Inside Cruise (cruise ship community) reviewed

Normally I tend to review larger travel websites as I know they have a solid web design approach and have budgets that enable them, if they applied appropriate skill, to create a great piece of functionality or website. I also tend to review when a company has stated objectives publicly - and then I can muse on whether those objectives have been met. 

Today I am going to review InsideCruise (http://www.insidecruise.co.uk/). They are a recently launched UK based travel community for those interested in cruise ship holidays. They are not a large company but as they have attracted some main travel industry press recently - I thought I would give them a quick review.

If you go to conferences “everyone” is talking about social networks and communities - and it appears this is the next big thing. Carla Prosser, from the company behind the new site, said as quoted by TravelMole (registration required) that:

We have embraced the community phenomena

More like jumping on the bandwagon - but hey we have a community for our product as well….. so I can hardly talk about bandwagons!

Will users trust the website?
A real key point for any community website is whether users will feel safe and trust the environment that has been created for them.

In an interview with Travel Weekly, Carla Prosser stated:

The website is going to consist of user-generated content, so it can only be unbiased

Therefore we know that Inside Cruise have the right mindset. However they appear to have implemented something that seems to me to break this trust.

Lets look at the “Top 10 web offers page” (see page). Above the offers list is a statement that says “We have hand-picked these cruise offers from selected UK cruise agents to bring you the best deals on the net each week”.

Right - that sounds OK. But hang on a second - what does the advertising page say?

So - lets get this straight - the users are being told that the list is hand picked by Inside Cruise. However advertisers can actually pay for this position if they wish. That can’t be right? Which is it?

Advertising operations for the top 10 list
Not only is the top 10 list misleading users, but there is a real problem with how this advertising is going to be handled operationally. Consider the following situations:

• There are only a couple of advertisers. If I was an advertiser I would start advertising at position 10. Will Inside Cruise then leave me at 10 (vs 9 “free” slots) or will they put me at number 1 (because I am the top paying advertiser?). They would want me to have a successful first advert otherwise I may not come back.
• What happens if two companies want slot 5? I assume the incumbent advertiser stays there if there is one - but what if they are both new? Who will take the slot? Will Inside Cruise give me slot 6 for less money (leaving money on the table - unlikely) or promote me to slot 4 as an “upgrade” for the price of slot 5 - but without telling the first advertiser.
• The market doesn’t set the price (it is a yes / no decision on 10 price points) - instead the pricing is set by the website. I hope they have set the correct pricing based on projected visitor volume. It could be embarrassing if these rates have to go down because of lack of visitors.

It appears to me that there is going to be an awful lot of email and phone communication between Inside Cruise and advertisers to sort all of this out. Operationally it will be inefficient and has all sorts of chances of upsetting advertisers….. (let alone misleading users!). I would have gone the Pay Per Click auction model - and created some kind of “market” - so as visitor volume increases - prices go up - and prices find their natural level. It could also be developed to be “self managed”.

Kick starting a user generated site
Starting a website like this is a real “chicken and egg”. You want to have lots of reviews, videos etc before you drive traffic to the website - but how do you get those reviews in the first place?

Inside Cruise have chosen to reward users for submitting videos, photos and reviews. £5 for a review and £10 for either a video or an image.

Does this then make people inappropriately incentivised to create reviews? Does this make them unbiased? As people are chasing the money - not thinking about content? Wisely Inside Cruise have limited this to a maximum of £15 per user that submits…. but this may just lead to a problem with users creating multiple profiles.

I would have gone the competition route ….. like top prize for a video - maybe by cruise line or destination - so you get a nice spread of videos covering all cruise lines and destinations - which is what they want really. It may have also grabbed some PR attention as well.

They also need to be clear who owns the rights to these reviews and images etc. Will the rights transfer to Inside Cruise? Can they use them for other purposes? (such as licensing them to other websites?). This is not clear within the Terms & Conditions.

What is their web developer thinking of?
Just for the icing on the cake - Inside Cruise have left a trail of web development tales of woe all over the web.

• They have left their test website up: http://dev.insidecruise.co.uk/ - actually coming up number 2 in Google for the term “insidecruise”. It is still up, in all its glory, with a copy of the functionality and data as it was about 4 weeks ago
• There is a nice section of their core code left lying on the CakePHP website - see the code ….. er…. yeah - this code includes the database username and password guys. They may want to remove it or at least change their passwords if they haven’t already.

Oh dear.

Summary
Interesting niche. Poorly executed. Needs a relaunch or rapid evolution.

There is definitely an opportunity here for Inside Cruise. They are pretty close to getting it right. If no competitors of significant size turn up in the next 12 months they may be OK. However with companies like Saga and their SagaZone social network launching recently (users of which will be core cruise target market) - unless Inside Cruise get a bit more Internet savvy, I am not sure they will make it to fulfil the potential that they have.

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