Why Take Your Travel Business Online?
If you’re conservative then you probably haven’t really taken your travel business online yet. Of course, you may beg to differ since you have your own business site complete with a booking engine as well, but you haven’t really been there and done that if you don’t have a presence on the social scene online.
Why Social Networking
Yes, my friend, taking your travel business online is as effective and important – if not more- than networking offline and people have learnt this time and again. It is really important to reach out to your target market via sites like Facebook and Twitter. The simple reason being that these are sites where people express their opinions.
These are sites where people make recommendations – they can praise a certain hotel to the heavens or they can trash it too, depending on the type of experiences they have had at the hotel. So along with providing stellar services to your guests, you have to make them feel wholly welcome.
Branding
Basically you have to establish a brand online as well as offline – you can consider it an extension of your offline image if you please. Look at your brand in the same way as you would, your product, your brand needs to have integrity and credibility just like the product.
Brand integrity is basically a measure of how trustworthy the market perceives a company to be. It is defined by the product value, behavior of the company, its employees etc. Therefore, taking your travel business online is important for establishing brand integrity.
So what can you do to be in a good position in this race? Tie up with people or sites which network with the best in the online travel business. It is not enough to merely have a Facebook page or thousands of followers on twitter. You have to have links with all the top Travel engines on the internet like:
• Expedia
• Kayak
• Makemytrip
Not just that you need to have a presence in magazines and online media portals as well. Try Travellersinsights or even Ezine, You will be surprised at the kind of results you get, I assure you. Take this one step further with a .mobi page of your own.
One Step Ahead
You might wonder what this .mobi page is. It’s simple really, this is a website of your own – a mini one- that is designed to exclusively cater to SmartPhone users who access most of their information on the go in airports and places like that.
This is great because it is custom made for smart phones as a result of which the navigation and maneuverability of these sites is much easier using SmartPhones than websites.
Remember, moving with the times is really important and one of the crucial aspects of it, where the travel industry is concerned, is having an online presence. You should venture into e-Commerce technology, Mobile marketing, social media marketing and of course, online tourism marketing. Are you to take your travel business online?
