Wednesday, July 11, 2007

Social networks - not quite right for travel?

UPDATE: Bainbridge has continued his musings on a new post.

Current social networks - such as MySpace, Facebook, WAYN - are not the place for promoting travel companies. Why? Because travellers fall into three categories:

  • Pre purchase information - finding out more product information from people who have been there before.
  • Post purchase, pre travelling - checking last minute changes (errata?).
  • Post travel - photo / video uploading, getting back in contact with people you travelled with.
Well, so says Alex Bainbridge on his Musings on Travel E-Commerce blog.

A fascinating post, although Bainbridge does have a social networking-type service being used by his own company, TourCMS, to plug at the end.

Worth a read...

Kevin May, editor, Travolution

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hi Kevin
Thanks for the post... Incidentally, TourCMS is not a social networking thingy - we are just reusing a service from Ning to power our community (we didn't build it ourselves).

This means that anyone can build their own social network - if they want....

Thanks. Alex

Travolution Blogger said...

Alex: Yes, of course - line should read "Bainbridge does have a social networking-type service BEING USED BY his own company, TourCMS, to plug at the end".

enrico said...

Hi Great post!

I've done a little research to find some social network to promote my business but it's hard to find them.

I've found more useful some forums like tripadv, etc...but this is not a long term join.

Usually in Italy we say that travel user are "Mordi e fuggi" (Take and go).

It's difficult to find a social network on travel.

Best regards
Enrico