Friday 22 September 2006 by Edward.

A blogsite has been created between RealTravel, a social network of travel experiences, and T4G, an IT business solutions company, reports Yahoo.

Posted in Blogs/Podcast/eInfo, AFTER the visit, DURING the visit, BEFORE the visit | 1 Comment »

Wednesday 20 September 2006 by Edward.

Apparently realizing the major changes taking place in tourism and in the tourist experience, national newpaper USA Today has relaunched its travel website. Readers will get travel news, planning and booking tools, expert advice — the total tourist experience, before, during and after the trip.

The USA Today website is content rich. It offers, for example:

Information on destinations
A Flight Centre (flight tracker, flight delay map, WiFi airports, and more)
Travel News
Travel and destination deals
Travel Columns

Posted in Website/Event, AFTER the visit, DURING the visit, BEFORE the visit | No Comments »

Tuesday 19 September 2006 by Edward.

Selected recent internet partnering in tourism: Tourism Partnerships 2.0
Maryland, USA, Office of Tourism contracts Travelocity to handle bookings.

Spainexperience accesses Worldspan’s global distribution and e-pricing system.

Expedia’s platform and network supports eLong’s Chinese outbound travel bookings

Alitalia airline joins Worldspan to speed e-ticket connections.

Jet Airways signs interline e-ticketing agreement with KLM via GDS

Rule 2 “The Rule of Partnerships” in the book ‘The 25 Immutable Rules of Successful Tourism’ by Roger A. Brooks and Maury Forman states that ‘Relationships require more than one person.’ The most important rule in creating a successful tourism strategy is to establish partnerships writes Brooks. One the internet, these partnerships can leverage resources for all concerned.

Posted in Report/Book, AFTER the visit, DURING the visit, BEFORE the visit | 2 Comments »

Tuesday 12 September 2006 by Edward.

You’re in charge of a hike in the woods, a coastal whale watch tour, or a biking expedition and you want to retrace your path taken. Perhaps you’d like to send the route travelled to members of your party, via the internet. New thumb-drive sized GPS tracking devices are entering the market that you can take on your travels to record your every movement.

SkyTRX is one such GPS tracker. This unit records every second once it receives its two AAA batteries — recording for 28-42 hours depending on the battery type used, and able to store 100 hours of data. It is compatible with Google Earth and Google Maps. Cost is about US$300.00

I had earlier posted notes about the GPS thumb-drive loggers GPS-CS1, by Sony, and the Trackstick.

Posted in Gadget/Idea/Webtool, GPS, AFTER the visit, DURING the visit | 1 Comment »

Monday 4 September 2006 by Edward.

LastMinute.com finds last minute travel and accommodation packages at great prices. With thousands of hotels, and hundreds of vacation destinations, airlines, and dining establishments to monitor, LastMinute needs to make sure their customers have good experiences, and needs to learn what delights and dissapoints their customers. Hello ResponseTek. ResponseTek is a Customer Experience Management (CEM) company. They specialize in understanding customers and help turn them into advocates and transform your business.

TCMnet reports that LastMinute has recently expanded its websites into France, Germany, Italy and Spain, brought along with them the services of ResponseTek. In upcoming 60-minute seminars ResponseTek demonstrates how CEM can build advocacy, and find out what is important to your customer.

Rule 2 “The Rule of Partnerships” in the book ‘The 25 Immutable Rules of Successful Tourism’ by Roger A. Brooks and Maury Forman states that ‘Relationships require more than one person.’ The most important rule in creating a successful tourism strategy is to establish partnerships. The best partnerships are ones that complement each other.

Posted in Gadget/Idea/Webtool, AFTER the visit | 3 Comments »

Sunday 20 August 2006 by Edward.

How would you like to put the coolest guest map on your website? BuddyMapping lets you place a Google Map on your website then have your online visitors leave their placemark with comments and photos for others to see — perfect for blogs, online forums, groups, and tourist destination sites. “The tourist destination”, notes site owner/developer Ben Gotow, “is the perfect candidate for a ‘buddy map’. A company could use a map to show popular destinations in an area, with pictures and links to more information. Visitors to the page could add their own favourite spots and make comments … or could use the map as a guestbook and let tourists write about the places to which they’ve been.”

Features of BuddyMaps include live-updating, links and banners for your website, views via Google Earth, a browser dashboard widget, and a map view counter. Placemarks can be coded to match your site’s colour scheme. What started as a way to connect friends has grown within about 3 months to over 1,500 maps and 11,000 place markers.

I examined the map posted at BuddyMapping.com. There were 270 people listed on the map. I contacted one of the entries — RV-dreams.com. An email from the site owners told me that they had 340 entries on their Buddy map in just the first week. They call their map the RV-Dreams Family Map. Their map was covered with markers from all over continental USA. Not all location names are accepted yet when creating a placemark, especially outside the USA. With time, I’m sure this shortcoming will be resolved.

I created a BuddyMap link for this website, TheTouristExperience.com. Check it out. Try adding your placemark and some comments on my map.

The BuddyMapping goal is to be “simple , clean and easy to use”, notes Gotow. This required an incredible amount of work, to ensure an efficient site in the popular browsers, he adds. Gotow has lots of plans (and lots of ideas from his growing fan base). Expect to see multiple-tag entries and migration of GoogleMaps to user sites in future.

Rule 17 “The Four-Times Rule”, in the book ‘The 25 Immutable Rules of Successful Tourism’ by Roger A. Brooks and Maury Forman, tells us that ‘The shortest distance between two pints is a good time’. People will visit your destination if it will maintain their interest four times longer than it took them to get there. In other words, if your destination will keep visitors busy for two hours, expect most of your traffic to come from within 30 minutes away — the ‘four times rule’. For tourist websites I will equate that to “site stickiness” and “site revisit potential”. Will a Buddy Map improve your tourist destination site stickiness and revisit potential? As Ben Gotow suggests, “try it and find out”.

Posted in Gadget/Idea/Webtool, Maps, AFTER the visit | No Comments »

Friday 11 August 2006 by Edward.

Web 2.0 for tourism, or Tourism 2.0, is about empowering the tourist, and about growing tourism. It’s about an active web — a web of actively sharing (www.triptracker.com and www.wikipedia.com), collaborating (www.1trip3.com), creating (www.ning.com), and socializing (www.myspace.com). Tourism 2.0 takes advantage of emerging internet tools such as RSS, Mashups, contextual advertising, advanced user interfaces, Podcasting, and group-forming networks.

Take Podcasting for example. A July 2006 Canadian Podcast Listener’s Survey put together by Sequentia Communications and Caprica Interactive Marketing found:

1 The number of male and female listeners were about the same.
2 Podcasts are moving into the mainstream with babyboomers as leading adopters.
3 Canadians love Canadian-content podcasts.
4 Original, quality Podcast content is preferred, once a week, under 10-15 minutes in length, with limited advertisements as acceptable.

For those who create travel-related podcasts, these numbers are quite useful. Please, share any travel-related podcasts you come across.

Posted in Blogs/Podcast/eInfo, AFTER the visit, DURING the visit, BEFORE the visit | 2 Comments »

Thursday 10 August 2006 by Edward.

Travelling by bike, especially as a tourist in a car-dominated city, can be challenging. Website Bikely.com hopes to ease this burden. It’s a site designed by cyclists, built and updated by cyclists. The routes are bike-friendly. Early I had posted a Dutch bike route planner with a different orientation.

In less than 3 months, over 2,700+ routes covering 30+ countries have been posted. These routes are listed by country and by route name. You locate the route of interest then display it on Google Map. Routes nearby can also be listed. Click to start the tour and a detailed map appears showing placemarks and some comments along the route. Each placemark shows how far (in miles or kilometres) we are along. One can download a .GPX file for GPS use.

In correspondence with the site manager, one of Jules’ favourite entries is the 34km Sunshine-Maribyrnong Loop. Jules anticipates multimedia tags will be included by cyclists in future as technology progresses. Jules adds, “Well I’m a cyclist and all my users are cyclists so their opinions did, and will continue to, shape development of the site”. “Expect to see more comments, route ratings and bookmarking facilities.”

This website is new, with a forum only months old, but with many entries posted to date. A development I anticipate with growing popularity of this site is a global map with start-of-route placemarks — zooming in to an area of interest, to show more details and a listing.

Jules recommends to all bike tour operators to get some of their routes plotted on Bikley.com and make them available through their website. Jules, it won’t be long.

Posted in Gadget/Idea/Webtool, Maps, AFTER the visit, BEFORE the visit | No Comments »

Monday 7 August 2006 by Edward.

Now here is a neat web tool you can embed into your site, to add site revisit potential from tourists.

Clocklink is a 24-hour countdown (or countup) clock. It can be used to show how much time is left before your renowned fireworks display, before the rock concert tickets go on sale, before the time the cruise ship sets sail, before your race begins, the number of days since that great trip to Scotland, etc..
You can advertise with ClockLink.com and create a custom clock for your organisation. The Clocklink gallery shows clocks that are compact, highly-configurable, and attractive.

Clocklink clocks were displayed 9.7 million times in the last 24 hours. The “most displayed clock of the day” was New Zealand’s 5001-blue (450,337 displays).

Roger A. Brooks Rule 10 “The 365 and 24/7” states that ‘Kiosks never sleep.’ The primary objective of a visitor information centre, writes Brooks, is to … well… provide information of course. But it must do so ALL the time, even when the centre is not occupied. Leave information visible to the tourist — at tourist information centres and on websites.

Posted in Gadget/Idea/Webtool, AFTER the visit, BEFORE the visit | 3 Comments »

Sunday 6 August 2006 by Edward.

Again Doc Martin’s Travel Show podcast from Melbourne made me thirsty. First it was bar-hopping with an “experimental traveller agenda”, now its a tour of six microbreweries in Melbourne.

Podcasts are part of Tourism 2.0, or Web 2.0. They enhance collaboration between the tourist and the destination. Does your destination have a travel podcast?

Get a noise-cancelling headset, have a story to tell, hookup to a Podcast service on the web and your off. Maybe take some lessons first.

Posted in Blogs/Podcast/eInfo, AFTER the visit, BEFORE the visit | No Comments »