Technology Supporting Business: Thinking Tourism Futures

Tourism Futures is on again this week. The conference is an annual gathering of travel industry planners, marketers and executives’ from around Australia and New Zealand and I’ve become a regular attendee at the day long Technology Futures sessions. I always find these sorts of events energizing, thought provoking and inspiring: lubricating my thinking and creativity in a way that is so hard to do unless you drag yourself out of the office and away from the everyday.

Last year I was honored to be invited to speak at the event and as I sit here preparing for this years conference, I find myself pondering that presentation. The title “Technology Supporting Business” captured nicely the two key messages in my presentation, concepts which I’m very passionate about:
1) The need for constant alignment of technology with business areas’ needs and;
2) to keep focus on the basics so that business can be both supported and enabled by technology.

Too many companies think of technology as a silver bullet (and yes, an alarming number of executives view it as a mere ‘cost centre’ or ‘drain’ on their core business). All technology should support their business’ goals, not its own ends. Too many people forget that technology is a tool, not an end in itself. I have been involved a lot of different IT and travel technology projects and have had the opportunity to see first hand what separates those that work and those that fail. While it would have taken a whole lot more than 40 minutes to [even] list all of the reasons for the various successes and failures, the message is that technology is not the solution if it is not implemented or managed well.

Business Alignment is critical to success. Aligning the technology to business is like aligning marketing goals to company goals or aligning a telescope to the sky. I argued last year (I still do if you get me talking) that senior management and business buy-in to technology projects is critical and that when business teams sponsor projects, they need to actively participate, not just leave it to the IT team. You would not try to drive a Winnebago down the freeway while making coffee, would you? In fact, when I was asked to give the same presentation to the International Project Management Institute’s Queensland Chapter, in October last year this was the topic that got the greatest response.

Conversely, if you are implementing or managing (or a business leader driving) an IT project, you need to consider the other side of the coin too: Technology needs to be part of a technology strategy and “IT Architecture”. Like building a house, there are certain foundations [that should be] in place and if you are extending your house, you need to work with these foundations. Extend on them by all means, but if you try to ignore the foundations you risk having the old and the new parts of your house move independently of each other causing all sorts of chaos.

So I’m looking forward to taking away a fistful of new ideas from the presentations at Tourism Futures: Tourism Online sessions. I’m just as excited to take these new ideas and successfully implement them,to the benefit of all my stakeholders.

Pondering Twitter's use as a tool for tourism business

Twitter is the current buzz word for internet users and digital marketers. Its use is growing at a fantastic rate: Nelson, for example, claim unique visitors to Twitter.com increased 1,928% year-over-year from 1 million in June 2008 to 21 million in June 2009 and although suggestions that Twitter has become more important than Google for traffic generation are still a little far fetched, it is clear that Twitter is becoming an increasingly valuable source of traffic - and more.

With the only real cost of use of Twitter being the time it takes to [write] tweets, the potential ROI is almost limitless: every dollar of revenue generated via Twitter has an almost $0 marketing / referral overhead attached to it. Early adopters in the space have seen that Twitter has the upside of word of mouth and an immediacy and reach potentially far greater than earlier web 2.0 tools like forums and blogs.

Everyone is looking for – pondering – ways to best make use of Twitter. How can we monetize Twitter? What strategy can tourism business employ to maximize the ROI? While the internet industry as a whole – indeed Twitter themselves – are still trying to come to decide how best to monetize this “killer app”, there are some great examples out there showing the way to possible strategies.

Firstly, there are the larger tourism operators using Twitter: companies like airlines such as Jet Blue and - the original web travel marketing innovator - Southwest Airlines as well as Marriott International Hotels and Resorts (remember their CEO Blogger, Bill Marriott). As the Mashable Social Media guide points out, these companies are not only using Twitter to promote sales and specials they want to tell you about, they are engaging their followers by keeping them informed, asking for followers opinions (acting on them too) and engaging in genuine conversation.

A lot of DMO’s and CVB’s are also using Twitter and I liked the entertaining though rudely titled article “Social Media Smackdown“ comparing the “Twitter work” of CVB's in Columbus, Ohio and Columbia, S.C. The strategies in the DMO / CVB space for the most part appear to be built around increasing awareness, creating engagement with consumers and in some cases driving actual bookings for individual operators in their membership or coverage area.

There is also a lot of room for smaller tourism operators, who make up the majority of tourism businesses inside a destination to effectively use Twitter. For those savvy enough to get up to speed with the rules of engagement, define an approach and give it a go, this is an exciting area because the small size of operations can mean that even a small number of bookings or minor increase in brand awareness in their target market can make a perceptible impact. I really liked the examples in the recent New York Times article “Mom-and-Pop Operators Turn to Social Media” The article’s observation that Twitter’s intimacy is well suited to small business is insightful and points to some real opportunities Twitter provides small business. The trend toward large hospitality chains Tweeting from both head and branch offices (as noted this article in US Restaurant News) is an attempt to create such intimacy and help ensure immediacy independent of head office only approach, however social web’s very nature means that there will always be an inherent advantage to the owner operator who is on the ground ‘at the cash register’ of his / her own business.

So while we can be sure that Twitter’s use as a marketing tool will change as it’s use matures and the company either finds effective ways to monetize their offerings,or gets swallowed up by someone else, tweeting is another step on that journey toward better customer engagement for everyone in the travel business.

Head of Ibiza’s official DMO this week credits .travel domain for significant increase in site traffic

US Travel Trade news has quoted the head of Ibiza’s official DMO who is crediting the use of a .travel domain (really???) for significantly increasing traffic to the DMO’s consumer web site in the first quarter of 2009.

It’s certainly an odd claim. Made odder by my brief look at the very busy site which front page highlights an all too simple trip planner from yesteryear and a promising looking hotel booking search box that opens a results page which takes [literally] minutes to respond. Add to this the fact that the .travel site has been up for over 18 months after being re-launched in November 2007.

But it is a good chance to take a look at where .travel TLD is at. I must say that agree completely with Jens Thraenhart that the whole, sad .Travel story highlights the truth we so often face – especially in the world of travel technology – about how hard it is to execute a concept sometimes, no matter how brilliant it may be [see also this update] “Every great concept makes or breaks with the execution”.

.Travel was a brilliant idea. It could have changed the travel industry in so many positive ways and I hope that as an industry we can learn lessons from its failure.

In the meantime, one is left wondering if the statements from Ibiza are anything more than an attempt to get publicity for the destination and web site or if they are not, what exogenous factors have contributed to renewed interest in the site or the Balearic Islands as a destination in general in the current economic climate?

Destination Marketing Online 2009 style V 1997 style

Xotels Blog last week posted their Top 20 Best Practices for DMO Websites

As always the case in digital marketing, everyone you ask will have a their own [often different] opinion however the article is a good read and nicely covers much of the basics of what DMO’s and CVB’s should be doing online.

I found it particularly fascinating to compare it to an early article on Destination Marketing on the World Wide Web from Travel Marketing guru Alastair Morrison. The internet archive record says 2002 but it’s basically unchanged from an original draft circa 1997.

There are lots of exciting new "channels" and tools in terms of content distribution, social media, mash-ups and of course an infinitely higher penetration of fixed line bandwidth and mobile technology (mobile was always said to be “just around the corner” in the 1990’s) to work with today however the lists are actually remarkably similar.

Question is, what will the landscape look like 12 more years from now? What will change and what similarities will remain?

Bada-Bing! Riding the Farecast Wave all the way?

It’s been just over 1 month now since the launch of Microsoft’s Bing search engine and along with it, Bing Travel. While I’m almost (almost) sick of reading about it, I’m still looking forward to looking back at these articles 1,2, 5 years from now when hindsight will tell us if Microsoft have devised and executed a strategy [this time?] that will allow them to change the online landscape.

While we will never know for sure what the real targets and objectives for the site are, we can make some simple observations based on what we know and how the site impacts on us: Pre-launch comments from Microsoft Exec’s defining Bing Travel’s goal as “helping people make smarter, more informed decisions regarding travel” (quoted by Web In Travel) were a positive start. They seem to indicate MS have finally realized the true value in using the web to reduce the risk inherent in selecting where to go, where to stay and what to do when traveling. And by building a tool around this concept, they seem headed in the right direction.

Bing Travel uses the tools of web 2.0 in some smart, user friendly ways too: The mouse over effects on the search results page are a great example of this (noted by Dennis Schaalin in this blog entry that also discusses the apparent strategy behind Bing Travel). MS also seem to have a handle on usability this time.

MS PR made much of the integration of the once venerable Farecast web site and its ability to predict the prices of airfares based on historical info. Integration of functionality like this will help to reinforce the brand message, at least if you’re coming to the site from anywhere inside continental USA and Canada where Farecast pricing predictions and those pretty graphs may be relevant to you...

But PhoCusWright make a good point when they say that "strategic differentiator cannot be a function”. MS has made a start and are headed in the right direction but will need to deliver a whole lot more on promise if they are to succeed with Bing Travel. So I guess we will have to wait a while before we know if Google's ambush launch of “Wave” the morning of Bing’s launch is an omen or just the first shot fired in the next battleground online.