So - another detailed review. This time let us take a look at a new cruise deal price-comparison / meta-agent site - CruisePricesCompared.com

I say “meta agent” because rather than sending through bookings to suppliers, customers are sent through to agents to complete the transaction. This is similar in style to travel.co.uk that I reviewed 2 days ago - although travel.co.uk is a much neater solution all round.

5 things I like

The founder has built and launched something rather than just talking about it

Well done to Harley Van Stratten. There are many agents who mope around complaining about what the web is doing to their business - but Harley has successfully launched a novel website to defend against what he sees as a growing problem. To quote Harley

Each month the money agents earn from cruise sales is being eroded because competition is pushing prices down. Agents are having to discount to compete and that means they can’t afford to advertise. On cruisepricescompared.com, they can advertise for free, which means they can start increasing their margins because they are not paying distribution costs

I agree that cruise is going to be a competitive sector in the next couple of years. Traditional agents who ran for shelter by specialising in cruise sales (because traditional tour packages had moved online) may find cruise isn’t such an attractive place to be after all. I am sure Harley is aiming to help these agents maintain market share.

Not being run from a yacht or pretending to be a super hero

Yesterday you may remember I reviewed SoCruise - a new cruise social network that is also going after the cruise deals sector (in the UK). SoCruise are now (in)famous for promoting themselves using super heroes and by saying they intend to run their business (now with 5 employees) from 2 yachts in Ibiza. Is that what SoCruise’s 250,000 EUR seed funding was spent on?

The meta-agent model

I like the meta-agent model….. but I have gone on about this too much already this week (in the travel.co.uk review). But its still a positive for the Cruise Prices Compared.com site.

I like the model enough to respect it but it isn’t one I would follow if I were doing a startup. It is too much of a “better candlesticks” approach…. when I am personally interested in electricity (i.e. its an improvement on an old model - rather than anything new)

Sorry - just have 3 things I like today. No refunds available.

5 things I don’t like

Video auto start

The homepage has a video slot in the top right hand corner. This will be available “for rent” to any advertiser. That is fine - I just wish they would turn auto-start off (especially as the homepage is the only page with the search on - so when you navigate around the site - you have to come back to that page often - and the video starts playing every time).

An alternative to turning the auto-start off is to make it start with the volume off on subsequent visits to the page (using a cookie). That is probably the most elegant way of solving the problem.

Colours

The blues and reds are really pretty bright and not very relaxing (as a cruise holiday should be)

But what is worse is that the blue is the same colour as hyperlinked text…. OK - I am not a designer - so I won’t get into the ins and outs of colour choices - but suffice to say - I don’t like the colours.

Pages are too wordy

This website has too many words and not enough bullet points.

Words are a funny thing on websites as they are both informative and are a core part of the user interface. It is far too easy to have too many of them.

One skill that many smaller (and larger) websites don’t tend to bring in to a website project is a dedicated copywriter. Copywriters, although they tend to be expensive, can do amazing things with words. Use them.

[Website projects undertaken by web design agencies are, in my experience, much more likely to use dedicated copywriters. Agencies understand how to create a team of all the talents, especially larger agencies]

Advertising model & not enough “other content”

The only content on this site is the cruise deal content - plus a rather weird page about how cruise is one of the best kept secrets in the travel industry.

This makes me wonder how they are going to make their business model work. Their suggested model is that all traffic is freely given to cruise selling agents…. i.e. an agent can come along, load up some products and receive traffic. No money to be made from agents there then.

But without lots of other pages - there just won’t be sufficient page impressions to make enough advertising income to cover either the operational costs of the site - or marketing the site to consumers.

The B2C marketing will cost a great deal of money. To quote:

Where there are adverts for cruising, we will advertise too

Marketing to agents will also cost money….. 

Obviously I haven’t seen their numbers - but in my experience to make sensible advertising income you really need thousands of pages all pulling their weight.

My advice would be either to move to a PPC model with the agents - or introduce a “nominal” monthly charge to be able to upload as many deals as you like. For an advertiser there is little difference between free and nominal - but people paying a small fee a month will actually care more about what kind of deals they are loading into the system. Quality will go up.

Search

Lets start with the basics

• Use GET not POST - so that the back button still works (and you can get back from a single result to the main results page)
• Vertical spacing - tighten it all up so you can get the data above the fold on a 1024 x 768 screen

I could go on and on about the search. This is the key part of the site - but it isn’t really quite right yet. 

My main concern about the search though is how the situation with multiple agents all loading a deal for the same cruise is going to be handled. Will the deals be grouped by cruise?

This really stems from the problem of not taking PPC advertising from the agents - if they were then deals from the top bidding agent could be shown against that specific cruise (or top two or whatever).

I would be interested to know how they intend to solve this - otherwise with, say, 100 cruise agents all loading offers there will be duplication between cruises…. the user interface will not really stand up to that kind of pressure - and users just won’t use the system as it will be unwieldy.

Final thought about these reviews

I only do these “10 things” reviews for new travel websites that have issued press releases about something or other. If you don’t want your site to go under the musings microscope - don’t send out a press release until you are ready.

Personally, I wouldn’t issue a press release on day #1 of a new website…… leave it a few weeks until you have got some private feedback from various people and managed to incorporate as much as you can into the next iteration. Then you can tell the world about your new site.

Finally, see also the Travolution blog - who are running an open thread where you can post what you think about the site….. CruisePricesCompared open thread

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!

Time for another detailed review….. lets take a look at travel.co.uk, a new website that “takes travel comparison shopping to a new level”. Its a UK based site selling mainly package holidays (at the moment) but with the intention to move into wider product sectors later.

5 things I like

Choose your booking agent and choose your holiday

This website isn’t just about choosing product - but you can choose who you are going to book with. The website takes no part in the commercial transaction between the customer and the agent.

You should be aware that none of the products and services that appear on the Site are provided by us.  They are provided by third parties over whom we have no control.  You should satisfy yourself that you wish to purchase these products or services before contracting with those third parties.  The third party providers will be supplying products and services on their own standard terms and conditions which can be found on the booking forms for the relevant product or service on the Site.

This makes a change from most online travel agency websites which tend to be about sending customers direct to suppliers. 

Support for the Travel Trust Association (TTA)

Interestingly they are also taking TTA bonded agents. Great news for the smaller travel companies out there.

Shortlist

A quick view of your shortlisted items….. and you can drag and re-order….

And you can compare items in your shortlist side by side:

Only negative on the shortlist is that the cookie seems to be session based - so if you close your browser and revisit the site - the shortlist is gone (Virgin Holidays, for example, maintain an unsaved shortlist even if you close your browser)

Calendar

A nice calendar with price bar chart below:

However I selected the £171 price for the 9th of July…. and a popup comes up. In the modal popup an AJAX call goes and checks availability for that date / price combination.

While it is checking I can see full details of the product (above - and notice in the top right it says checking availability) - but then - without any warning - because the product is unavailable - the page refreshes to a page saying nothing available:

Ummm…. maybe I don’t like this date checking system after all!

They need to make the “unavailable” message appear on the details page - because otherwise I could have started to interact with the page - and be shocked when it fully refreshes to negative message. The user should be left in control of their experience….

The domain name

Yep - travel.co.uk is a pretty nice name.

5 things I don’t like

Spelling of accommodation

One of my pet peeves on travel websites is seeing the word accommodation misspelt. It really winds me up. Unfortunately travel.co.uk have fallen into this trap.

I am sure they will fix this in a jiffy! 

Not clear enough benefits between one agent and another

While I like the concept of being able to select between different booking agents, I can’t see the benefits of one over another clearly enough.

The text describing the agency profile is too wordy - and too generic. Of course everyone is independent, of course everyone has experience - blah blah blah blah blah.

…. and price distinction between booking agents doesn’t help either…..

[Shows detail of Agent 1 vs Agent 2]

Minor point for the designers…. a potential usability issue here…. the page on the site is for selecting a different booking agent - but I read it initially as choose a booking agent - so I overlooked that a default booking agent had already been selected. My fix would be to repeat the defaulted booking agent in the “choose a different booking agent for this holiday” box.

Popup hell

Navigating around the site you end up with all sorts of modal / non-modal popups that contain core functionality and product details. Certainly this isn’t accessible but it may also be a problem for less than expert web users. Yes its funky and new - but tried and tested traditional user interface design works for a reason.

About us page not clear about not being responsible for bookings

The quote I listed above was from the terms & conditions. The T&Cs make it quite clear that travel.co.uk is not part of the transaction between the customer and the booking agent - however other pages don’t.

Yes on the homepage it says “booking direct with the company of your choice, right here on this site” - but this is easily missed….. and could easily be confused with booking with a supplier direct rather than booking with an agent direct.

I have a feeling this is going to cause all sorts of customer service issues down the road - and resulting bad press - unless they clearly define the proposition and explain it better to consumers.

While we are talking about the About us page - its about five times too long. No one will read what is probably one of the most important pages on the site. [People coming via online marketing will select a product, and just prior to the purchase decision, read the about us page in order to find out more about the company, and then go back to their product and book - if they were not upset by anything they read]

Help is unhelpful

The help is stuck in a tiny popup. What makes it worse is that you have a tiny scroll bar to move the help information up and down….. and the web designers have made the popup size locked (resizable=0) so even if I wanted to make the popup larger I can’t.

Frankly the help popup is pretty rubbish.

Summary

I am being tough on this site because it has been put together by one of the leading travel technology companies - and a leading travel website design team. They should (and could) be doing much better than this.

Maybe in 3 months the site will be great - but at the moment there is still a great deal of sandpapering to do - and a few redesigns required as well. No awards for this one yet. Luckily the awards season - and UK peak sales period for package holidays (January / February / March) - is still some way away!

I read with interest the news, via Travolution, that Thomson Holidays have “fixed” £1.5 million (3 million USD) worth of “lost bookings” after having identified issues with their website. It makes a good headline - but I am not convinced that this is a real number.

• This number is probably generated, internally, from a ROI metric rather than actual bookings. From my experience at working with large travel companies every development has to have an ROI calculation - and when you can’t think of one (as it is a minor usability tweak) you devise an ROI return value that would at least cover the development cost of making the change. Although ideally the ROI metric should match actual expectation…. often it doesn’t…..  
• Can they be sure that an abandoned transaction wasn’t just a “channel” abandonment - as with these large, multi-channel, companies - it could just be that the customer has booked over the phone in the end (rather than not booking at all with their company)

Anyway, the principle is sound - evaluating abandonment (and tweaking design to address these issues) can have a positive benefit to transaction volume (and reduce strain on call centres). I am not arguing with the principle - just how the headline number is calculated before being published as “fact”.

Which brings me to another area…… here is an email I received today from a senior industry insider….

Blimey, booking a hotel on line is very difficult. I say this tongue in cheek to some extent, because I have some years experience in hotel technology and web distribution.

So with some disappointment I find The Lygon Arms website has no availability. Knowing a little about contracting/yielding etc, I check an aggregator. Superbreak are top in Google. They have availability but at something approaching Rack.

So i call the chain central res office. They say on the phone they DO have availability and some good rates. Why after a decade of web distribution is the hotel industry such a shambles!?!?!?!?

I tried another well known country house hotel last night. The web booking engine crashed, so I couldn’t get rates. Its supplied by a mainstream PMS supplier.  Yet the hotel owner… and they must be turning over say £15-20m… think so little of their customer facing property (web) that they serve up the drivel I saw last night. I am sure this property invest hugely in their property (physical) and yet they don’t appreciate that before a customer can get to be physical… they are increasingly virtual and need to be wowed by their online service

Would they have a really amazing bar, and restaurant, and rooms, but leave the front office with no plaster on the walls, a bare screed floor and cement mixer standing  in the corner? i don’t think so.

Web front ends should be checked, polished, and attended to as diligently as front offices

This week we have had rants, reviews and a bit of strategy. What do you want me to write about?

Almost Friday….. so time for a bit of levity.

Here are my favourite quotes about design and user feedback:

If I’d asked people what they wanted, they would have asked for a better horse.
Henry Ford

i.e. yes listen to your users and hear that they want improvement - but don’t necessarily do exactly what they ask. Customers are great at pointing out problems - but use your own experience to devise appropriate solutions.

Why isn’t there a mouse flavoured cat food?

Umm…… good question.

i.e. when designing based on your own experience ensure that you are representative of your customers’ needs

So my challenge to you….. if you are going to a meeting today to talk about the design of your website…….. try to incorporate one of these quotes / questions into your discussion. Think of it as a form of “buzzword bingo”.

Travelodge, a budget hotel chain, has launched a new website. Here are some quick facts:

• 87% of their bookings come directly via their website
• They have 330 hotels in the UK, Ireland and Spain
• The website attracts 500,000 visitors a week to the site

[Thanks Travolution!]

Apparently they have invested £1 million (2 million USD) into the website…… so lets take a look and see if they got good bang for their buck.

I am going to use a new style of website review…. because some have commented that I am always a bit negative! Well I would say that any company that wants to generate press coverage from a website relaunch and has spent a good amount of money should grin and bear it.

5 things I don’t like

Confused about the dash vs the colon

I would much prefer to see a colon : here rather than a dash…… The discount isn’t minus £4.05 but actually discounted to £4.05

They do use colons elsewhere in the booking engine - so not quite sure why they haven’t on the breakfast.

Do they really need to mention the word death in the first paragraph that everyone reads?

“Up to £500 cover for non-refundable room cancellation costs due to specified reasons, including: death, illness or injury, or if the vehicle you are travelling in breaks down or is directly involved in an accident.”

While it is great that they offer room cancellation insurance - I wonder whether these conditions could be hidden in a popup - or at least written less legally and in a more friendly way. Perhaps the copywriter who came up with “bag 10% off” could be used to improve the legal room cancellation cover text. Incidentally, on the “bag 10% off” - not sure this will be that well understood by people reading English as a non-native language.

Hidden help

They have a help “window”….. however I don’t like the way that some of the help is only visible when scrolled down.

I expect this looked great on a design mockup - when there were only 2 questions…. but when they came to build it they realised that actually there are more questions than space allowed for, and they didn’t want to break their voice bubble metaphor.

I would choose the top couple of questions - and then put a really big link to further questions. Certainly I wouldn’t leave it like this.

Checkout time

12 is a dangerous time to use on the web….. especially in 12 hour clock (rather than 24 hour clock) because it is easy to make a mistake.

I am fairly confident that Travelodge really mean checkout by 12 am (not 12 pm) but I am left wondering whether I am right or not!

Messy presentation

What is going on here?

[Firefox, PC]

5 things I do like

Mid way through booking - you can get back to it

If you are half way through a booking - you can get back to it from the homepage and some other non-transactional pages….. therefore if you leave your booking, perhaps to look up an answer to a question, you can come back to your current booking fairly conveniently.

However, this is broken (visually) in IE / PC

Almost full

I like the little gauge telling me that the hotel is almost full on the dates I have selected:

Mind you, I am wondering why the “night” has jumped a line. Looks like it needs a bit of a tidy up to make this more presentable.

Integrated Google maps

I like the way they have quite neatly integrated Google maps with their website. Its a pretty good job. However, it isn’t perfect…… if you follow the link from this promotional advert on the special offers page:

You find yourself here…….  yeah - that map is helpful.

Nodcasts

Wow…… almost went to sleep listening to this one
http://www.travelodge.co.uk/whats_new/files/nodcasts/Stress.mp3

To quote “you are like a magician and your creative mind is all powerful…… on the right is the new you…. the dream you created earlier”……  Ummm…. .Thanks Travelodge - I needed that on a Monday morning.

Listen to more Nodcasts!

Booking on behalf of another person

I like the way you can book on behalf of someone else. This situation has come up recently when booking on behalf of a colleague…. becomes very tricky on some websites.

However, on the “Add contact details” popup I don’t like the phrase “Enter any details you want for this contact”. What they really mean is complete any of the following fields……

Conclusion

On the plus side plenty of nice mapping and a fairly well considered booking process. However there is still a ton of sandpapering to do….. Looks to me that they have become too focussed on stuff that is sexy to talk about (mapping etc) - rather than the rather boring job of making sure all the tiny details are correct.

Worth 1 million GBP (2 million USD)? No. Not yet.

Last September 07 I came up with a “Canary” describing how to judge a website by the number of “click here” links there are on the site. Obviously the fewer the better.

Click here Canary article

Maybe I have found another Canary - the privacy policy URL. In my opinion having a clean URL for the privacy policy tends to indicate a well thought out website.

For example some nice ones from leading websites….

Yahoo
http://info.yahoo.com/privacy/us/yahoo/details.html - a bit of a mess, but acceptable

Google
http://www.google.com/privacy.html - clean, simple, easy

Microsoft
http://privacy.microsoft.com/ - clean and simple, but over-engineered

BBC
http://www.bbc.co.uk/privacy/ - elegant and classic

So lets look at some online travel ones - not really as neat….

Opodo
http://www.opodo.co.uk/opodo/StrutsServlet/DisplaySiteInfoPage?pageName=privacy - oh dear

Expedia
http://www.expedia.co.uk/daily/service/privacy.asp - quite simple

Orbitz
http://www.orbitz.com/pagedef/content/legal/privacy05.jsp?popupsDisabled=false - in a popup

TravelSupermarket
http://www.moneysupermarket.com/legal/PrivacyPolicy.asp - I don’t want legal information - and besides, the privacy policy is on a different site domain.

and a tie for the winner….

Kayak
http://www.kayak.co.uk/help/privacy.html - better to help than give legal info

WAYN
http://www.wayn.com/privacy.html - perfect (looks like they copied Google)

So next time you want to quickly evaluate a website - take a look at the privacy policy URL - it may just be a great indicator of how well thought out the site is. YMMV.

TripKick has just launched (in the last few days) and it looks like a website that is worth a quick look at.

URL: http://www.tripkick.com/
Concept: Not just hotel reviews - but community generated room level reviews

For example, rooms in the Clift Hotel (San Francisco)

Wow this is going to be a challenge….  firstly there is a great deal of data and secondly hotels just are not setup for taking bookings for specific rooms - so even if you know what room you want there may be a challenge in booking it.

As a quick recap to those unfamiliar with hotel operations, hotels tend to sell in one of three ways:

• By the room - for example small hotels and Bed & Breakfasts. e.g. the Sea View room,  the Blue room etc
• By the room type - for example “double room”, “twin room” etc (tend to be mainly medium sized hotels)
• By the rate type - for example corporate rate, special rate for company ABC etc (often how the big hotels distribute)

Room level review information, instead of being useful to consumers, may actually be very interesting indeed to two constituencies:

• The hotel owner - as now you can find out which rooms could be yield managed differently to other rooms
• Tour operators making group bookings - sometimes in a group you have premium and non-premium guests…. although they may be all in the same room type. Now you can, when allocating rooms to guests, determine which people should go where (assumes that you have a tour leader in the group at checkin!)  

So the TripKick idea could work…. but I wonder whether it is just “too much information”. However it is early days - and computers should be ideal at determining what data would be of interest to users - hence maybe TripKick will succeed with this.

They should probably look towards the trade for monetisation though (either as an additional data set to conventional hotel review websites - or to hotel owners / tour operators - to inform their operational decisions)

One to keep an eye on as in the first week a website is live it is hardly fair to give a thumbs up / thumbs down quite yet!

A couple of weeks back I again opened up again an opportunity for a “review” on this blog. This time four companies came forward to go under the “musings microscope”. (see original post).

I apologise for being a bit slow on coming back to it…. but everything is a bit hectic at the moment…. today I turned on Skype for a call and within 10 minutes I was having 5 concurrent conversations with different customers from around the world. Anyway, its hectic for all the right reasons - so I am not worried too much (note to self - when turning on Skype - turn it on as invisible)

Excuses over, the website / service I want to review today is Panedia - http://www.panedia.com/

Aaron Spence, CEO, from Panedia, described their service as follows:

“We’re a content development company doing new things for online travel with panoramic virtual tours….all extremely high quality content…all shot by professional photographers. We do put our content on maps (like Google with Streetview) but a quick look at our sites will show that we’re not a Streetview (or Everyscape, Mapjack, Earthmine, BlueDasher + the rest) copy. We’re not trying to shoot every street in the world….we professionally shoot things that travellers may want to see.” 

One look at their website and I can see some beautiful images taking up 90% of my screen (the remainder mainly being a Google map). The high quality of the images and the execution on the web is top level.

One of their competitors will be Google street view. Indeed Panedia, in this blog post, have done a side by side comparison. It basically boils down to having a few, high quality, images vs a quantity of low quality “snaps”.

So what do travellers want?
I expect business travellers and those dealing with the practical aspects will tend towards finding Google street view very useful indeed - you can look ahead and work out where to park, the current traffic levels (in some cities) etc.

However Panedia are not going for that market - they are aiming to sell their quality content to 3rd parties (presumably travel companies and consumers directly) in order to help build a reason to go travelling in the first place (especially for leisure travellers with their desktop wallpaper service).

I could spend a great deal of time looking around the Panedia website as the quality of the images drags you in and makes you want to click to the next one (they are linked into adjacent images so you can travel around, much like Google street view)

What challenges do they have?
Challenges will come from two directions

• Keeping images “fresh”
• Competitors

Keeping images fresh
I remember managing website projects for large travel companies who have dedicated staff working on their image libraries. One of the challenges when working at large scale is keeping images fresh and accurate. For example, on a hotel reservation website, if a hotel undertakes renovation - then, according to trading standards rules, the old images may no longer be used…. etc etc…. its a real issue.

Panedia may have made a great upfront investment in creating a wonderful library of images - but in 3-4 years time - they are going to have to do many of them again. Therefore their opportunity is a current one.

Competitors
I am not going to list all competitors because Aaron has done a great job of that in his quote (!)…. however one that probably ought to get a bit of attention is Panoye. Basically this is a community website and has been developed by an individual rather than a company.

It is a community where individuals can upload geotagged panoramic tours with the ultimate aim of building a virtual tour all around the Earth. The guy behind Panoye says that he only did it as a website to put on his CV…. 

If I was Panedia I would recruit the guy from Panoye as soon as possible. According to his blog he wants to move somewhere sunny and is looking for a job - hence Australia would probably be fine (if the visa can be arranged!)

Why am I so interested in Panoye?
In my opinion a community effort is really one of the only ways to build a massive collection of quality images and take on Google streetview. OK Panoye isn’t the completed article yet…. but it shows that a community of global photographers can be created….. and therefore, given a bit of backing, it would exceed any effort made as an “expert lead” project.

Power to the people.

Last October (7 months ago) I reviewed the Expedia Inspiroscope tool. At the time I wrote

“I don’t expect this one to stay on the Expedia homepage for too long if it is designed in its current form. Perhaps it was never intended to replace their Inspirator - and is just there for a forthcoming marketing campaign”

Well…. it is no longer so dominant on the homepage ….. the tool has been relegated to their inspiration homepage found here (OK there is still a tiny mention on the UK homepage). Instead, Expedia have a new “Where to go” map…. which I expect is much more commercially successful.

However, the inspiroscope is still getting mentioned in the UK travel trade press…. two UK travel conferences have recently held the tool up as a great example of online travel innovation - hence it is probably worth taking a second look before Expedia remove it completely!

The statistics
One of the best ways of investigating the success of a solution is to look at statistics. I don’t have any usage stats….. however Expedia have kindly still left the “vote” results available for all to see.

http://inspiroscope.expedia.co.uk/GetWordVotes.ashx

Lets do a quick analysis:

(Remember this is for a 7-8 month period, during the UK winter….. so will be dominated by summer holiday concepts, probably)

• Interesting places - 11037
• Beach - 10011
• Beautiful scenery - 9335
• Good weather - 7301
• Hot weather - 7093
• New experiences - 6228
• Time to relax - 3906
• Relaxed atmosphere - 3690
• Culture - 3505
• Exotic - 3365
• Beautiful Sunsets - 3303
• Lazy days - 3013
• Nice Accommodation - 2814
• Good hotel - 2753
• Relaxing - 2723
• Adventure - 2439
• Getting a tan - 2137
• Far and away - 1989
• Eating out - 1787
• Good food - 1721
• Architecture - 1449
• Local markets - 1411
• Excursions - 1380
• Beer - 1365
• Cocktails - 1361
• Rest - 1272
• Archaeology - 1259
• Friendly locals - 1247
• Blue sky - 1171
• A good book - 1115
• Entertainment - 1109
• Fresh air - 1103
• Snorkelling - 1055
• Socialising - 1049
• Bars - 1040
• Meeting people - 1035
• Sand - 1024
• Swimming - 1015
• Sea - 1012
• Good wine - 976
• Ice Cream - 939
• Watersports - 898
• Nice pool - 833
• Kids clubs - 767
• Boat trips - 709
• Museums - 597
• Diving - 496
• Friends - 454
• Friendly staff - 275
• Theatre - 219

Firstly the tool is definitely hitting the correct users (so the marketing and site positioning has been appropriate). With interesting places being the top result you can imagine that users are, even with a tool in front of them, struggling to come up with anything that they really want…… and relying on the tool to inspire them.

The second top theme is weather (with good weather and hot weather coming in 4th and 5th). Weather is a tricky concept as it is relative to the user’s location and the proposed activity. If you are in the South of England your expectation of good weather may be different to someone in the North of Scotland. Likewise, if you are going for a hill walking holiday you may not want the weather to be as “hot” as if you are going for a beach holiday. And for ski holidays the definition of good weather / hot weather becomes even harder to determine.

The third theme to come through is “relaxing”. Time to relax, relaxed atmosphere, lazy days, relaxing and rest are all in the top half.

Kids clubs comes in low on the list…. can we infer anything from the Expedia demographic from this?

If you are reading this, you probably know what RSS is. RSS is an XML based format that enables websites (such as this blog) to syndicate articles out to RSS readers… so you can read this article without having to come back to the central site.

Of course, RSS isn’t just about blog posts, but can be used to distribute all sorts of data that is intended for consumer consumption. You can find info about what RSS is from here:

Anyway, today is RSS awareness day. Yeah. I bet you are pleased to know that.

Fact of the day….. there are 70 million (or so) RSS users on the web…. but this is only 5% of the internet population…. (Source: RSS Awareness day website)

So what can you use RSS for (apart from blogs)?
Well you could use RSS to create a special offer or “price feed”. For example:

• Expedia New Zealand
• Travelocity - actually pretty good
• Orbitz
• Lastminute
• etc….

Does RSS work commercially?
There is an interesting case study from 2006 where Travelocity promoted their new RSS system to just Hotmail and Yahoo email addresses (these users were chosen as Travelocity knew that these users had access to RSS readers either via Windows Live or My Yahoo). Anyway, apparently, 66% of users that opened the email (outlining the RSS system) subscribed to a custom RSS feed.

TourCMS also supports RSS feeds generation…. which is nice. Only one customer is using it for that though…. but from small acorns! (Full details on TourCMS RSS support and an example RSS feed)

An industry standard
I would love to see a travel industry “standard” for RSS feeds. The kind of organisation that should be creating this “lightweight” format would be the Open Travel Alliance - but they seem focussed on “heavy lift” data formats….. The advantage of having an agreed standard would be that companies (such as meta-search companies) could create tools to consume these RSS feeds in a standard way.

Subject lines, from a standard perspective, are not very interesting (but they are the most important aspect from a consumer perspective). They tend to include:

• Product name
• Date
• Rate

The key to any new RSS travel special offer standard would be to determine what data should be in the body (so can be both read by consumers and aggregators). I suggest:

• Product name
• Travel date (either fixed date, or applicable date if an extended period)
• Offer ends date
• Rate
• Short description
• Marketplace restrictions (in code form) (e.g. only available to US customers)
• Product tags (yep - a folksonomy)

Some come on Open Travel Alliance - can you knock up a standard for us? (or I could co-ordinate it, if anyone thinks this idea has legs)

Go on….tell me below how you are using RSS…..