Planning Your Travel on Web 2.0
Marcus Crowley, Managing Director, Hong Kong

With the holidays upon us, November is good time to review recent developments in online travel industry.

Many readers will have heard the term "Web 2.0" used to refer to a new generation of web sites and web users characterized by the creation and sharing of user generated content. YouTube.com  and MySpace.com  which have been valued in billions of USD are two of the more prominent examples of this. The first aspect of this trend is that a new generation of portals now provides ecstatic (or disgruntled) customers with a soapbox to talk about their experiences with the services or products of any company. Read about how good internet access is at Pacific Coffee shops on travellers' blogs at travel.yahoo.com , for example.

The second exciting aspect of the current generation of portals is the widespread reuse of data across sites. You will have seen small RSS icons cropping up across a variety of content-rich sites such as Lonely Planet (lonelyplanet.com ). RSS is a simple standard format for data exchange which means that one web site's content can be picked up by another - and barring any copyright implications - can be combined with other data and used in new and interesting ways. Imagine, for example, setting up a customized home page which tracks 30 different RSS feeds, and monitors them for articles on the topic of cycling across China. If this was something you were interested in, this would save you a lot of time doing the research yourself. Taking the reuse of content to the extreme, enterprise-level products like Kapow (kapowtech.com ) enable companies to grab huge amounts of content from the web and create a "mashups" which track competitive offers, perform automated search engine queries, aggregate content from subsidiary sites and more.

What does all this mean for travellers and the travel industry? Research released by Guideline.com  indicates that the strongest influencer of holiday plans in the US is recommendations by friends and family. In an effort to tap into word-of-mouth marketing, Sheraton's new web site (sheraton.com ) allows guests to share their travel stories with the world.

If you're a traveller, quite apart from the usual research via Google and the hotel or local tourism board's web site, you now have a multitude of other voices to tune into which could influence your holiday plans. Tripadvisor.com  for example, attempts to help you decide where to stay and once hooked, sends you off to online travel agents such as expedia.com . Kayak.com  provides the ability to do comparison shopping and then send you off to orbitz.com  or the appropriate brand web site. Viator.com  provides a helpful listing of tours available in each destination. Sidestep.com  is well laid out and mashes up a bundle of sites to help cut through the clutter when looking for flights, accommodation and activities. The list goes on and on and is not just confined to the English speaking web.

For the Cathay Pacifics and the Shangri-las of this world, the corporate web site was originally a way to influence brand preference and sell directly to consumers. While some offline travel agents are still going strong, the rise of online travel agents has meant that consumers can now comparison shop and may not book directly with a branded site. Online visibility via search engine placement and online PR have therefore become increasingly important. As some of Hong Kong's most admired brands (see the 2006 Brand Admiration Survey at ingrambrandco.com ) now mull over how to loosen the precious brand reins enough to embrace user-generated content, expect to see more steps in this direction in our part of the world in 2007.

Happy holidays!

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