Alex Bainbridge's Musings on travel ecommerce blog
Musings on travel ecommerce blog
Blog home  Blog home

New travel website feature - who do you want to go on a tour with?

Tuesday, March 4th, 2008

Here is an idea for a feature that would work on a tour operator website (but it would have to be a multinational one!).

From my past experience of running tours I know that to make the tour the most enjoyable for all customers you need to create the right groups. One of the issues with adventure travel is that it can attract those in their gap years (prior to University), young professionals and more mature people.

Take a tour in Egypt….. some people go for the culture and history others go for the adventure and diving. If you put people from both groups in the same trip you could end up with some customers getting frustrated at spending too much time in museums etc.

Its not just what people want from their holiday that you need to ensure is compatible with other group members but often nationality and languages spoken. None of this is really an issue for hotels (where you don’t have to socialise with the other guests) but for group tours where you are travelling from place to place you may end up spending 10 evenings with these people that the travel company you have booked with has thrown you together with.

A couple of days ago I was having a conversation with someone and an example of this came up….. a customer from a European country booking via a US tour operator in order to travel to another European country. The customer said that they wanted to book with a US company because they wanted to be with English speaking people. Maybe the exchange rate helps as well.

Anyway, this looks like something that customers consider when booking a tour (that will be a group trip) however I haven’t seen any functionality that tour operators have used on their websites to help this?

One suggestion maybe to add, on all tours on a website, a little graph that gives the demographic information for each tour….. letting the customers move towards tours that suit them better. Not sure though.

Any more ideas?


If you want to be notified next time something is published sign up for email alerts or subscribe to the RSS feed. Thank you for reading!





More posts (maybe related, maybe not)

  • TripAdvisor go 404 for unusual website testing
    Here is a great quote from a recent post on Particletree - a blog that I really enjoy reading - describing what TripAdvisor are doing with their site.... The post in question was about prioritising feature development. For those...
  • Feed Lag - RSS feed reading functionality idea
    I subscribe to about 30 RSS feeds covering a range of subjects. I try to choose one or two feeds for each subject that I am interested in - rather than every single feed that exists...
  • Search results voting would be a nice feature on a travel website
    I have written previously about how Virgin and Thomson both have "recently selected products" or "recently visited pages" integrated tightly with their holiday search engines on their websites. (see previous post) This functionality is especially...
  • 15 travel itinerary saving / sharing websites reviewed
    One theme that is beginning to become more prevalent is "itinerary saving" and "itinerary sharing". Overview Say for example you are going on a trip to New York - you may want to save information about...

Comments are closed.




This blog is about travel ecommerce with a focus on topics of interest to tour operators & travel companies

Alex has previously started up a small tour operator (5 staff) and also worked for leading "dot coms", airlines, hotel chains and tour operators advising and project managing web, ecommerce and reservation system projects.

Alex is available for travel ecommerce consulting via Travel UCD. Travel UCD also operates TourCMS - a web based reservation system for small tour operators


RSS Feed

Subscribe via daily email



AddThis Feed Button

Homepage
About this blog
Best of the blog (top 10 posts!)

Recent comments
Tamara: It’s a lot of money! But I guess it’s probably good value for the column inches it generates - of course as long as you get to the top five! To guarantee that it looks like you have to have...

Alex Bainbridge: Hi Tamara …. as for PhoCusWright….. I am sure that at the point the judges judged they were impartial - however it was a fairly self selecting group who put themselves forward to be judged...

Darren Cronian: Alex, I am worried that we are becoming on the same wave length. http://www.traveldotnet.co.uk/ articles/lets-not-forget-offli ne-travel-innovation/ No, I have just read this post now, I didn’t...

Pete Meyers: Alex - I’m really looking forward to hearing the pirate story, well done!

Ben Colclough: I must say I had more fun acting out a chicken in a restaurant in Yunnan, China than I would have had with the flip book. Seriously though - it is a good idea & innovative. Not sure I would want to...

Alex Bainbridge: Hi Pete The times I would have found this useful (PocketComms) I really wouldn’t have wanted to put an iphone into someone elses hands! For example negotiating with a people smuggling ship in...

Pete Meyers: I think the best innovation is a combination of great ideas and succinct execution. To your example about the PocketComms, it was a good idea that fermented for a number of years, yet who’s to say...

Tamara: This is an interesting debate. I wonder what the PhocusWright judges views are. They seemed to be very clear however that they wanted to reward companies who had actually created something - rather than simply...

Ben Colclough: P&G, generally regarded as a very innovative large consumer branded company has an approach to innovation that throws some light on this. They embrace failure as a necessary part of innovation. This...

Categories
Top commentators
Kevin May
Darren Cronian
Jeremy Head
John
Ben Colclough
Alex Bainbridge
graham steele
Ian McKee
Big Travel Web
Tamara
Guillaume
Ignacio
Neil MacLean
Dominic
John Pyle

Other travel & tourism blogs
Travolution
The Boot
Hotel Blogs
Travel Rants
TraveBlather
Travel PR Blog
Dot Tourism
Albert Barra [Spanish]

Wiwih blogs - a directory of travel industry blogs

Small Fish Big Ocean

Come and join my travel business social network! for small tour operators and niche agents


TourCMS