STA travel and their widget strategy….OK start – more work required

The blogging world is awash with news (and positive reviews) of STA travel’s latest “widget” offering however I think they have some work to do to fix what they have done.

Firtly a quick recap – a widget, as defined by Wikipedia, is

…a portable chunk of code that can be installed and executed within any separate HTML – based web page by an end user without requiring additional compilation. They are akin to plugins or extensions in desktop application

To you and me, this means putting a bit of self-updating data either on a desktop (like a PC or Mac) - or a website – normally a blog, web dashboard (like Netvibes) or social network profile. A widget can communicate back to the central web site – and update itself. A marketer’s nirvana.

And the STA have implemented quite a neat travel widget system – take a look for yourself

This includes:

Trip countdown: As one of their PR people emailed to me – a nice way to rubbing it in everyone’s face that you are going away. Indeed. I expect this will one of their most popular widgets.

Special travel offers: A pre-sales gadget to inform people of latest offers. This may have some appeal for desktop use – but unlikely to be something you would want to share with your friends on your blog etc. It would be interesting to see some booking conversion statistics on this in a few months time.

Travel to do list: Desktop only. This doesn’t inspire me really as there are thousands of “to do list” widgets already out there – so its a bit competitive. However, it does fill out their overall offering. I have no idea how the data flows for a desktop widget (i.e. does it sit on the local machine or on the central web server) – but if it sits centrally – I am sure STA can do some interesting data mining on it…. (and there is no privacy policy from the STA widgets page, as far as I can see)

Weather comparison: What is the weather in your destination vs your home town. Ah yes – this, like the trip countdown, will be a popular widget. I like this one.

Flight finder: Boring.

The CEO of Electric Artists, Marc Schiller, the company behind the development, recounts the story about selling the concept to STA travel:

During the conversation we talked about the importance branded utilities and lightweight applications that can be integrated into personal pages like MySpace, Facebook, and blogs, as well as into dashboards like PageFlakes and Netvibes. 

For STA Travel’s customer base (the college market) today it’s less about “browsing” the web and more about “clipping” the web.

The marketing team at STA Travel not only “got” the importance of branded but they also knew that they needed to embrace change quickly.

So what needs fixing?

Well – this is all hosted on the wrong domain! It is on ElectricArtists.com domain name – meaning that all this blog coverage, all the incoming links etc – are all giving zero (zero) benefit to STA travel. Additionally, all the widget links (in the embedded code) are using ElectricArtists.com domain name as well…. nothing to do with STA. All it needs is a zero-cost CNAME entry on a subdomain of STA travel.com – and all would be well – they could leave their hosting technically where it is. However, it is a bit late now as they have received their coverage.

I think their developer thought about this at the time they coded the JavaScript – as this message is in the file “PATH – Change this path to reflect new hosting location (must be full path)”…..

However, all is not lost, as many widgets don’t need to be manipulated from a central location – and can be “re-served” by companies like Widgetbox