Blog homeFirstly lets define “travel porn”. This could be fun.
Can you remember back in the history of the travel industry (!) where you used to get wonderful brochures that you picked up from high street travel agents? They would have a lovely, crisp, feel - with high quality paper stock - brilliant photos - and a smell of paper pulp.
You could sit at home and flip though the pages - generating a frenzy of excitement - before trudging off to the travel agent to book your annual holiday. Recently, when bookings went online (or some did), I know that people still went back to travel agents to pick up brochures for products they had already booked - just because the brochure is such an exciting product to own and feel.
Before you wonder why this is called “porn”…. well I am not making this up…. I have heard it referred to as porn within large travel companies (not often, but enough to know its a standard term). Also I have found a blog that refers to the same principle…. its not just me OK !? This isn’t how my mind works.
Remember - holidays are about escaping the day to day….. and this experience has to start at the research phase…. but researching and booking is just too clinical when completed online…. we need to introduce some fun somewhere. Take people out of their office cubicles and to some far off lands. We need to stop websites looking like Microsoft Excel (with tables and data) and more like a nice Microsoft Powerpoint presentation with graceful transitions…. (or Keynote for you Mac fans)
How would this work online? At some stage in the future web won’t be something we access via a PC but it will be experienced more tangibly. This could be quite a few years off but Starwood Hotels are already playing with it using Microsoft Surface. (read report from M-Travel or view a video from Popular Mechanics).
One ecommerce website that is already using interesting means to navigate product is Etsy - for example look at the colour navigation system - or the Time Machine etc. We need more of this and less “put your dates here and select a destination from a dropdown”.
Finally, when researching this article (!) I searched on the web for some interesting travel porn examples or images I could use. Very intersting it was too. Eye opening. Not something to do from work. Unfortunately I couldn’t find anything I could publish here.
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Interesting, but a bit “thin”
How does this hold up to your recet post about undesign? Could you expand a bit on what you think travel websites should or could do to create a more pornographic (this will help even more weird queries landing here 
) travel website experience?
I’m thinking about the not-so-often used possibility to let people download/print PDF’s with richer imaging. Or just ask for a brochure to be sent to them, in exchange for an e-mail adress for instance. Or using more Flash on sites with slideshows and video.
And does every travelsite need more porn, or is it just the packaged trips. The more commoditized sectors (hotels, airline tickets) need less, one could argue.