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.

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!

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…..

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?

Travolution asked yesterday why mega-corporations find it so difficult to be innovative online. Well my simple answer is that, in my opinion, you can’t have a successful start up culture as well as a successful “innovative big business” culture…. those people with the innovative ideas tend to find their way into startups so are not there to put the “big ideas” into practice at large corporations.

Anyway, forget about innovation, many large companies struggle to just get anything new online working at all.

Lets look at The Times - a well respected, quality, media brand (UK) (and part of the News International stable of media organisations). They currently make money from travel classified advertising (along, obviously, with other income sources).

We know there is a battle going on with advertising revenue….

“Between 20 and 100 additional online users are needed because the revenue per reader for a newspaper website is far less than the equivalent figure earned by a print edition, even though online advertising is booming.

“As more and more people shift their news reading from print to online, the newspaper industry must dramatically increase its online advertising revenues or die,” said Vincent Crosbie, a senior associate at American media strategist Borrell Associates.”

[Guardian, 2006]

So what have the Times got, online, to replace existing income their offline travel classified advertising?

They have launched a new online travel classifieds directory…. OK - not innovative…. but perhaps they can execute it well.

Technically, this directory is powered by the AdTarget classified ad system from adprecision. Adprecision commercial Director Alasdair Cross said of the partnership “News International owns some of the most valuable and popular websites in the UK and we’re delighted that they have chosen our technology to power their travel search and contextual advertising” (see press release)

OK - so lets do a search for travel to London….

Well I suppose, on a global scale, Falmouth is fairly close to London….. but its not exactly a direct match. Lets try something else, perhaps the directory is better for UK people travelling abroad…. so lets search for Spain

Ah - those offers looks interesting - lets take a look

Ummm - not a great deal of detail to entice me to click through….. but perhaps I will anyway…

Oh dear….. not sure I really wanted to go to buy a luxury log cabin! (You can see the mistake - this website looks like an accommodation provider - and they have the words “spanish agent” in the top left).

Things to fix
The issue with their new solution is a data one…. how do you launch a brand new system, without advertisers, but make it sensible enough that users who find their way there may actually find something useful. Here are my top fixes:

• Rather than return bad results - return no results….. and perhaps a mention that you can advertise there.
• An alternative to returning no results - howabout backfilling with product offers from 3rd parties. There are many travel meta-search companies who would jump at the chance of being RON advertising for random travel keywords. They could supply products etc that would nicely fit in with the rest of the site.
• That generic “world map” image is awful. Even a “blank gap” is better than that.
• Get a new head of advert quality control. This directory should not be public in this state.

I still think the Travel Mail are ahead in the travel newspaper stakes!

One of the problems that I have written about before is how do you launch a web based travel community when you are a risk averse large travel company. After all, creating a community is about creating the right environment - but in the end it is the people in the community (the members, not the staff) who really determine whether it will be a success or not. Also community management can require a different set of skills to running an ecommerce operation so additional recruitment to cover the new roles may be needed.

The core dilemma is that with a large brand it is a risk to start small because it doesn’t reflect very well on the brand…. and people will expect more of your site than it initially delivers. However you can’t build a new community overnight. This is why so many existing communities are being purchased by the leading travel companies as it is easier to buy than build (also completely removes the element of risk involved in building a community from scratch)

MakeMyTrip are an India based OTA travel dot com with an annual revenue of 125 million USD. They have a travel community called OkTaTa Bye Bye

I have a couple of thoughts about their community website:

Branding strategy
There is no mention of the ownership of the site at all (no connection with the MakeMyTrip.com company). I assume therefore that they are following the strategy of “release under a non-core brand name” and build critical mass - then integrate at some future point. In reverse, there is only one mention of OkTaTaByeBye on the MakeMyTrip.com website…. so they have pretty much disconnected them 100%.

Site design
It is a very busy design - by this I mean there are elements all over the page and you can navigate around the site for quite some time without quite knowing what you may discover on the next page. If an ecommerce website was designed like this I think people would object (and vote with their mouse) but for a website where you can find great destination content actually it makes the experience quite fun. I enjoyed navigating around wondering what I would find next.

I would liken it to walking around a cramped antique furniture shop! Everything is interesting to look at but you don’t know where to look because there is too much going on. Probably not ideal if you are looking for something specific.

Destination knowledge when its your “back garden”
One of the challenges of creating a community for travellers from India who are travelling around India is that much of the previous “destination knowledge” has been created for international travellers. I have no experience of solving this problem but I imagine that it requires a very different approach.

The grievance department
They have a new (and empty) grievance section on their website.

• Submit your complaint
• Discuss with the supplier on your own complaint page
• Reach an acceptable solution
• Share your experiences and thank everyone involved

This is where the real challenge of running an independent website at the same time as being a leading online travel agency starts. How will negative comments be handled? Will they be moderated if they are negative about the parent company?

Side note
I know that I have a problem with this under UK law….. because as a travel industry blogger - I can’t blog negatively about any direct competitor and use their trademark. Indeed, it is not just my own blog that is a problem but also the Small Fish Big Ocean community (where of course anyone can publish anything - yikes!)…. So businesses that are in the tour operator reservation business are safe from me…. but not if you run a travel website!

For example Coca-Cola can’t blog negatively about Pepsi….. but anyone who isn’t Coca-Cola can. (Yeah - this isn’t legal advice) (More information from Out-Law - UK law - Trademarks)

Rewarding loyalty
One of the aspects of their website that is notable is their loyalty point system:

I am not an expert on community loyalty schemes but this looks like a fun approach. I probably would have put in some “cost free” rewards such as have your profile on the homepage for a week. If I was a regular user I would probably be more excited by that than a pair of headphones.

Overall its a reasonable, functional, fun site. If I was responsible for it I would immediately do some usability testing to see if the overall navigation is understandable because that is my largest concern.

Incidentally, this website was reviewed as part of the “Review my website” theme that I started last weekend. I will repeat again next month. We had 6 entries this month! (more details)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Any more ideas?

Tour operators used to be brochure driven. Companies used to spend a great deal of money designing and printing fancy brochures.

Along came the web.

Now you don’t need brochures. Not only that - but the skills to produce a good, commercially successful, website are not the same skills as those that are required to produce a well optimised brochure. Yes there is some overlap but its not a like for like change.

So if you are a brochure specialist….. what can you do?

One thing NOT to do is put your brochure online. Please don’t (yes this is a rant)

You know what I mean….. those page flipping things that you sometimes see around the place. I don’t enjoy the experience at all.

• Slow on old machines
• Difficult to print
• Not accessible

Of course, I can’t show you examples I don’t like - that wouldn’t be fair….. so here are some examples that contain interesting information….

• Travolution February 08 edition - lovely. Best article is page 42.
• MajorPlayers salary survey - if you ever wanted to know what all the UK / London salary levels for perm / contract staff (digital) then this document reveals all. Actually very interesting reading. 

An alternative to a flipping page would be SlideShare.net. Upload a powerpoint presentation and create an audio track - then embed it around the place on your website or 3rd party websites. Much more useful.

If you absolutely have to have a flipping brochure on your website….. don’t pay a commercial company to do it for you - buy a Flash component such as Flipping Book or FlashPageFlip and ask a web designer to use that. This will be much better value.

Anyone found flipping pages to be useful?