By providing a highly functional and user-friendly suite of Web 2.0 tools, you can engage with your customers in very effective new ways.

Capture their imagination - provide inspiring content about destinations, provided by other users.

Visualise their trip - include a link in the booking confirmation email to a personalised interactive map of their itinerary, showing the airport, hotel, and
local tours & attractions.

Create a 'sticky' site - travellers have a reason to return to your site during their trip, to upload their photos & videos or blog entries, and communicate with friends.

Build long term brand loyalty - customers are likely to keep coming back to the site in the future to look back on their trip, and make further bookings.

Product offers & adverts are contextual, targeted to specific locations, maximising conversion rates.

Add products to users' maps - each user has a personal map showing their travel itinerary. Tours, activities, transport, car hire and accomodation can be displayed on
this, drawing the customer's attention to products nearby that they may wish to book.

Booking reference cross-selling - when a user is logged in and we know their
reference number, we can offer them only relevant products they haven't bought yet.

Location specific offers - ads shown within the content can be targeted based on both where it was sent from and where the viewer is located. E.g. a blog about Sydney, viewed by someone in the UK, may include an offer for a flight from London to Australia.

People want to share their travel experiences with their friends & family - take advantage!

Facebook® Integration - automatically update the user's Facebook profile whenever they post a blog entry or photo album. This can be branded, include contextual offers, and also simultaneously appears on the news feeds of all their Facebook friends - spreading your brand to a massive new audience.

Post to MySpace & other sites - videos can be posted onto MySpace, Bebo, or any other website quickly and simply. Videos can contain a watermarked image of the travel company's logo, along with a post-roll advert and a live feed of contextual offers.

Social Bookmarks - generate further incoming links and exposure for your brand and website by allowing visitors to share site content on social bookmarking sites such as Digg and Del.ico.us.

Users provide large amounts of high quality content for free, which you can benefit from in a number of ways.

Attract visitors with interesting & engaging content - people are interested in other people, and the social nature of the media they generate will keep the attention of website visitors and help to create a 'sticky' site.

Improve conversions - reviews are not just one factor consumers use to decide between different holidays, but are their most trusted source of information. Products that include reviews, even if they are negative, consistently outsell those with no reviews at all.

Search engine optimisation - User generated content boosts the search engine friendliness of your pages because it is contextual and relevant, frequently updated, and encourages additional incoming links.

STA Travel Blogs

Winner of 'Best Use of Social Media' award, Travolution Awards 07 & 08

STA Travel wanted to differentiate itself from its competitors, build a stronger relationship with its customers and increase brand awareness.

As part of its digital strategy, STA Travel implemented a range of Web 2.0 services on its website to increase the community nature. Core to this strategy was the introduction of the travel blogs, a white-label version of the Off Exploring platform, which offers customers a way of staying in touch with friends and family when travelling, as well as a means of creating a permanent record of their journey.

The return on investment has exceeded all expectations. "The implementation was primarily about offering our customers a new experience and giving them some real value-add. But that's not all it has done, STA has benefited in ways we never expected," says Craig Hepburn, formerly Global Webmaster for STA Travel. Additional benefits include:

• 15-20% of all traffic to the STA Travel website now arrives via a customer's travel blog
  
• Visitors from over 185 countries have visited the site and spend on average seven and a half minutes on it
  
• Over 57,000 blog entries have been posted about travel experiences around the world, plus 1.8 million photos and 4,000 videos have been uploaded
  
• The bountiful user generated content has increased STA Travel's search engine ranking dramatically
  
• Return visits to the website are encouraged through blog update communications (e.g.: through email notification) carrying corporate branding and special offers.
  
• Less budget is required for pay per click advertising and marketing.

Hepburn continues, "We now have a new means of engaging with website visitors and the potential to turn them in to paying customers. The unique user generated content on the site has increased STA Travel's SEO ranking massively. Importantly, we have been able to reduce marketing spend and pay per click advertising on websites and search engines, due to the success and reach of the travel blogs. The service is now central to our business strategy due to the sheer impact the implementation has had."

Link: www.statravelblogs.com

Contact Us

To speak to us regarding business opportunities please call our sales director,
Doug Campbell, on 01295 680782 or email doug@offexploring.com.

Alternatively please complete the form below and we will contact you shortly.