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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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)

I categorise the functions of consumer facing tour operator websites into 3 core roles:

1. Sales - the actual online reservation / booking 
2. Marketing - making someone want to buy a product (and making them aware of it in the first place)
3. Operations - online balance payments / errata notification / crisis management etc

These three levels really illustrate how the web is evolving within online travel - as companies tend to progress through the three levels logically. Most small tour operators are at step 1 or 2 while a number of the very large tour operators are now at level 3 (although not quite yet doing online erratas or effective crisis management) (An errata is some information that you need to communicate to a customer that may be different to the product as advertised - this may be prior to purchase - or post purchase / pre travel - for example building works in a nearby hotel)

A ”sales” website would be one where the customer has made their purchase decision based on a brochure - or speaking to a sales representative - but the purchase takes place online - made directly by the customer. This may generate efficiencies within your business (as presumably an online sale takes less staff time than a manually entered reservation) - but in the main this is just moving bookings from one “channel” (telephone or booking form) to another(web). The customer has gained their confidence in your organisation through something physical (the brochure or the human) - and therefore may overlook any little problems you may have on your site.

A ”marketing” website would be one where the customer makes their purchase decision based on information they have read on your website - without you having to get involved. Hopefully the sale then takes place online as well.

Of course you will take sales however they come, but its a “marketing” efficient website you are looking to create. Very few websites really succeed at this - especially on the more complex “tailor made” type product - as often not enough information is put online - or not the right information.

Product information is difficult to pitch at the right level - I remember back to managing development on a hotel reservation system (I have worked on a few) - and the discussion was all about televisions. If you put as a room amenity “TV” while a competitor website has “Colour TV”, a customer may make an assumption that your television isn’t colour…. So if you then put “Colour TV with Satellite” - and another site then puts “Colour TV with Satellite and British TV channels” - the customer may choose that website to make the reservation….. (Personally I try to stay in Accor owned hotels when I can, because they always have French TV channels….. which just goes to show you can’t suit everyone with your product descriptions)

However it is the “supporting” (non product) pages where people really get to know your company.

What kind of supporting web pages do you have?

• Contact pages (giving telephone numbers, addresses etc)
• Special offers tables
• Brochure request forms
• Terms & Conditions
• About the destination
• Specifics about travelling (for example travelling with children, travel when requiring special needs etc)
• Blog ?
• Available jobs
• Industry association memberships
• Environmental awareness
• Testimonials

I haven’t done the research (perhaps I should!) but in my opinion these supporting pages are as important to generating your “decision to purchase” from a customer as the product information itself. Just prior to the “sale” a potential customer will normally do a little tour of your site - and all the supporting web pages (having mainly looked at product pages upto this point). These supporting pages will all be looked at - so collectively can be very influential in making (or breaking the sale).

Also it is the area that is least looked at by small tour operators. Probably when a new website is launched the brochure content is put online - and so the product information will be reasonable from the start. However, the rest of the site will probably be a few paragraphs from here or there cobbled together and put online. This is not good enough.

What should be the focus?

1. Demonstrate expertise - if you are a tour operator this should be easy (it is slightly harder for travel agents as they are one step removed, but still possible to do very well). You can easily take on the large travel company giants by showing greater knowledge of your destination and your product than they do - you have the knowledge - just put it online. The larger companies are really good at the big things like taking bookings and running massive advertising campaigns - and managing systems that hold x thousand holidays - but terrible at generating interesting destination specific content. You can never be too expert in something. Get your expertise online.
2. Reinforce that you are a tour operator -  you and I both know what a tour operator is (vs a travel agent) but it seems that many customers don’t - and can quite easily get confused. So don’t use the words “tour operator” - but instead make sure you have lots of photos of your guides - in branded uniform - really showing the product is yours. This message needs to be seen on every page of your website. (One way I did this in the past was to put a local “Operations office” address on the “Contact Us” page - so people saw that - even if they were just looking to email the UK sales office….. osmotically the customer knows that you are “real” and present in the destination country) 
3. Remember that a potential customer will visit your competitor sites as well - if you are selling tours to France - don’t give me endless information about France - it won’t be read as I will have seen it on other sites already. Really focus on your product and your style of product delivery (* see note). For example, do you do cycle tours? Lets see some close up pictures (with all the detail) of the cycles you use. Lets see the bikes left outside of a local bar - this gives you an opportunity to incorporate that local information - and information about France - while at the same time adding a little more interest to your general approach to product delivery.
4. Make your website “dynamic” - if you have 3 or 4 tours that are pretty similar - and you can easily advise people on the phone why someone should do one rather than the other - then create a little “tool” that asks a couple of questions -and in response - gives some advice or suggestions. Not only have you created a little feature on your website that people may find useful (hopefully!), but they are much more likely to send that to their friends than a link to a bit of text (as it captures interest while a user is thinking about researching their holiday, rather than buying). Also, if you store all the requests on your server - you can evaluate them - and check that you have the right products for the people who are coming to your site! Don’t ask for customer details at this stage, just make it fun and easy and “low emotional investment”.
5. Go “land only” - historically companies have been in one niche - and in order to expand - have had to go into another. For example by adding additional countries to their offering. However, with the web, sales can come from everywhere (not just your home country). Reinforce your “land only” (i.e. no flight) prices. If you get your marketing site working well, you will find your non-home country sales going upwards. It is much easier to keep your number of destinations down, but increase your global marketing, that to operationally increase the number of destinations you offer, but keep to your home market. (One reason to cover multiple countries is to mitigate risk - but that is slightly different) 

* Note from above - OK sometimes it is good to put endless information about France on a tour operator selling to France -as this can help with search engine optimisation - but put it on your website in such a way that it isn’t seen as content that “must be read” prior to purchase.

Lets take another example, the contact page. This is pretty much the most boring page you can have on your website - normally it just has perhaps a postal address, a telephone number (perhaps different ones for sales and accounts) and not much else. However you can be 100% sure that every single potential customer will visit this page at least once prior to purchase, even if they don’t have any questions for you. What can you do to it to spruce it up?

• Put a Skype (internet phone) mechanism on there. Doesn’t matter if you don’t have it turned on - but it gives reassurance that you are there (or could be)
• Put a little map so people can find you. No one actually will come to visit you (if they are buying online) but they like to think they might - and a map will convince them that you care about them enough. Tell them about the parking and the local bus route.
• Put your local time (that updates automatically) - and list your office hours. You could even list the best times to call (with the shortest wait)

The point here is that you can make a boring page much more interesting - and turn it into a page that helps turn your site into a marketing site - not just a sales site.

Do you have any more ideas? Please use the comment form below

Yep - another mouthful of a word (see definition) - but it really means “cutting out the middleman”.

A few years ago the flow used to go something like (for an example tour going to Turkey)

1. Consumer reads about Turkey in a newspaper or magazine
2. Consumer contacts a travel agency for a set of brochures (from multiple tour operators featuring tours in Turkey)
3. Consumer decides to book (via the travel agent), tour operator gets contacted by the travel agent
4. Tour operator uses a Turkish “ground handler” to provide the local services (although some tour operators are their own ground agents)

Travel agents have become increasingly concerned that tour operators are “moving in on their turf” (i.e. going direct to consumers - rather than selling via agents). However the agents have to see it from the tour operators perspective -as now with the web - ground handlers are increasingly setting themselves up to go direct to the marketplace - missing both the tour operators and their associated travel agent network.

The next logical step is now happening - and the original “trusted” sources of impartial travel advice are looking to retain (or regain) some of their readership losses that have occured to companies like WAYN and TripAdvisor - for example see the newly launched TravelMail (OK you can’t see the site yet - as I write this - so you will have to be happy with some screen shots instead)

Could the next flow look like this?

1. Consumer reads about Turkey in an online newspaper or online travel magazine - like TravelMail
2. Consumer books direct with a Turkish based travel company

Therefore my advice is that you have to own the delivery of the product - if you want to ensure that you are going to be in the travel business in the long term. Other areas will survive (but it is difficult to say what areas those will be)

Practical tour operator tip
If you run your own tours - make sure this really clear on your website. Put up lots of photos of your tour leaders (wearing branded clothing)….. as a tour operator, this is your edge.

Kevin May, on the Travolution Blog, raises an interesting a question about budgeting for pay per click online advertising. Pay Per Click advertising (or PPC) is where for each site visitor that a 3rd party sends you, you incur an advertising fee. Google Adsense is an example of a PPC advertising engine and so is TravelSupermarket and Cheapflights

The story that Kevin recounts is one from an ancillary firm who advertise via TravelSupermarket (see the full story) - who set a fixed advertising budget for the year. TravelSupermarket then upped their own TV advertising - leading to additional traffic to the ancillary company (each click costing money) - and the fixed advertising budget being used up. The ancillary company then had to respond and increase their prices they advertised via TravelSupermarket - to price themselves out of the website (therefore reducing their spend) - while they not fully extracting themselves from the site (presumably waiting for their budget to be refreshed the next year)

Kevin asks - what else can you do?

Frankly - lots. They need to create what is known as an “infinite” advertising budget. Even better if they can create a cash flow positive infinite budget.

Firstly some assumptions - as a website selling ancillary sales direct to consumers there is little customer retention. Yes you may get a subsequent sale to the same customer - but perhaps if they have come via TravelSupermarket originally- they will come back to you next time via TravelSupermarket - therefore costing you again. So on this assumption the entire advertising fee must be recouped by the initial commission / margin generated from the first sale (i.e. excluding any future revenue opportunities). This isn’t exactly correct - but it will do as a conservative working assumption.

Secondly, we need to know the conversion rate (paid click to sale) - helpfully Kevin has supplied information that it is 9-10%. That is within the bounds of a normal website performance.

OK - lets work this out

Lets say that an average click cost is £1.50, the average margin is 20%, the conversion is 10% (click visitor to purchase). So it costs 10 visitors @ £15 total advertising spend to generate one sale. At a margin of 20%, they are going to need to sell their product at £75 at least in order to cover the advertising. (As a side note, this is why principal travel companies can do PPC advertising not travel agents -as the margins that agents earn are not sufficient to play the same game)

If the average click cost was £1 then they need to sell product at least at £50, or if a £2 click, product at least at £100.

Why sell at zero profit?

Three reasons - firstly you can increase the volume of transactions going through your systems - leading to better negotiation (or internal efficiencies) - leading to lower costs in the future. Secondly, you could be aiming to hit a quarterly sales target (particularly for newer online companies that need to show some kind of improvement to investors - even if the investors are not wise enough to see through the figures). Thirdly - you may have an allocation that you need to move (i.e. product you have committed to purchase even if you can’t sell it)

You don’t have to sell at zero profit - this is just the edge of the curve (i.e. you take all the sales you can get that generate positive profit - as well as all of those that take zero profit - but then stop)

Therefore the conversation that the ancillary company should be having with themselves is “What percentage can we afford to spend on advertising”. Say its 15% revenue. That should be the budget - not some static “old school” way of setting budgets with a fixed annual amount.  

OK I hear you say - wonderful having an “infinite” budget - but what about cashflow? If you are taking deposit payments online - and are paying your PPC advertising on credit (say 30 - 45 days), you can get yourself into a positive cash flow situation (as you are paying for your advertising after some income has been received). If you are an ancillary company selling hotels - if you are selling on the merchant model (i.e. full payment at time of reservation rather than to the hotel at time of customer checkout) - then you can really begin to generate positive cash flow from PPC. This should convince your head of finance that budget setting based on revenue percentages works better than fixed annual budgets.

Are there alternatives to the “infinite” budget? Yes - you can do what is known as traffic arbitrage. Say you have a landing page on your website that relates to an individual hotel. You have paid £1.50 to get that visitor to see the page - but they, for some reason, reject that opportunity to purchase. You can “sell” that user to someone else. If 20% of the time you can get £0.50 exit money from users the outcome looks like this

100 users clicking through to the page
10 sales (costing £15)
20 paid exits (earning £10)

All of the sudden, your 10 sales have only cost £5 advertising, which means for the original budget you can already do so much more!

A few years back much of the legal moves online were made by the music industry - protecting themselves from massive copyright theft through the distribution of music via various networks and websites.

With the forthcoming rise in user generated content (such as for example hotel reviews on TripAdvisor) how will travel companies “fight back”?

One answer appears to be the “if you can’t beat them, join them” concept - which Sheraton have taken on their hotels website (see Neighbourhood). Maybe the more appropriate saying is “Keep your friends close, but your enemies closer” - although I can’t see them saying that their customers are enemies exactly…. !

However there does seem to be some risk taking here by the companies involved. Just today Digg - a user generated news prioritisation mechanism - has started sailing close to the rocks - because they have not been able to comply with a cease and desist letter from an owner of some intellectual property (namely a HD-DVD code). They tried to (and removed the offending user generated content), but their users forced them to put the content back up. Kevin Rose, founder of Digg, looks concerned that this may put their business at legal risk - and came up with the great comment “If we lose, then what the hell, at we least we died trying”. (See his blog post)

I don’t see too many travel company executives wanting to take that kind of risk on behalf of their users? What would TripAdvisor do if many travel companies started a “legal” approach to take down their content? Would they take it down - or out of principle keep it up? (Read this TimesOnline article that discusses these points - to quote ”However, top libel lawyers contacted by Times Travel say this may not be a strong enough defence where reviewers have defamed a hotel by making unfounded claims that could affect its reputation”)

If you remember, with music companies, once they had done with companies - they moved to individual targets (probably because they were easier). If, in the example above, the UGC company (such as TripAdvisor) doesn’t budge, maybe the individual users could be targetted by the travel companies. In the states you can slander someone in a blog comment…. (see ShoeMoney blog)…….

See the Travolution Blog for additional insight, reported yesterday, on how user generated content can be beneficial (Just to balance up the negativity in the post above!)

I am not a lawyer - and don’t suggest that lawsuits start flying (and not in this direction thank you) - I am just commenting on what could be coming next, to a user generated content website near you.

For a practical ”user generated content” tip that can be applied by smaller travel companies - work on your testimonials - make them product specific. These have been around long before the Internet, are known to work, and let you control the message. But remember, make them real not up. I found an article on a website I respect - that suggests that phoney testimonials are OK - as long as they look real….. err…. I would stick with real ones - and that website has lost much of my respect.