1 (WCAG1):

"3.4 Use relative rather than absolute units in markup language attribute values and style sheet property values.

“Whether a browser accommodates for fixed fonts or not WCAG requires that fonts are flexible. A website should never be built to accommodate a particular browser or software because if you do then you are at risk of locking users out. And while we don't want to pander to a particular browsers failing in their inability to scale font sizes the issue has to be looked at in a real life context: Internet Explorer is the most widely used browser at the moment and you can't force, or expect, a user to use a browser that you have deemed the most suitable for your site.

“Taking your Ferrari analogy, would you build a seat that only fitted a person of average height that had no flexibility to move the seat forwards or backwards? I would also argue that some of us could do our weekly shop in a Ferrari (although if I had one I'm pretty sure I'd have someone else doing one for me :-).

“Building on the standards compliance issue, all user agents (browsers, access technologies, media players etc) should also be built to a defined standard, the WAI User Agent Accessibility Guidelines (UAAG). Authoring tools (Content management systems, HTML editors etc) are the third piece of the picture. Authoring tools should facilitate the output of accessible content outlined in WCAG and user agents should be able to render and read accessible content.

“It's important to remember that standards and guidelines like these not only enable sites to be accessible but also future proofed and protected against the website breaking when new technologies emerge. A useful document explaining the concept of web accessibility depending on these three components can be found on the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) website Essential Components of Accessibility.

“So to wrap up, there are plenty of people out there who do want to resize text in IE, who may not have Firefox either because they are not aware of it or prefer not to use it. Who wants to be forced to drive an estate when you could afford a Ferrari? Or, to turn it on it's head who wants to be told you can only drive a Ferrari if you can only afford an estate?

“I hope this helps and thanks for the feedback.”

Join the debate by posting a comment on the Blog or email us.

Kevin May, editor, Travolution

Satirical magazine Private Eye, in its Neophiliacs column, regularly pokes fun at those who like to predict what the Next Big Thing might be.

The latest, collected from various UK publications, are hilarious: “Heists are the new rock and roll” from the Daily Star; “Is Wayne Rooney the new Queen Victoria?” from The Independent; and, most bizarrely, “Is the breast pump the new Blackberry?” from Slate.com. [Discuss!]

But after few a months on the scene, Travolution has discovered the travel industry is equally obsessed/guilty when it comes to its forecasts.

There are the obvious ones: “Muscat is the new Mauritius”; “Angkor is the new Valley of the Kings”; or “Earth orbit is the new skydiving”.

And from the business side there is also an impressive range of prophecies. So here are Travolution’s favourites for the first half of 2006:

“Meta search is the new search”
“Geo-targeting is the new branding”
“Click-to-book is the new unique users”
“Hotels are the new airlines” [in terms of web strategy!]
“Travel agents are the new tour operators”
“Tour operators are the new travel agents”
“Troogle will be the new Lastminute.com/Expedia”

A prize of instant gratification through publication is available for any more emailed entries.

Kevin May, editor, Travolution

It appears the tour operators are fighting back, with Thomson joining the likes of Thomas Cook in a concerted effort to put the online travel agents in their place.

[Read our story here]

It must be rather satisfying for the likes of Thomson to be able to gloat to a room full of travel journos in London that it and other tour operators are seeing continued growth online, while the “traditional” online travel agents are losing their way a little.

Sales and marketing boss Miles Morgan admitted that in the past the “competitive advantage” rested with the OTAs because of their technological prowess.

However the times they are a-changing, apparently. Not only are the big players – including the airlines – creating sophisticated and functional websites, but they have the “exclusive and range of content” to market direct to the consumer.

“We own the beachfront!” Morgan said.

So despite being fierce competitors, Thomson has now joined Thomas Cook in recent weeks in sticking the knife into the likes of Expedia et al.

[Read our Thomas Cook story here]

A united front to battle against those “Dotcom darlings”, as Morgan calls them?

There is a growing feeling that the various camps are digging their heels in/battening down the hatches (delete as appropriate) for a good old fashioned scrap for consumers again as the Internet reaches a new level.

Seconds away...Round 2(.0!!).

Kevin May, editor, Travolution

Technorati Travel

Perhaps two travel companies are synonymous with so-called brand extensions – EasyJet.com and Lastminute.com.

Since the creation of their core businesses – flying people around cheaply and finding late holiday deals – both have branched out into new areas such as Internet cafes and boats (EasyJet) or gifts and poker (Lastminute.com).

But if both companies are running out of ideas, here’s an amusing tip from the political world, produced unintentionally in this week’s New Statesman (a magazine not known for its humour).

Journalist Nick Cohen was highlighting the escalating costs of the government’s various IT projects, such as the NHS’s Choose & Book tool, which is believed to have over-run by £135m.

[Read the article here]

Lamenting the role of management consultants in the affair, Cohen said: “If you were advising a friend on a new computer system, you would tell him or her to get tried and tested software.”

Referring to the comments of Computing magazine about the Choose & Book debacle, he suggested “there is no real difference between booking a hospital bed online and booking a flight”.

“Yet I doubt if the DoH’s [Department of Health] advisors recommended going to either EasyJet.com or Lastminute.com and buying and adapting their programs,” Cohen remarked.

So there you have it, the latest brand extension: the white labelling of travel booking systems to enable GPs to reserve hospital places for patients.

They could even dynamically package an NHS "product" for patients - an operation in one hospital, recuperation in another, choose the type of ambulance for the ride home, rehabilitation or physiotherapy at a specific clinic, medication from a certain brand.

Genius...

Travolution is stunned they haven’t thought of it already. I jest, of course…

Kevin May, editor, Travolution

Technorati Travel
Technorati Flight
Technorati Search Engine

The Travolution e-news service is about to change, with a bulletin sent out every Tuesday and Friday from next week.

[Make sure you sign up here]

The first email of the week, sent to subscribers on Tuesday afternoon, will contain news from around industry.

Friday’s bulletin will contain more news, plus a look at what has been happening here on the Blog, and also a round-up the week’s online travel-related news from the national press and other websites.

There will be more exciting developments in the coming months.

[Once again, sign up here]
Kevin May, editor, Travolution

It is obviously incumbent on Travolution to cover and debate the major developments within the industry, but here’s a little piece of news affecting us for a change!

Travolution has teamed up with sister title Travel Weekly to launch a dedicated page for everything online in the UK’s most widely read travel trade newspaper.

The fortnightly section will feature news, a regular column, information about our Sm@rt Agent award, plus the best bits from the Travolution Blog.

Some would argue that the traditional travel agent is at the sharp end of the massive changes affecting the travel industry.

Our new page in Travel Weekly aims to address some of those issues and also provide agents with a route into the world of Travolution.

News featured on the first Travolution page in Travel Weekly includes “Traditional players fight back” – a report on Manny Fontenla-Nova from Thomas Cook and his forecast on Expedia’s supposed levelling out in terms of growth.

There is also more coverage from the Travolution Summit: “Cendant aims to put the user first” and “Trade told to ‘step up the search’”.

Kevin May, editor, Travolution

Is the world of price comparison websites about to become one of the most competitive markets in online travel?

The evidence so far: Yahoo! is continually making improvements to its Kelkoo price comparison site; so is Cheapflights; and Travelsupermarket.com has been signing up new inventory at a rapid rate this year.

In March, Henoo.com – specialising in package holidays – entered the fray a few months ago with bold ambitions of its own.

Within weeks of Henoo.com’s arrival, Travelsupermarket.com launched a major TV advertising campaign – its first above-the-line marketing push.

A few weeks ago the same site unveiled a package holiday search tool of its own.

And at the end of this month, Henoo.com will unveil a TV advertising campaign of its own.

[Read the Henoo.com TV story here]

Firstly, traditional advertising die-hards will highlight the irony that sees online companies using something as “old media” as TV to attract consumers.

But the fact that at least two of the Meta search operators – one clearly bigger than the other at this stage – are turning to TV advertising could be seen as an indicator of how far the market has come in still a relatively short space of time.

But if the Meta search market is the Next Big Thing, as so many industry figures seem to suggest, this will not be the first time there is a similar glut of activity.

Kevin May, editor, Travolution

Early candidate for Travolution’s unofficial Interesting Industry Chap of the Year goes to Dimitrios Buhalis – a Doctor, no less, who works at the University of Surrey.

A few people have said recently that Dr Buhalis is one of the key people to nail down for a coffee at some time – so what better way to spend a morning than in the stock broker belt of Guildford.

Dr Buhalis, a native of Greece whose family own a hotel back home, teaches tourism – and, most importantly for a feature we’re doing in the next edition of Travolution, e-tourism – at the university’s School of Management.

What makes Dr Buhalis so fascinating is that he speaks with massive authority on pretty much any area within the tourism industry but isn’t – ultimately – trying to sell a flight, hotel or package.

He’s a straight talker, pretty controversial and name drops CEOs and MDs as frequently as he talks of the family business in Greece [he counts a number of the Travolution advisory board as close associates].

All rather refreshing, in many respects!

Amongst other things, he is a passionate believer in the theory that suppliers and consumers are becoming drawn ever closer together, leaving those in the middle – aggregators, tour operators and the likes – with an interesting dilemma ahead.

He also sees an end in sight for the dominance of the search engines as one of the main tools for attracting consumers, paving the way for the direct marketing approach by suppliers and, interestingly, the Meta search model.

“I am interested mainly in the supplier and the consumer,” he says rather triumphantly after explaining how the family business in Greece used to deal with tour operators in the 1980s, one of the many triggers for his move into academia.

Readers of our print edition and online users can expect to hear a little more from Dr Buhalis in the coming months.

Kevin May, editor, Travolution

After a few weeks on other things, it’s back to some old fashioned search engine shenanigans.

Yahoo! has today revealed it will be massively overhauling its search advertising platform later this year.

[Read story here]

This essentially, some are already saying, is what is commonly known as a Good News Story For The Travel Industry, and for e-commerce in general.

While the 30-minute campaign turnaround and enhanced performance analysis were the key strands in terms of PR in the announcement today, it was a paragraph tucked away at the end of the official release from Burbank in the US that is perhaps the most interesting.

“Future versions of the new platform will include additional distribution options and audience targeting based on factors that could include demographic information or online behavior, as well as additional ad formats enhanced with graphics or rich media,” the statement says.

In other words, Yahoo!’s enormous base of around 420 million users could be targeted through some very clever systems – especially in the online behaviour arena – that the likes of Google have made little or no mention.

This development would put Yahoo! on a par with the widely anticipated MSN AdCenter, due for launch some time this year and which is being hailed in some quarters for its ability to geo-target and follow user behaviour.

But where Yahoo! will have a head start is in its estimated 30% share of the search advertising market, coupled with the power of having strong consumer products such as Mail and Messenger.

If Yahoo! is about to up the ante in the search marketing arena, with the obvious benefits to travel advertisers, then expect rumours of Google's Troogle to re-appear again.

[Read the last Blog entry on Troogle]

Kevin May, editor, Travolution

So it seems the UK tourist board VisitBritain is getting in on the act and has launched a flight search tool on its website.

[Read the story here]

This is an interesting move and yet, while it rightly claims that it can’t favour a particular airline or aggregator – being government funded and all that – it is interesting that it has created a system based, it admits, on the Meta search model championed by the likes of Kelkoo.

The deep linking direct to a booking engine landing page is a smart idea, for a start, rather than just highlighting a price and then sending the user to the homepage of a website.

But what is perhaps most interesting is that it demonstrates, with the right tools churning away behind the scenes, that any business or organisation can effectively move into the travel space.

VisitBritain has realised that practicalities of actually getting to the UK for the inbound tourist market can be captured early in the research process.

Browsing for ideas of where to go in Britain? Need a flight? Don’t waste time with a search engine, just search and book it from here…

It is this strategy that could see other operations branch out into the search and book process – and not just for flights.

For starters the London 2012 Olympics is guaranteed to throw up a multitude of new websites for the incoming sports fan; there are dozens of concert, event and attraction websites – such as Ticketmaster – in the UK; and, of course, there are rail, coach and ferry online operations.

Perhaps even B2B media brands specialising in the online travel industry should have a flight or hotel search engine on their websites!?!

[That's enough blue sky thinking - Ed]

If this development catches on, it really could be open season for the consumer, which is where the internet should be heading anyway, some argue.

But as with so much of the rapid spread of functionality in the online world, where will this leave the existing players?

Kevin May, editor, Travolution

Talk of personalisation and user-generated content seems to be dominating discussions in the online travel community these last few weeks.

Indeed last week’s Travolution Summit witnessed a clutch of senior industry figures stressing the importance of allowing consumers to drive the online experience.

How this will be come to fruition on commercial websites will be interesting. Trip Advisor has been widely praised for a business model that allows users to create reviews of hotels (at the moment) in return for a deep-linked booking facility to other sites.

[Unless you are The Sunday Times, of course, which highlighted the site in its round-up of the Best Travel Websites last weekend, but suggested users “watch out for spammers — many of these sites suffer from contributors who praise their own hotel or criticise a rival”.]

So, can transactional travel websites learn something from their counterparts in other areas of the travel industry?

A relatively recent new entrant into the market – My Life of Travel – is a good example.

The site allows users to generate a Blog for a holiday, upload photographs, create route maps, as well as providing practical knowledge and the opportunity to share travel tips.

Rather than just being a private service for registered users, all content is open access, so users can browse through the adventures of fellow travellers.

If transactional websites are to take (a not so giant) leap into the so-called Internet 2.0/personalised space, then it is likely to be similar to the My Life of Travel model.

Kevin May, editor, Travolution

Some extra photographs have been added to our portfolio of images running on Flickr, including YO!'s Simon Woodroffe, Laura Wade Gery of Tesco.com, Mike Nelson from Cendant.

[Click here to go direct to the showreel]

Kevin May, editor, Travolution

Ping! Ping! Two emails from users based in Dubai.

It seems our attempt to share photographs from the Travolution Summit, held last week, on the Flickr service has fallen foul of the authorities in the United Arab Emirates.

"We apologize the site you are attempting to visit has been blocked due to its content being inconsistent with the religious, cultural, political and moral values of the United Arab Emirates," said a strongly worded message when users tried to view our images.

One disappointed user emails us to say that the Emirates' telecoms company Etisalat blocks all access to Flickr.

Another emailer, with a somewhat lighter tone and a handy screen grab, writes: "Dig this page I received when trying to view the Summit Flickr photos from Dubai!"

Travolution can assure users in the UAE that our pictures of Brent Hoberman (Lastminute.com), Carol Dray (Thomas Cook), John McEwan (Advantage Travel Centres) et al are actually very pleasant indeed and we are sorry you are unable to see them!

Kevin May, editor, Travolution

We have the first batch of photographs from the Travolution Summit last week.

Click here to view images on the excellent Flickr slideshow.

Our thanks to Newspics for snapping away for most of the day.

[Unfortunately you will have to get in touch with us in order to reproduce any of these images]

Pictures from the afternoon session will be available soon.

Kevin May, editor, Travolution

Another day, another declaration of war on the Internet. Ok, the frequency is not quite so extreme, but the rhetoric is.

Recently it was Gerry Smith from Cottages to Castles announcing that it’s necessary “to fight back against the growth of the Web” and “to combat the march of the Internet.” (This according to a TravelMole article from 22 March)

It’s easy to be cynical about such pronouncements, to wonder, for example, if Smith’s great grandfather was busily resisting the growth of telephony around 1900.

But the embrace of the Internet also makes it easy to overlook the fact that there are livelihoods, careers, businesses at stake in this (as in any) channel shift. (Not that this recognition will rescue a business model based on “combating the march of the Internet” from the trash can of history.)

A topical analogy presents itself in the form of the 50th anniversary of the shipping container and the many media reviews of Marc Levinson’s “The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger” [read Amazon page here].

Levinson says about Malcom McLean, the putative “father” of the container industry: “His big insight was that the customer doesn’t care how you’re shipping the goods. The customer wants to get it from here to there cheap and on time. The customer doesn’t care if it goes by air or land or sea.”

The travel industry version of this “big insight” is that the customer shouldn’t to be forced to decide whether it comes by air, land, or sea – ie, by Internet, call centre, email, fax, or agency store. The travel customer doesn’t care about taking sides in a channel conflict; they want, in contrast, channel transparency – the ability to begin a buying process at any point, by any channel, and to end it with a purchase commitment via any channel.

So rather than forming phalanxes of resistance, it’s in the interest of a supplier like Cottages to Castles as well as the agencies to multiply the opportunities for potential customers to enter, navigate, and complete the buying process in as many ways as possible.

To take a simple example from FatWire’s travel demo site: a travel prospect doing research on the Internet (as 78% of them do) can place the trips/products under consideration in a “My Trips” bin, then either:

(1) proceed to check out and purchase online; (2) place or request a call to complete the purchase over the phone; (3) print out via PDF a personalised My Trips brochure to review offline; or (4) search via postal code for a agency store near their home or office.

In the last case, an email is generated that sends the prospect’s My Trips content to the selected agency/agencies. Arriving at the store, the prospect does not have to reconstruct their vacation criteria, and the agent has been able to qualify and prepare the sales conversation. Suppliers could offer a special margin for these synergistic (rather than antagonistic) sales closures.

The other lesson from “The Box” is that the established ports that most fervently resisted the transition to containers are the very ones that declined most dramatically.

Tim Walters, director, international marketing and strategy, FatWire Software