In this time of credit crunch and fuel surcharges many travel companies are looking again at IT / web projects and wondering whether they are really going to give the return as projected in their business cases.

Rather than cancel or postpone a project here is an idea how to bring down your technology supplier costs. You need to understand the principle of a risk premium.

The temptation when asking a technology supplier to provide a quote for a project is to start too early to talk about price. The goal should be to hold off discussion about price until the latest possible moment.

This ensures that your technology supplier:

• Has the most detailed understanding of what the proposed project will require (in terms of their own time and IT resources)
• Will be wondering whether the project really will convert - so may be prepared to negotiate - especially if they have been holding back people to work on your project - so may struggle to allocate these people to alternative client projects at the last minute should your project not progress.

If you head for a discussion about price too early, the supplier will have to take more of the risk of not fully understanding the nature and scope of the project - hence will inflate their proposed price to take this into account. This is a risk premium - a premium that the supplier will charge you based on them taking more of the risk.

What I would do is have a senior member of your project team permitted to talk about price - but make them unavailable for a couple of weeks (for example by going on holiday) - while other team members get on and talk about the detail of the project…….

[Of course this works better on fixed cost estimates than on Time & Materials estimates - but the principle still applies to both styles of project]

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I have touched on the subject of lack of innovation in online travel (from the large online travel agencies) previously…. however perhaps this is a different way of looking at it.

Lets just say you have £100,000 GBP (200,000 USD) to spend on marketing. This is a major sum for a small tour operator - but a minor budget for a larger company such as a leading OTA.

Here are a couple of options:

• Spend the money on PPC advertising
• Create a great new piece of content or content area on an existing website (i.e. perhaps innovate)

Lets just assume that the average PPC marketing cost for a new customer / booking is £20 GBP (40 USD). The PPC advertising would therefore return 5000 bookings.

£100,000 GBP would buy you 4 web developers working for 12 weeks (at standard London contract / agency developer rates), plus a bit spare for hardware, software / content licenses etc. You could get quite a bit done in this 12 weeks - but it wouldn’t be a major web development project (in comparison to other IT and web project costs that large OTAs undertake)

It would be a brave executive who would be confident that their “idea” (potentially unresearched) would give a 5000 booking return….. so it is currently just too easy to continue with PPC.

PPC prices have to go up in order for people to need to innovate…. maybe Google is doing everyone a favour with this whole “trademark” bidding thing…. because now companies may determine that innovation and investment in new web projects is a better commercial option than increasing PPC.

So - what would you do with £100,000?

This week a number of people in the travel industry have gone blogging mad. I guess this is to do with the PhoCusWright ITB bloggers summit taking place in Berlin this week.

I really don’t like these self-selecting conferences (although I would have gone if given a free entry!). I mean a blog is just a means to post stuff online in a chronological order, have people subscribe to it - and perhaps have some form of conversation. It doesn’t give anyone who blogs “special powers” - nor should it really be used as a “golden ticket” for conference entries. In the end, taking the technology view, its just a bit of HTML.

Not only has travel industry blogging spawned a conference - but there are now books and several travel blog ranking lists for people to look over and consider. Haven’t we all got better things to do? (OK - the book is nice - but not as useful as a well structured mechanism to find the content that exists in its primary form i.e. on the web)

On a more practical point….. here are 7 forms of travel blogs that you, as a travel provider, could consider running.

CEO blog
A CEO blog is normally where the CEO (or other senior executive from a company) outlines, over a period of time, their vision. It enables them to react to industry or market events and reach out to have conversations with people they wouldn’t normally converse with on a regular basis.

Example: Randy’s Journal - Boeing - by VP marketing Randy Tinseth

Probably only useful for larger companies where understanding the core vision is useful to customers.

Industry blog
A number of blogs are “industry facing”. For example this blog - Musings - is written to reach out to you lot! I know most of my subscribers (about 300 or so) read my daily ramblings. I have no real idea if this is doing damage or helping me commercially - but, speaking personally, I quite enjoy it.

I suppose you know who I am as a result of this blog….. which wasn’t actually my goal really - I would prefer if you knew my products not me!

Product -> Agent blog - the “Fam” topup
If you are based in a destination or focus on a specific activity - and you happen to use agents as a distribution channel - then a blog that is written with the intention of being read by travel agents would probably work for you. Your goal should be to produce an informative blog - not about your products necessarily (although you can slot them in every so often, like I do here!) - but more general information.

A specialist agent (from outside of your destination) may only visit your country every couple of years…. and so your blog focus should be on informing agents of changes that may be necessary for them to know in order to best sell your destination. For example a great new restaurant, the change in times for the cross-harbour ferry service - useful - practical - information that a travel agent will want to subscribe to.

You need to make these very “tight” in terms of focus….. If you happen to sell 5 countries then don’t lump them all into one blog - because it may be unlikely that your agents also sell those same 5 countries. Instead produce 5 blogs (or one blog with 5 RSS feeds)

Consumer facing blog
Many companies are looking to go the direct (non-agent) route. However is a blog the best way of doing this? Not really - the reason is that a blog is intended for long term subscription not necessarily something to “dip into” as part of a product or company pre-purchase evaluation. As a result of this “dipping into” scenario the most important pages on your consumer facing blog are the category or archive pages.

However as a result of having a consumer facing blog you may find improved search engine rankings…. etc - which is all helpful.

Special offer blog / feed
I am not sure about these. There are a couple of scenarios where these maybe helpful:

• Customers who live in City A and have family in City B. They need to take a flight between the two cities and are looking to travel “when the price is right” - but won’t travel otherwise. Maybe these customers will subscribe to an offer feed / blog over the long term
• Where the travel research phase takes an extended period of time - for example - say I want to go skiing next year…. I could subscribe to a special offer feed and be given offers upto the right point in time where decisions have to be made.

Product news blog
Maybe for your top selling products you can produce a blog just for that product. Don’t worry if you only publish every so often - with blog subscriptions people are happy to go several months without anything coming down down the pipe….

For example, I have a blog / RSS feed just for news about our reservation system TourCMS. It only has a few subscribers - but the people who want to know are subscribed - which is fine.

Status blog
Oh dear my IT roots are showing again. In IT everyone likes the concept of status - what is going on right now - is everything OK?

An example status blog or feed maybe for a local ferry. A storm is approaching and the a city based travel agent needs to quickly inform a customer they have on the phone whether the ferry will still be running today. A status blog works wonders here.

In the main the latest post should be a “All running OK” - a simple one line sentence. Then, when you have an event that is out of the ordinary - you can just put that up….. and when that event ceases - put back the single “All running OK” blog post.

Subscribers will learn that your most recent post is the one that they need to be paying attention to.

Conclusion
With many web people saying “you must have a blog” it can be difficult to understand what kind of blog you need. The important point though is to remember that your blog needs to have a focus. Consider what information you know that you could give to someone else. Hopefully it is information they want. If you can drive commercial benefit from your blog then great - but think of the information focus first - then how you are going to commercialise it.

However, please don’t blog just because you want to be part of the “in crowd”.

I know us travel ecommerce consultant folk always go on about having a blog on your website and getting involved with social media…. but I am not sure that we have, collectively, been that persuasive. Many travel websites, agents and product owners are still not using the power of blogs that effectively.

Perhaps this may help persuade you.

On the 7th of February (3 weeks ago) I wrote a post with some thoughts on the Ryanair website…. and how it was to be “down” over the last weekend while they changed booking engine. Well I never thought they would bring their entire website down… just the booking engine….

As a result of writing this blog post I received a few incoming links from various news stories covering the topic. Well that was nice. However it has been the SEO sourced traffic that has been most interesting.

My single Ryanair post now ranks 7 in Google (world) for Ryanair site down and 60th in Google (World) for just the word Ryanair by itself.

I am particularly interested in the single word result - 60th for the term Ryanair…..as I don’t have much on this blog about them….. and I am sure that there are thousands of sites that use their name all over the place.  (indeed, according to Google, there are 7 million pages that mention the term Ryanair!)

I get “quite a few” visitors to this blog who are actually consumers rather than industry people…. all I need to do to monetise this traffic is add some Google Adsense adverts….. and, bingo, a money fountain (or trickle perhaps!). Maybe that is what I should do!

UPDATE: My previous post ranks 33 for single word term Ryanair via Google UK (one of Ryanair’s key markets). I am amazed by these results and the volume of traffic I am getting to this blog (from consumers) as a result of it.

According to Travel Weekly, Ryanair’s website will be down for 3 days while they make some pricing changes to their website (between Feb 16th and 18th) (Ryanair are an Ireland based low cost airline)

Read the Travel Weekly article

I have no inside knowledge of how Ryanair run their website but 3 days? Are they serious? That is rather a long time.

I can only think of a couple of reasons why a site would need to be down for 3 days……

• They are making a political point about how hard it has been to comply with the new website upfront pricing legislation….. but taking it to this extreme would be a bit much
• They are making a significant DNS change to their domain name…… but even then - this could have been handled is a faster way (I expect)
• They are making a significant reservation system change - and may be having to transfer old data from one system to another and then manually auditing the data transfer (when you have to transfer live data, often these changes have to be sequential and not done ahead of time)
• They have to reload pricing in a different way to how they currently load pricing - and this price load can’t be done in an offline system - only the live online system - but if they make the changes to live loaded prices prior to corresponding functionality changes on their website something breaks or causes user confusion.

Somehow there must be some manual process to cause a 3 day delay. My bet is on the 4th - which is probably why they have taken so long to get around to this project.

If I am right, the process will be something like this:

1. Take system down
2. Change loaded prices in live reservation system (manual process - could take a long time)
3. Upload new website functionality that corresponds to new style of loaded prices
4. Put system back up

Ummm……. At this stage I would start to look at a DataLoad - a mechanism to systematically upload data into any application - even legacy green screen applications….. if you could cut down the manual load process to a couple of hours this could get their site up after 24 hours (perhaps!). You can also do “trial runs” prior to the changeover event to ensure everything will go smoothly.

If someone from Ryanair thinks I have saved them a few million dollars in lost sales with this tip, please send contributions to me (and corresponding self-bill invoice). Thanks

Tim Hughes over on The BOOT (a blog about the online travel business) has come up with 4 quick rules for success for a travel content focussed website:

1: Content - Lots of it
2: Index - a fantastic Google friendly index and expertise in search engine optimisation
3: Access methods- varying ways and means for consumers to access the content
4: Patience - time (and money) for the traffic to build.

These are great rules. I would add a few more:

5: Create the right environment where people want to publish their own content via your site. Instead of hiring 10 writers (or photographers), convince people (through the power of community) that the benefits of putting their content on your site outweigh the time it will take them (For example, if you are a travel photo website - then you need to create more benefit for a user to post their holiday photos on your website than on someone else’s, or versus just chucking photos on a CD and putting them in the post to family members)

6: Distribution to other websites - Once you have content - let it free to travel around the web…… this may either be full content - or a “taster”, bringing people back to your central website.

7: Keep it fresh - content goes stale quickly. You need to be constantly revisiting old content to check it is still correct. Even better, get your users to alert you to old or stale content.

8: Don’t monetise through CPM advertising - but “something else”. Try selling things. If its great content (and can’t be found anywhere else), then try a subscription model.

9: Let people manipulate content on your site - One reason people may want to come to your site is how they can alter the content around what they want to do. If you have lots of data about different holidays that people can take in a certain destination - let people create travel itineraries using this data - which can be shared between friends etc.

10: Do one thing well - rather than everything at a top level. For example do one destination at an amazing level of detail - rather than an entire country (or the globe). Perhaps instead of creating an entire tool box, you should create a hammer, a screwdriver etc….. but make the best hammers, the best screwdrivers….. let someone else create the saw and the tape measure.

11: Track what people are doing on your website with your content - you may be able to understand trends from this - and these trends may have commercial value to travel companies. If you start getting lots of people researching a new kind of travel via your site - this data may be interesting to a travel company.

12: Decide if you are going to be “expert lead” or “user lead” (and then stick to it). If you are an expert on a topic - then somehow expose this expertise - but without doing so in such a way that a less expert (but knowledgeable) person could come and “borrow” your ideas and information. If you are user lead (by community) then stick with that. If you can join both together you could have a powerful combination.

13: Try to create content that is “all year round” - For example will people just be looking for content when they are thinking of researching their trip - or when buying - or just before travel - or post travel when they want to remind themselves what it was like. Many travel websites focus on the research side of travel….. but tend to forget about all the other opportunities. You may think this conflicts with rule 10 - do one thing well - but unless you are all year round - your revenue stream may not be constant over the year - which can lead either to believe you are doing wonderfully - or that your website is never going to work.

14: I prefer content (or any business) that is based around need rather than around desire - Travel (as a holiday) is normally desire based (but once you have decided to go on holiday, you may need to know certain information). However business travel is often need based. You need to go to a particular meeting in a particular city. Its often easier to create a commercial model based around the principle of need.

15: Get your copyrights sorted out - If you are employing writers, get agreements in place. If users are creating the content for you - what reuse rights do you have? If in 2 years time you want to publish a book - or make a video - can you use the content? What happens if you receive an offer to put your content on another website? Are you covered for that or would you have to renegotiate with your users / writers?

Any more rules?

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.

Before I explain what I mean, first a little history.

7 years ago a few of us set up a small tour operator. We took reservations online - but only in a very simple way - people had to download a PDF form, complete it, then send us their document with their deposit payment. Simple - but it worked.

We didn’t have a big budget for marketing - and sales started to flow in very very slowly. Actually it was too slow - but that is a discussion for another day. As a result, every time we got a sale we got very excited. We poured over the customer’s data - Mr & Mrs so and so from Hampshire going to Egypt…. the news travelled around the office a few times - and much like UK politics - the same sale was announced several times - just to make us feel better.

A few months later and sales were up. We didn’t get excited by an individual sale anymore. Instead we began to group similar customers together by product. Comments still went around the office like “Ah - another sale to Egypt” or “This customer comes from Alaska”. We didn’t know the customer names anymore but we could still identify them by their individual needs.

A few years later I was working for a dot com. We were doing a couple of thousand bookings a day. We had no connection with the customers at all. Customers were numbers on a spreadsheet.

However, there was one thing that was in place that did try to address this balance. We had an information radiator.

Next to the coffee machine (it was a 10,000 USD coffee machine - remember this was a dot com) was a computer screen that updated every 5 minutes or so. It would provide a daily count of bookings - as well as a “month to date”. This was all broken down by booking source - agents, partners, affiliates etc…. Every time any member of staff had a coffee we all had a look and informed ourselves about how sales were going on.

I have also seen information radiators run on whiteboards - where you show the number of site visitors, number of bookings (and therefore conversion). The key is that it is updated at least on a daily basis.

These radiators really help everyone in a company focus on the performance of your website (or other booking channels). Information will be “osmotically” distributed - staff will know how things are working and whether this month is a good month or not…

From my experience I have found this very useful and ensures that people remain focussed….

This week I have been reading up on Yahoo’s information about improving website performance. They have a useful section within their developer network about exceptional performance. This page should be in most web developers bookmarks, especially those on high trafficked websites or those with many images, videos etc.

I have also been spending some time playing with YSlow, a Firefox add-on, that can look at individual websites and determine whether they are compliant with Yahoo’s website performance rules.

YSlow works with Firebug….. I like Firebug as it can produce nice little outputs like below - showing you all the elements of a page as they download - and this helps determine which are fast and which need optimisation. It is also very good at looking at source code of other people’s websites…. if you are into that kind of thing.

Anyway, back to the rules….One of Yahoo’s suggestions is to improve how your hosting is setup.

When you choose where you are going to host your website people conventionally consider the following:

• Price - You can run a website on £100 per year (200 USD) - or £500 (1000 USD) a year - or, if you are a large dot com, you can spend hundreds of thousands of pounds per year just on hosting.
• Technical support level - the price of hosting tends to reflect the support level - is it 24×7 or office hours only. Will they proactively look to solve problems - or just ensure that there is Internet connectivity to your hosting and let you sort out your own issues?
• Legal jurisdiction - with some kinds of data there are issues moving it between the US and Europe etc…. and the jurisdiction of your hosting provider can make a difference - if you are storing or transferring personal data (such as booking information) via your website.
• Central bandwidth connection - people tend to want hosting to be at the centre of the Internet (or near the main traffic hubs - like London, West Coast USA etc)

One issue with being hosted at the centre of the Internet is that, for example, say you are hosting in London - your US visitors will all experience a “slowdown” of your website as all the traffic (for each element of your web page) has to transfer from the UK to the US on every web page request. Likewise, Australian users will have their traffic going all around the world to them - on every page request.

This can be slow however many web developers have just said “well that is how the Internet is” and left this problem for another day.

Is there an alternative to using centrally connected web hosting?

Instead of hosting centrally - you can move some of your hosting “to the edge of the Internet”. For example, you can move your images, videos, flash, CSS and JavaScript to Australia, the UK and the US. Australian users will download their content from your Australian servers, your US users will download from a US server and your UK users from a UK server….. however they will all have the same content URLs….. and all of this server switching happens behind the scenes.

The networks that support this kind of hosting are called Content Delivery Networks (CDNs). You can see a nice demo of one of these networks at CacheFly’s demo - complete with pretty pictures and cheesy US accent.

Yikes - that sounds expensive…. but actually it isn’t. CacheFly have a plan that starts at USD 15 per month. Other companies like Amazon S3 are also reasonably well priced (although Amazon is not quite the same concept as a CDN). You can find a full list of CDNs on this website

Back to travel for a second - I have worked with many leading travel dot coms - and I can’t think of a single one that uses a Content Delivery Network (CDN).  That strikes me as odd especially as there are, on the larger websites, thousands and thousands of images that could really be sped up by using a CDN.

However, I think in the next few years, this will change. Most international websites will be using the services of a CDN - or conventional hosting companies will start to support “CDN directories” - so you can divide your website into sections - those files that are centrally hosted (like script files that generate the HTML) and those files that are distributed onto CDNs automatically (like JavaScript, CSS, Flash, images, videos, documents etc)

Hosting, which has recently become a commodity that people don’t really think about much, has just become a lot more interesting.

Yesterday Google integrated YouTube.com videos into their main search results. As you may know, Google purchased YouTube a while back - for a reported USD $1.65 billion.

Bloggers have started to discuss how this may actually assist Google in getting a return on their massive investment - for example read this post from Scobleizer

The results on Google are now split - we have the main search results - where, if a video (on YouTube) was stongly ranked, it will be replaced with a screen shot of the video. Not a major change - and one that will not really help or hinder smaller travel companies.

See this Google result from searching for “Rotatour Brasil” (They are a Brazil based tour operator) - http://www.rotatour.com/

However, additionally, at the top of the Google page, we now have some new links:

Clicking on the Video link, we do get the top video search results - so your videos will be easily available, even if not yet highly ranked in the main search results. Also, you can play the video within the Google site (rather than having to go to the YouTube site)

Practical actions to take 

Make some videos! (They don’t have to be “real” videos - for example the Rotatour one is animated static images with music added on top)

Finally, while looking for videos to use as examples, I found this (a classic from UK TV history)