You can’t beat local knowledge

by Steve Keenan

About six years ago, when at times online.co.uk, I first came across the website SpottedbyLocals.com, run by the very fine Bart van Poll out of Amsterdam. It was a revelation – a site that gave travel tips from residents living in different cities.

Eureka! Why send a journalist to write a city round-up when I could ask people on the ground? Why go anywhere else to research when residents were adding the latest openings and news to one huge pool of information?

Bart had something like 15 cities covered then: now he has 41. The technology has moved on a bit. Still slick but the information is better presented on maps. More categories per city too. And on PDF and iPhone.

But the principle is still the same: a number of residents in each city adding the latest to the site all the time. You really can’t beat that format, although dozens of sites since still believe they can.

The number of start-up travel planner sites emerging is more down to wiring networks together than knowledge of a place: the technicians assume we’ll do all that work for them.

But why would I? If there is an established site like SbL around, or The Guardian’s excellent series of city guides, what could a random collection of ageing recollections from a bunch of random contacts or acquaintances achieve?

If a mate lived there, or had just returned, I’d ask. Otherwise I’d stick to what I know and trust. There is not a hope of 95 per cent of these newcomer sites surviving, unless they have the scale, ambition and deep pockets of a Trippy.com.

Or they have the cool originality of Unlike.net, a site I came across this week while researching an article on Warsaw (see image, above).

The content on here is excellent. Look at Amsterdam – Bart’s back yard – to see lists for food, clubs, fashion etc., written by locals and augmented with other reviews of new openings and offbeat haunts. The layout is Pinterest in style: very visual and very readable.

It’s now going down the route of adding contributor content. Now that could work – top content, great layout and added recommendations from strangers. But it would never work without that strong base of content in the first place.

It could even give Bart a run for his money. Although, with a 10-year head start, I doubt it.

Social customer service in the travel industry

The enormous challenges that social media poses for traditional tour operators was highlighted in Florence at the final conference in the WTM Vision series on Friday.

Speaking on the closing panel, Angelo Cartelli, sales and marketing director of Eden Viaggi, said that travel companies now had to listen carefully to what their customers were saying in social media channels and react quickly.

Cartelli said that if people on Twitter or Facebook were talking about a new destination that they wanted to visit and wanted to go there for four days over a weekend rather than the traditional seven day Saturday to Saturday then it was incumbent on tour operators to offer that.

He added that travel companies also need to listen to negative feedback about hotels. “If guests are sitting in a hotel and tweeting that they don’t like it, you need to resolve that immediately. In the old days, travel companies might hold onto a hotel for the whole season even if the guests were unhappy.”

This voice of the customer is something I spoke about at the WTM Vision Conference Florence conference too. To see my presentation click here.

Over the past few years, that voice has become deafening. Patients turn up at doctors’ surgeries armed with details of what they believe is ailing them scoured from the internet; holidaymakers arrive at travel agents or hotel websites with a clutch of Tripadvisor reviews.

Increasingly, those views are gathered from people in your social networks. It is becoming something of a cliche but social networks have allowed word of mouth to go global. Travel companies ignore that at their peril.

The logical conclusion of all this could be even more worrying for travel companies: they may need to go even further and use social media in real-time to customise their service offering on the fly.

On a recent visit to the John Kent Institute in Tourism at Bournemouth University, I spoke to PhD researcher Nicolas Gregori who is looking at how real-time enabled social media can be used for designing services “on the spot”, pro-active personalisation of service offerings, identification of service complaints and subsequent recovery service failures.

What this means in practice is that if someone tweets or posts a status update complaining about their hotel room being too hot or cold, someone from the hotel will monitor it and act accordingly to keep the guest on side.

But to deliver social customer service in the future, travel companies are going to have to do much, much more.

When you are a global travel brand being mentioned thousands of times a day, throwing people at the problem is unlikely to be practical. Technological tools to monitor and prioritise depending on how loudly a customer is shouting – and their influence on social networks - may well be the only answer.

Our view on travel top 100 lists

Just how valuable are travel top 100 lists? It is very difficult to visit a news website, open a magazine or turn on the television without quickly coming across yet another: the top 100 views, the top 100 restaurants, the top 100 luxury hotels and even more obscure ones. They are so prevalent that I am soon planning to compile a list of the 100 best top 100 lists.

But joking aside, the reason they are so prevalent is that they are undeniably popular. When working on The Times’ online travel section, we would receive an update from the boss (a certain Steve Keenan, who also blogs here) showing which had been the most popular stories that week. It was always fascinating and depressing in equal measure. You picked up nuggets real insight on what readers were interested in – Sex ban on the Airbus A380 was a soaraway favourite among readers back in 2007. But what was evident was the enormous appetite for top 50 and top 100 lists. This caused much despair to old school travel writers who liked nothing better than being sent off to a glamorous and expensive resort to dash off 800 words about ‘what they did on their holiday’ – compiling a top 100 list takes a lot of work, often sitting at a desk rather than on a sun lounger.

The world of social media is no exception when it comes to top 100s.

Lists of the top 100 travel bloggers are very popular – Travelpod, Brendan’s Adventures, Washington Flyer, Touropia are just a handful of the very, very many out there.

Social media agencies have also realised the value of top 100 lists in generating traffic to their sites. Social agency Headstream has just published its Social Brands 100 list. There are other similar lists out there (of course) and it does not deal only with travel.

In social media lists, the fascinating thing to do is look at methodology. Earlier in the year, Headstream compiled a 300-strong longlist of brands by seeking nominations via Twitter. The company then analysed the interactions between those brands and their fans and followers on “Facebook, Twitter, Google+, YouTube, brand owned forums, Foursquare”.

So who made their list? It is an eclectic list to say the least and includes the likes of Marmite and Manchester City FC. From the world of travel, you find – among others - Chiltern Railways, KLM and Mr & Mrs Smith.

The list contains some these are obvious social media leaders and some more unlikely choices. But this unusual mix goes straight to the heart of the appeal of top 100 lists. Everyone has their own opinion and if their favourite hotel, travel blogger or social media brand does not appear, they want to know why and say so, helping to create a buzz. I’m doing it now by talking about the Headstream list. Clever eh?

The world’s biggest-ever blog trip

by Steve Keenan

The world’s biggest-ever blog trip will be staged this summer when more than 100 writers descend on Belgium and flood the country’s music festivals.

Music and travel bloggers worldwide are being identified and invited by Tourism Flanders Brussels, a region which claims the highest number of festivals per inhabitant. The aim is to highlight the diversity of music in the region, which has hundreds of festivals ranging from jazz and blues to rock, hardcore and dance.

The blog trip organisers have highlighted between 30-40 festivals and are now looking to match each event with the right blogger.

One of the organisers, strategic consultant Frank Cuypers, said the aim was not to invite bloggers to a Coldplay or Mozart concert. “They can do that in their own country. We are looking for people who are in search of a somewhat different experience.

“Our starting point was to mix key influencers that focus on a music genre such as jazz, hardcore, baroque or reggae with an open mind travel blogger that is up to something ‘different’ as an experience.”

Initially, Flanders started its search for bloggers by destination, primarily from countries close by – that has now changed. “I’ve learned that influencers cannot be looked up geographically,” added Cuypers. “We have spotted already reggae fanatics in Sweden; a wheelchair blogger from Spain, a blogger pop star in China and even a connoisseur of Flemish festivals from Hungary.

“We are looking to find that blues fanatic and that special reggae fan. We are looking for young vloggers who portray our cities and region in a different way than the average established journalist.”

The region is being helped in its search by Vancouver-based Think! Social Media. Chief strategist William Bakker said: “Flanders is the perfect client for us. They went all in with social media. By selecting bloggers based on their personal passion and matching them with an event they will love, the word will spread amongst people that care. And because of the diversity in festivals, you need a lot of bloggers to cover a lot of passions. Flanders wasn’t afraid to do that.”

The further the blogger travels to attend the event, the bigger the festival they will be offered, such as Tomorrowland (dance) and Werchter (rock and pop). Access to organisers and performers will be arranged. But Cuypers said he also wanted bloggers and videographers who are “intrigued” by those at the mixing tables, in the catering tent or selling tickets.

“We have also visited every festival organizer and given them a short training course about what kinds of stories could be of interest: for example, Leperfest is 100% vegan although the music is hardcore.”

A Facebook page (which already has 10,000 Likes), Youtube, an online game and competition will support the campaign.

It’s an intriguing experiment, not only in scale of ambition but in the way a destination is adopting social media wholesale as a central platform of an international marketing strategy. Fashion, food and cycling are other key areas that Flanders is looking to promote through recommendation.

Word-of-mouth is key, said Cuypers: encourage enthusiasts to find the good stuff, recognize it, then recommend and help a destination build a good reputation. He added: “Provide the right target groups with the right experiences and they will discuss these experiences… which become stories and will be shared as a result.”

* If you are interested in entering or finding out more about the competition, go to the Facebook page or email: [email protected]