Travel Weekly Blog

Lost luggage photo project 'is a little odd'

February 25, 2010

I'll let online photo project Is This Your Luggage? speak for itself...

I COLLECT LOST LUGGAGE, PHOTOGRAPH IT, AND THEN TRY TO FIND THE OWNERS.

IT'S A LITTLE ODD BUT NOT AS ODD AS STAMP COLLECTING, JUST A LITTLE HARDER TO FIND STORAGE SPACE.

Reminds me of long-running photo tracing site Is This You, only... with luggage. ITYL gets its cases from unclaimed luggage auctions, so it's odd but above board.

Click on a case and you'll get a composite photo of its contents, which is where I threw in the towel.

Via Metafilter

How self-explanatory should Travel Weekly headlines be?

February 24, 2010

If you're a consumer, you could be forgiven for looking twice at 'Keith Richards to leave ABTA'.

You'd figure out pretty quickly that it doesn't refer to the Rolling Stones guitarist, but the scenario does raise an interesting question for web editors.

When we publish stories online, we know our headlines go out 'into the wild' - Google search results, RSS feeds on third-party websites, and so on.

And we know that the audience in those places may have less background knowledge than those who habitually pick up the paper or visit the homepage.

Indeed, they may have no background knowledge. They may have just searched Google News for 'Keith Richards' and found this:

So what do we do when there's potential ambiguity? Pack more information in to clarify matters, or keep it concise and trade-friendly?

For example:

• ABTA axes professional development role in restructure, or
  
• Keith Richards to leave ABTA
  

Generic headlines can be equally problematic. I ask reporters to avoid lines like 'Agents hit out over commission cuts', because out of the context of Travel Weekly that could be any kind of agent protesting against any kind of commission cut.

'Travel agents hit out at Operator X commission cuts' is more useful to everyone, consumers and travel industry Googlers alike - but again, it makes the headline on the article page a bit less punchy.

Virtual Trans-Siberian Railway: It's all very well, but is it marketing?

February 23, 2010

Just found, via Creative Review, Google and Russian Railways' virtual version of the Trans-Siberian Railway.

Videos (the first embedded below) deliver a real-time window view of the route, while a map tracks progress and a drop-down menu lets you select an appropriate soundtrack.

There's also a skip-to location menu on the right, which is a mercy, since the whole thing is some 150 hours long.



Creative Review reckons it 'works brilliantly as tourism campaigns go', but does it do more for the media-marketing echo chamber than it does to bring in tourists?

Either way, it's a nice proof-of-concept.

Link: The world's 18 strangest airports

February 22, 2010

A fun feature on unusual airports from Popular Mechanics, though there are a few obvious ones - the sunbather-scraping approach to Saint Maarten is a Youtube staple:


...but the tiny clifftop runway at Saba, Netherlands Antilles, was new to me - and I also had no idea that Saudi Arabia's King Fahd International is 11 square miles bigger than Bahrain.

I'm ashamed to say I've only landed at two of these - Hong Kong International and Madeira.

Via Neatorama - I don't generally read Popular Mechanics...

Video: Eurostar boss responds to Christmas breakdowns review

February 12, 2010

The results of an independent report on Eurostar's troubled Christmas - six breakdowns thanks to snow and ice - were released yesterday, and with them a video response from  chief executive Richard Brown.

The key points...

• 0.35 - Acknowledges faults, and apologises.
• 0.55 - Indicates that he has talked to customers personally.
• 1.17 - Introduces details of the failings identified in the review, breaking them down into 'passenger care', 'communications' and 'resilience'.

• 2.20 - Assures us that the review's recommendations will be carried out.

Your thoughts?

The 'Facebook Generation' is a generalisation too far

February 11, 2010

I removed a bit of a conjouring trick from our story on Hotel-fairy.com's Facebook poll, which suggests that only 14% of the site's users frequent high-street travel agents.

The poll itself is basically sound. Survey of Facebook users, carried out on Facebook, covering the standard 1,000-person sample size. Fine.

But there's sleight-of-hand in the press release: 1,000 Facebook users become 'the Facebook Generation'.

'Generation' is a bit of a fuzzy word, inviting you to assume that what is true of users of a particular website is true of an entire age demographic.

It's also simply the wrong word, since stats indicate that Facebook is increasingly multi-generational, and there's no indication that the poll was targeted to a particular age group.

If anything, the assumption should be that only 14% of a fairly broad swath of the UK use high-street agents.

But that doesn't work either, since Facebook has (acc. to April 09 figures from O'Reilly Research) 18m users in a population of over 60m - and the very fact that poll respondents are Facebook users means they're the sort of people who are likely to book online.

So why publish the story at all? Well, because the point about Facebook users is useful on its own terms. If you're an agent and you're considering Facebook as a marketing tool, figures about its users' buying habits are going to help you make a decision.

Everybody loves a trend story. But sometimes extrapolation just muddies things up.

(NB: But it's fine if you're honest about it.)

Successful storytelling on Twitter? Read 'em and weep...

February 10, 2010

I reproduce this series of travel tweets from Bus2Antarctica for two reasons.

One, they tell a good story.

Two, they work despite trashing a few Twitter orthodoxies - it's quick-fire first-person stuff without much engagement.

Storytelling, as you'll have guessed from the post title, is something I never thought Twitter was all that good at. But I followed this eagerly - and although it doesn't relate a very pleasant experience, the sense of camaraderie and relief in the final tweets makes it inspiring as a mini-travelogue.

All comes from an award-winning journalist (Andrew Evans) who is travelling to Antarctica by bus for National Geographic.

Poll Corner, Extrapolation Edition: Is it all about efficiency?

February 1, 2010

In last week's TW homepage poll I asked What do you need more of? - and the results came out like this:

• Staff 23%
• Sales leads 33%
• Hours in the day 44%
  

(Off 132 votes)

So... if we extrapolated from this, we might conclude that the trade needs to work on efficiency rather than marketing and customer acquisition.

Does that picture ring any bells? Or does travelweekly.co.uk just have a readership of fiercely independent grafters?

Globes 2010: Did consumers and travel agents agree?

January 22, 2010

I've been waist-deep in Globe Travel Awards 2010 content since 6.30 on Tuesday evening - winners lists, videos, photo galleries, the whole nine e-yards.

As I did last year, I'm rounding off with a quick look at the points where our supplier awards and the Associated Newspapers-sponsored Consumer Awards overlap...

 

Favourite Cruise Company

• Consumers: P&O Cruises
• Agents: Fred Olsen, Royal Caribbean, Silversea and Hurtigruten

 

Favourite Airline

• Consumers: Virgin Atlantic
• Agents: Voted Virgin Atlantic best scheduled airline to US/Canada

Emirates, BA and Monarch took the other categories.

 

Best Rail Operator

• Consumers: Virgin Trains
• Agents: Eurostar

 

Favourite Hotel Chain

• Consumers: Holiday Inn
• Agents: RIU Hotels

 

European short break provider

• Consumers: Eurostar
• Agents: Thomas Cook

 

Long-Haul Operator

• Consumers: Kuoni
• Agents: Kuoni

Peaks period crowdsourcing: If we built it, would you come?

January 11, 2010

With a couple of our stories pointing to guarded optimism from travel agents at the start of 2010, this week's homepage poll wrote itself: a simple 'Here's what we've heard - but how are things with you?' job. 

As Robin said in Friday's comment piece, we can't know how the peaks period has gone until proper numbers start coming in a few weeks down the line.

But we do know that, even as Travel Weekly goes to print and people start opening the digital book, the picture is slowly becoming clearer.

So a situation like the peaks period is particularly interesting and challenging to web editors. It cries out to be covered 'live', but there's no event to focus attention - as there is when, say, the BBC does live text coverage of a test match.

I'm reminded of Farmers Weekly, who were across the hall at TW's old publishing house. Their equivalent is the annual harvest, and last year they invited readers to anonymously submit their location and progress. All that went into a broad 'heat map' that showed how the harvest was going in each region of the UK.

Problems with that? Of course. It makes demands of readers. Do they have time to submit data to their trade media? Do they want to?

I'm idealistic enough to think the answers to those questions don't have to be 'no', especially when there's a big shared experience involved.

When snow started falling over the UK on December 17, even the most casual Twitter users were adding #uksnow and a postcode to their tweets, and gabbling excitedly about Ben Marsh's brilliant snow map.

I had an airport pickup to do the following day, and I'm not kidding when I tell you that was more helpful to me than the BBC and Met combined.

For now, I'm just running a peaks poll - and it's gratifying to see that early results do reflect 'cautious optimism', with 59% seeing good summer sales (winter's a different story).

But could we have done more? If Travel Weekly tried to track the peaks period with your help, would you participate?