Last month the Travel Technology Initiative held the latest in its series of technology summits for the travel industry. Here are some of the key developments and announcements.
Gapyear.com takes social networking further
Selecting trusted customers to produce videos, blogs and review gadgets is one thing website gapyear.com is doing to attract and engage visitors, its founder revealed at the TTI Summitt.
Tom Griffiths, who launched the popular website for backpackers and experiential travellers a decade ago, gave an insight into how social networking has evolved among his client base.
He said: “We see ourselves as occupying the middle ground between being a travel agency and a social networking site.
“Typically, our customers will spend between one and two years planning their trip, so we provide an area where they can research destinations and products and make contact with people who have either been to a place or are planning to go.
“We’ve built up a massive community and a wealth of user-generated content on our site and people come here to be inspired.”
Some areas of the site, which picked up the Best Website accolade at last year’s Britain Youth Travel Awards, are open to all registered visitors to contribute.
These include the message board where people can link up with potential travel mates and discuss a diverse range of issues, such as where the best diving is in Australia, to whether to dump your girlfriend or boyfriend before you set off travelling.
But Griffiths said he decided to allow only a limited number of “regular and trusted” users to write blogs and produce videos of their travels – a range of which have recently been launched in a section on the site called gapyear.com TV.
He said: “We call these users ‘legends’ and they are responsible for a particular country or activity. They love our site and they volunteer their time – we just let them get on with expressing themselves. Some of them spend more time on the site than I do.
“Our customers like the fact that we aren’t telling them what to do – we are simply putting them in touch with their peers.”
Other users have been picked to review travelling equipment and gadgets, such as rucksacks and cameras, which are sold through an online shop on the site. Gapyear.com has also recently launched a travel writing competition.
Griffiths said the website targets UK travellers in the 18 to 24-year-old and 25 to 35-year-old age brackets who typically spend £3,000-£4,000 and £6,000-£9,000 respectively on their gap year.
He now plans to target the 55 to 65-year-old age group – the so-called ‘denture venturers’ who have time and disposable income to travel extensively.
If agents want to incorporate a social networking functionality on their website, Griffiths advises them to familiarise themselves with the most popular websites in the user-generated content space.
He added: “Spend some time on Facebook, YouTube and Flickr – it’s important to engage with these sites, so you understand the culture and how the sites work.”
Web boosts niche travel products
The internet has given agents access to excursions they previously wouldn’t have been able to sell, according to viator.com chief executive Rod Cuthbert.
He claims Viator competes with Expedia as the world’s leading online vendor of tours, shows, theme park tickets and transfers. Cuthbert said the web-based distribution model makes it far easier and cheaper to promote and distribute small, niche ground products.
He cited the growth in popularity of photographic tours as an example. Typically, these are city tours led by a local photographer who can show customers new viewpoints and interesting details of a destination that they might have otherwise overlooked, and help improve photography technique.
Cuthbert said: “We now offer photographic tours in 30 destinations. This is a niche tour that has grown in popularity overnight. All we had to do was create a page on the site and distribute it – it can happen very quickly and reach a wide audience in no time. “Before the internet, these guys wouldn’t have been able to afford the brochure costs associated with distribution on such a scale.”
Cuthbert added he was keen to work with agents through the website affiliate programme, where agents can earn 6% commission on any sale.
- Related: The ‘long tail’ of travel [Travolution]
The value of mobile websites
Websites that have been designed for mobile users stand a better chance of appearing higher up Google mobile searches, according to Gerry Samuels, executive director at mobile travel specialist company Mobile Travel Technologies.
He said the internet giant had introduced a service at the start of the year where the ease of use of a website being searched for by a user with a mobile device was a factor taken into consideration alongside how popular the website is and its relevance.
“Most regular websites don’t work well on mobiles because the devices can’t deal with the amount of data they have,” he said.
According to Samuels, airlines and hotels have been quicker to embrace mobile than travel operators because they have seen the potential of the technology for people who want to check or change an existing booking while travelling.
“The trend at the moment is to book on the web and service on mobile,” he said, adding that growth areas for mobile include accessing customers in developing markets where “mobiles are the internet”, as well as location-based services using global positioning technology.
