Category: Holiday

With Air, Bed & Breakfast you can spend the night in people's homes. You only pay a small fee.

EasyToBook.com, specialist in online reservations of quality hotels for the lowest possible prices, has started a massive and ambitious expansion. The company is expanding from three European destinations to 2400 destinations worldwide. These new cities will be added to the website. EasyToBook.com's completely revamped website will offer overnight stays in about 20,000 hotels. Dublin, London, New York, Paris and Prague have already been added to the site as the first new destinations.

At TravellersTV.com everything revolves arround video content based on holiday destinations. You see the continents on a click-able Google map. Once you have clicked a video over the continent begins. Then you can zoom in on a destionation and you will find related video chanels (in total there are 1200 destinations and 20 lifestyle tv channels). The videos often include supplementary text. In addition you find a buttons by every destination for more information over accommodation, food and drink, attractions, events, activities, transport and shoppig. You can rate, tag and comment on everything and you can also send the information on to others. But... it's still a beta version, sometimes things work and sometimes they don't, the content is far from complete but it is still well worth a look. A good concept with a lot of possibilities for good business models in the future...

Dutch website for holiday homes and hotels WeekendjeWeg.nl (’A weekend away’) provides directions for guests through a button ‘Add to my TomTom’ with every hotel. Soon it will be possible to add all hotels in one go (am, Dutch). Now we still have to actively transfer information, soon even our TomTom will be a (mobile) window to the virtual world. We then won’t just have dialogues with the TomTom brand through this screen, but also with other brands. Like a Philips TV or a Dell monitor also provides access to the virtual world. Then the dialogue we started with WeekendjeWeg on a bigger screen will just continue on a smaller, mobile screen. Then we will be able to retrieve reviews and have them read to us on our mobile screen. And if we want to know how to get somewhere, TomTom’s brand agent is there for us.

Martinair as the first airline provides its passengers with a travel guide for mobile phones (mc, Dutch). Thus personal holiday brands come to life. In this example the travel guide function is connected to an airline, soon new brands will watch all holiday moments during your life, including all moments of orientation, of booking, joy of preparation, return, and joy of looking back. They are the ultimate providers of this service and will be able to offer tailored information. The introduction of this travel guide adds to a new dynamic in the travel branch.

At Holidot.com all hotels, bed and breakfasts and holiday homes in Europe are lined up in 7 European languages. With this, it is the biggest, and also the first independent site making all hotel and holiday addresses visible. Travelers can publish their travel reports, which are shown uncensored, and users have the possibility to bookmark favorites, and share them. Accommodation owners (hotels, bed and breakfasts, holiday homes, camp sites, etc) can open their own mini website at Holidot.com for free (mb, Dutch). Thus another personal holiday brand comes to life. In first instance the most important phenomenon will be completeness in the domain, but in a next step it will be most important for us to really have the holidays of our lifetime, every year anew. The relationships with the consumer soon will be the most distinctive factor, but in order to get a relationship, brands will have to know what is out there in the market. We are building that knowledge right now.

New Dutch holiday website Vakantieoordeel.nl searches all big national and international holiday review websites, and publishes all information in one spot. Vakantieoordeel claims to be independent because it is not owned by a tour operator. Besides, bad reviews are not removed. To have a review removed, suppliers will just have to do better (dc, Dutch). Personal brands, a type of brands in development, have a couple of shared characteristics, among which completeness in the field they are serving, openness, and independence. Only this type of brands in the future will have access to the consumer. Transaction brands, tied to locations, a certain type of service or packages, will have to make sure they offer top service. The development of personal holiday brands has taken off, and this is an example of it.

Kango is the first so-called ‘travel review aggregator’, a site that gathers reviews from all kinds of review sites, and puts them together. That means 20 million opinions of more than 1000 review websites have been analyzed. Holiday makers can search by terms like ‘romantic’, or ‘sweet’, apart from objective criteria like price and location. The beta version for now only works in Hawaii and California (mb, Dutch). In 2007 (and 2008 and 2009) completeness is important: bring everything together for me. This is an example of that.

Tripadvisor, the biggest travel review site in the world, has conducted research among its visitors and published it. Tripadvisor now contains more than 10 million reviews, and the research was conducted among 2500 travelers, to recover the trends for 2008. It was about Hotspots (with Jerba, Tunesia as No 1) and airports (with Schiphol, Amsterdam as No 1) (mb, Dutch). Market research is replaced by client research. Brands with access to consumers are very used to asking questions. This type of research then is relatively easy to conduct. In a next step we will get these types of reports more and more often from personal holiday brands, brands that really book the holiday for us, so that we are sure we have really been there.

New Dutch online travel portal ReisRadar (travel radar) is meant to be a one stop shop: visitors can search AND book their vacation all on one website. The user can extensively look through daily refreshed travel stories, travel tips, and news. This is realized through a cooperation with review specialist Zoover.nl, which already contains almost 400,000 personal reviews of more than 100,000 accommodations around the world. Every new review at Zoover.nl is directly placed on ReisRadar (em, Dutch). Thus personal holiday brands gradually develop. It starts with completeness of the supply. Then the consumer can start searching. Booking is the next step. Asking a review comes after that: after all, then ReisRadar is sure you really made the trip. After that, ReisRadar includes your travel history (and those of your friends) in future advice. Thus personal holiday brands develop to be very valuable brands, for which we are more than willing to pay. Advertising then doesn’t make much sense any more. And thus publishers slowly start using the enormous chances they have to grow into personal brands, the biggest brands of the 21st century.

Online travel agency HolidayCheck shows the trend in changes in appreciation of accommodation. This way, a place which has always been valued highly but which is slowly deteriorating, can see its appreciation go down. The amount of reviews is still limited, but that is a matter of time. Due to these kinds of analysis personal holiday brands get more value (Holiday Check has the potential to grow into being such a brand), and transaction brands, providers of (local) services and products, will be more and more pressured to deliver top products and services. This real-time trend analysis contributes to that. 

Belvilla is the first company in the travel branch to test an online ‘reading aloud’ function for visitors at the website. By clicking ‘Lees Mij’ (Read Me), a friendly female voice reads to you everything about the holiday villa you are looking at. In the test phase, only the descriptions of the holiday villas can be heard. Plans are to have the ‘read aloud’ function for all web content in the near future (cc, Dutch). Thus the spoken dialogue comes to life. Now the voice also plainly reads all impossible codes ("the 4 and 6 person villas BE-8421-01, type A/ BE-8421-02, type B/ BE-8421-07, type A comfort/ BE-8421-08, type B comfort, listen here), in the future the language will be completely tuned to us. Now still at the PC. In the future we will sit in the car and ask: “Hey Bella, I would like to go to France for a week. Is there something free from October 1st onwards?” And then you will hear some choices, you can select with your voice ("that one sounds good! Do you have something bigger too?"), and you can watch your selection at home on TV. Step by step it goes that direction.

Dutch website Zoover.nl, a site with more than 300,000 vacation reviews, offers tour operators like D-Reizen the possibility to place facts, figures and reviews on their own website. Travel agencies can use the Zoover technology under their own label. Through this module they can for example send questionnaires through e-mail, to ask customers for their experiences after their vacation. The travel agencies this way can research general findings, but also has to ask their customers to leave a Zoover review when coming home (em, Dutch). This way the relationship between personal brands and transaction brands slowly becomes clear. Zoover becomes the personal holiday brand, responsible for the contacts with the customer. And companies like tour operators, airlines and car rentals become transaction brands. Transaction brands which only through excellent achievements will survive in this landscape. This landscape in which the consumer dominates. This is very logical: after all, he is the one who pays. This is a step in that direction.

Through Dutch website Ilse Reizen (Ilse Travel) consumers now have all travel options available at once. Based on criteria like a golf course, the climate, or total travel time, you will get a list of potential destinations. Then you check the price and the availability, and when you’re satisfied, you book it. Now this works for flights, hotels, travel packages, car rental and a combination of these. Later holiday homes, campings and related travel products will follow. You book with the organization offering the trip, and Ilse Reizen earns money through CPS deals (mf, Dutch; ilse reizen can be tested through login: ilse, and password: bloggerpreview). This way personal holiday brands slowly come into being. Now Ilse Reizen is complete. Later she will ask all customers for their reviews about their experiences. And they will connect with social networks, so that Ilse Reizen will be able to say: John has been here last year and really loved it. This way, publishers change into personal brands. With huge added value in the lives of consumers. This is a great example.