Firstly 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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Ever gone on holiday or for a business trip - and forgotten something important?

Well this rather neat website will, depending upon what kind of travel you are doing, remind you what you may need to pack.

Universal packing list

So far in the history of online travel most web developments have focussed on getting more “sales” and have therefore been around booking engines and online marketing.

I expect however much more post booking, pre travel functionality to be added to supplier websites in the next couple of years…… so expect packing list tools to become the next big thing!

First some clues: 

1. We all know that printing from the web is not that well handled by web browsers (although IE7 is much better than IE6 was). 
2. Tabblo is described as a place to make cool stuff with your photos. They also have a public print toolkit that can help make websites more printable. With their first release they say you will be able to re-format a web page into printable templates through calls to their templating engine. This sounds good. (I have also added their new blog printing tool to the sidebar on the right hand side of this blog)
3. HP have a free download to enhance web page printing within Internet Explorer . I played with it a few weeks ago and it seems quite good - although I have now uninstalled it from my browser as I don’t print much and it just gets in the way.
4. Tabblo is now owned by HP.
5. HP have a strategic relationship with Travelocity 

If you go to HP’s SmartWebPrinting.com website you get a message that says:

If you have any issues with any features of the Travelocity Travel Plan Creator….

I haven’t seen this Travelocity travel plan creator (apparently it is in Beta) - and it isn’t listed on any press releases or customer case study pages….. must be coming soon then!

It may be that Travelocity, through their long term agreement with Yahoo (which I believe must still be in place), are doing a little test with this Italy trip plan. If you click on the “printable version” icon on the right hand side - you get a Tabblo popup like this:

It actually prints out rather well…..

Have I just spoilt someone’s forthcoming press release? Whoops. Sorry.

No no no - not me!

I don’t often mention TourCMS (thats the reservation system that my company runs alongside our ecommerce consulting and project management services)…. but one of our clients, a US based airline, has to check flight booking passenger data against US government “no fly” lists. That is pretty normal for US airlines….. I am not sure what happens in the UK - but I think something similar occurs.

This is one of the reasons why there are “name alteration” costs for airline tickets…. (the other main reason being to stop agents pre-buying in their own name - and changing their name into a customer name at the last minute - thus stopping a potential resale marketplace from existing - which would be a big problem for revenue management…. but I digress)

Anyway, I was looking into all of this….. and thinking about databases of individuals etc - and how this all ties together. I found this rather interesting company website - WorldCompliance.com

On this website you can buy all sorts of global lists of individuals:

• Pep list: 600,000 profiles of Politically exposed persons from 240 countries
• Sanction list - including passport numbers, national ID numbers, dates & places of birth, photographs, affiliations, associations as well as biographical information
• Arms dealing list
• Interpol list (or Global Black List) - an aggregated list of terrorists and most wanted criminals
• FBI list
• Drug trafficking list
• Money laundering list
• Financial fraud list
• Criminal court list - they monitor criminal proceedings in more than 50 countries

I am not sure we are going to integrate this with our system anytime soon….. but it is interesting that this data exists….. so much for data protection laws. 

M-Travel just picked up that Opodo have recently launched a “map and click” booking tool. Opodo have described it as “Europe’s first”.

Well they are not first in Europe (and HotelWorldMap, a Hotels.com affiliate, probably weren’t first either - although it is worth a look ). There are also other versions out there outside of Europe - for example one by Air New Zealand.

What do I think of the Opodo sytem?

Well it is nice - it makes heavy use of Google maps and AJAX. Nothing wrong with that however it does leave them open to a couple of problems as they haven’t hidden their AJAX source code (as it is all JavaScript in the browser)

• Opodo have exposed a nice API to “extract” their special offer data - all in XML. A big thank you from their competitors who can now compare their special offers with Opodo whenever they want, all systematically. (See here for an example XML response). Knowing how much price & availability screen scraping goes on in the online travel industry I don’t know how they overlooked this.
• Opodo say they are going to release a hotel version “later in the year”. However, actually it is mainly in this release already - they have just commented it out in the JavaScript source code. For those that want to know, they will let you filter on Average temperature, Star Rating, Seaside and Culture - and price.
• Terminology - they have used the term “blackout period” - while I know what this is - I can’t be sure that too many consumers will. I suggest that is rewritten to be more clear to non travel expert users.
• The exit from their search system is poorly integrated. If you go to buy a flight you have just found via this search (missing the fact that most of the links are actually broken right now - but that is a bug they will fix) - then you end up on a “landing page”. If you have selected a Birmingham to Paris special offer - on the landing page you have to enter your “Birmingham” airport request again……

So, in summary, nice idea but needs better integration - and also the link bug fixing.  I would also invest in a JavaScript obfuscator (something that mangles the source code so that browsers can still read them, but users can’t easily) - if they are going to continue down this AJAX route.

(I should disclose that I wrote the design specification for a similar system for a UK airline, in 2003, but it wasn’t as clever as the more recent mapping systems. I have also worked indirectly on behalf of Opodo in the past.)

Go to EscapeMap on Opodo.co.uk

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

A new website came on my radar today courtesy of Travel Trade Gazette and it is called “Don’t book your holiday online” - and can be found here

It is a single page website stating reasons why you should book with a tour operator rather than online - and has been created by Classic Collection Holidays

Although actually I am not quite sure what the message is - because in the TTG magazine the headline states “Classic site is anti-web” and goes on to say:

Classic Collection has set up a website urging customers to book through travel agents. The site lists reasons why operators and agents are better than the web.

Maybe I am just coming from the wrong perspective - as I have never seen agents and operators vs web as being mutually exclusive. Web is just a channel - just like a telephone or fax. Presumably (and this is an assumption) Classic Collection holidays mean by web the larger dot coms who only trade online…. I don’t know. (A better description of a web only travel company is a brochureless one - as most web only actually also have telephone and other distribution channel sales - so they are hardly web only - but I digress)

Therefore, for the purpose of my musings below, I am going to assume that Classic Collection Holidays (CCH) really mean “don’t book online with anyone, but book direct with them offline“

So, here are their points, with my opinions….

When your computer says: The flight is full
CCH: We can easily check for alternative airlines and other airports close to you
Alex: Most websites can check for alternative airlines as well. Actually this is a benefit to booking with an agent vs a tour operator - as agents tend to have a wider product set under contract than tour operators. If the agent is a large chain, they will probably have a better rate than the tour operators as well…. check an accommodation only price from a tour operator and shop around for a flight - and compare that with a flight / holiday package from the same tour operator
Summary: Not a justified claim

When your computer says: The hotel is full
CCH: We’re happy to ring the hotel and check for rooms extra to our allocation
Alex: Do consumers even know what an allocation is? I doubt it. I agree, booking with a tour operator directly does mean they may try to find additional capacity. However, this can be achieved online as easily as on the phone (because it is unlikely that the end customer wants to wait on the phone to a tour operator while the tour operator phones the hotel to check for extra rooms - especially if the hotel being called is in another timezone)….. therefore actually this is better done online so there is less waiting involved (for the customer)
Summary: Semi justified - but nothing to do with web vs non-web. Web to a tour operator directly is the best solution for this problem.

When your computer says: You can only book a standard room
CCH: We’re pleased to give price quotations and book room upgrades and suites
Alex: Er yes. Agents find this harder to do, tour operators can do this. However this is a more “anti agent” line than it is anti-web - as the web has nothing to do with this
Summary: Not a justified claim

When your computer says: Booking online is cheapest
CCH: We offer the lowest price and best possible value through our price promise guarantee
Alex: CCH’s own website says

Prices shown on this web site are based on our brochure and reflect costs that were available and correct at the time of printing (Summer 2007 printed 30 November 2006 and Winter 06/7 printed 30 June 2006) and include a £15 per person standard brochure reduction. 

Draw your own conclusion, but are CCH saying that if you book online (with them) that they charge you £15 less? I don’t actually know what they mean (but neither do their customers, probably)
Summary: Not a justified claim. This is mainly anti-agent rather than anti-web - as agents find it harder to cut sale price (cutting into margin) than tour operators do (as agents have a smaller margin to start with than tour operators on a direct sale)

When your computer says: Why not try this hotel?
CCH: We’ve inspected all our properties and operate a strict quality control standards - we only select the best.
Alex: There are many INDEPENDENT hotel review websites where customers get to review what they experienced - rather than the travel companies.
Summary: Not a justified claim. Web collectively has far more depth and independence than a single travel company

When your computer says: Multi-centre!?!? & tries to throw you out!
CCH: We’re happy to create a tailor-made itinerary for a twin or multi centre holiday with all transfers included.
Alex: Not sure how many consumers understand the term “multi centre”. However, CCH do have a point - and many websites struggle to do multi-centre well. But, over time, websites will improve in this area - the only reason it hasn’t been done well so far is because websites have gone for the “low hanging fruit” of single centre. Also viewdata doesn’t do multicentre.
Summary: OK, CCH can have this point

When your computer says: Follow this link for further information
CCH: We can offer you extensive travel knowledge and expertise and what’s more we’ve actually visited all our featured destinations and resorts
Alex: Much like an earlier point, the web, collectively, has almost infinite information. The challenge is its organisation. One of the problems with selling top end luxury travel is that your clients may know your product placement better than your sales staff (who are often low paid and don’t live the luxury lifestyle) - therefore, with web networking, luxury clients can find people like them who have travelled to distant places - and give a much more rounded view of what the experience was like (or any further information required)
Summary: Not a justified claim. Web has more information - when organised - it is also more appropriate information

When your computer says: Error
CCH: We are committed to meeting and exceeding your expectations but in the unlikely event that something does go wrong, we’re here to help
Alex: Yes - computers do have bugs. But humans have bad days. Indeed some sales staff never have good days!
Summary: CCH are right, to a point. People with websites tend to hide a little more than they should - and this factor can be used by niche tour operators to deliver better service than dot coms

When your computer says: I’m acting as an agent not a principal and we aren’t responsible
CCH: We always act as principal, we care about you and all elements of your holiday including your enjoyment and safety
Alex: Yes - a number of dot coms are not principals. However, many offline agents and operators don’t always act as principal on all components either - so this is not a web / non web point - but a business setup one
Summary: Not justified in terms of the web vs non web discussion, but a fair point in general terms

When your computer says: Unable to process payment for this booking
CCH: After spending 45 minutes on line there’s nothing more annoying than being dumped out of a website on the credit card payment page! Simply booking with your local independent travel agent or call us with your credit card details
Alex: Ah - at last - a mention of an agent! A number of modern travel ecommerce systems handle payment failure in a better way than the ”chuck a user out” scenario as described. Some place a option on the product (or confirm the booking) and then they are queued to the accounts team to followup (manually) subsequently.
Summary: Not justified. Some websites are dreadful at this - but this is not a strategic point about web vs non web…. but generally websites could improve here

When your computer says: Book your next holiday with us
CCH: We value all feedback after you’ve returned from holiday and we’ll enter your name in a Champagne draw if you send us back a completed questionnaire
Alex: Thankfully though CCH do like the web for customer feedback
Summary: Not justified. I can’t see how this is a web vs non web point

Overall - I like CCH for having published this website - and presumably they did so in order to get some discussion happening within the trade (or perhaps it is part of some forthcoming direct marketing drive). However, I think they have not carried the arguments with the strength of their points. Also, if I were suggesting a similar scheme for a client I would want to see some kind of feedback mechanism - like comments etc - just like a blog has.

Visit the Don’t book your holiday online.com website and see if you agree with me….

I am going to a wedding this summer and have recently received the wedding list. Rather than the standard “china” and household goods (that seem to make up quite a number of wedding lists nowadays) - Alex and Alex (neither being me incidentally) have gone for contributions towards experiences on their honeymoon.

See http://www.alexandalexwedding.net/weddinglist/s_viewlist.php for the full list. The wedding list is fully available online (but probably only for the next few months or so)

The basic premise is that the honeymoon is laid out on a webpage and individuals can make a financial contribution towards all elements of trip. For example the flight, a day trip to the Bako National Park, Sarawak etc.

It would make an interesting website if a travel agency started to offer a travel wedding list service. Instead of taking financial contributions, the agency could create a tool that enables these lists to be managed online - and then book the elements as required. Some elements could never be booked by a travel agent - but the tool would handle that as well (on behalf of the lucky couple).

This is something that a travel agent would be best placed to do - not a tour operator - due to the diverse range of products that would be required to be available.

Expect to see some enterprising travel website picking this up in the next few months…..

Do you have a travel or tourism related blog? A number of travel blogs have got together to create a “T-list” - a mechanism for self promotion….

Instructions:

1. Write a post.
2. Copy/paste the link list from the post you’ve discovered the T-List into it.
3. Make sure the links are active and correct.

If your blog is on the list, remove it. This is not a self-promotion post. As Tim Fehlman (Z-List) said: “Don’t worry, because if your name is on mine, it’s on others and will spread.”

• Add your favorite tourism and travel blogs on it
• Add the url of the blog where you’ve discovered the T-List as well (i.e. TourCMS Blog)
• Publish the post on your blog
• People will notice the T-List and continue it.

Here is the list:

• Hotel Blogs
• Radar
• Social Media on the Fly
• Les Explorers
• Chrispitality Media Blog
• A Luxury Travel Blog
• Travel Rants
• Travel Weekly Blog
• BootBlog
• Erin Julian
• My Travel Backpack
• Happy Hotelier
• The Travel PR Blog
• Boot - Business of Online Travel
• Travolution