Web 2.0 & Tourism - 7 Travel 2.0 trends

Claude Benard from Les Explorers has interviewed me about tourism, trends and social media. To read the entire interview in English please go to his site. Here is a little excerpt featuring my top seven travel 2.0 trends.

Drop marketing speak for authenticity: Corporate websites will become more personal featuring people and real language, not marketing speech.

Stop online segregation: User generated content and social media will have to morph into the traditional website.

Connect with your online sales force: Online relations managers will become additional positions in communications departments. Budgets will have to shift significantly from traditional marketing and PR to online relations. Companies engaging in online relations and building rapport with bloggers and social networks will become increasingly successful.

Become customer-centric, now: Websites have to be created with the customer’s needs in mind, not with the companies’ or stake holders’ interests in mind. Destination management organisations will have to provide RSS-feeds for their partners such as hotels and attractions for aggregation into their sites. This is also true for social media networks like Facebook and others to come.

Educate your internal sales force: With the transparency enabled by the new web, every single action of your staff will get more attention and become part of your sales force. To beat competition use new tools like podcasts, videocasts, blogs, and wikis and enable constant improvement.

Monitor to excel: Online monitoring of costumer generated content should be viewed as a source for product development and enhancement.

Be accessible: Content will have to be accessible from different devices. This will entail setting up different versions of the website.

More at Les Explorers.

While I am still working on these 7 travel 2.0 trends, Juan from rumorismo has already translated them into Spanish. Gracias Juan
7 tendencias del turismo 2.0 - en espanol