Friday, July 14, 2006

Engage (and win!) with Gazetteers

Here’s an interesting development by our cousins on Gazetteers Plus, the online content provider for 60% of UK travel agents.

Seizing on the current trend for user-generated reviews, Gazetteers Plus has launched its own tool for agents, called Agents Advice.

Agents will be able to share their own opinions on a resort or properties with their counterparts around the country.

Similar to the massively popular TripAdvisor model, content now includes images, a general description of the property and feedback submitted by agents covering reviews, hints or tips.

To help woo agents to the new initiative, Gazetteers is holding a prize draw for the first month for every review submitted by an agent. Switched-on agents will be able to win one of four MP4 players.

Get reviewing…

Kevin May, editor, Travolution

3 comments:

Malvern World Travel said...

A Smart move from gazeteers. It Now won't have to pay it's reviewers. In my opinion the gazeteers over the last 10 years have gone down hill. At least now theyr'e trying to do something about it. Most insertions were either reviews asked for, Paid for, by Tour Operators or hotelliers and " The Bible" lost it's tell all and warts side of things. We highlighted sometime ago ( So some changes might have been made) for instance that Kalkan in Turkey had far more than the few Hotels that were listed. Also how could you feature Mauritius and not have any of the Beachcomber hotels in the gazeteer.
So a lot of work needs doing, so why not get Travel Agents to do the work for them. An MP player is cheap labour as opposed to sending a reviewer overseas on paid expenses

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Anonymous said...

Select World Travel raises some good points, and gives gazetteers plus the opportunity to ease their mind.
Gazetteers plus has never accepted paid for, or any other reviews from hotels and tour operators. Our researchers continue to travel the globe and independently review properties and resorts which are chosen on the basis of their popularity through a combination of tour operator offerings, holiday trends in the market, and outbound tourism from the UK. We include the selected hotels on the site for FREE.
We review over 12,000 properties worldwide, and while we have debated expanding the range of reviews, the resulting subscription price would be unaffordable for agents.
The addition of 'Agent Advice' is not designed to replace the exsiting independent reviews, but to provide a forum for the agent community to exchange opinions and advice to compliment that provided by our own independent reviewers. We are delighted to have received an excellent response from agents regarding the 'Agent Advice' functionality, and we are adding a substantial number of their reviews on a daily basis.
By the way, we have also started to include our independent researchers' blogs on the site too, thus providing our users with some more first hand travel experience.