IgoUgo continues to inspire great travel
EyeforTravel.com | May 04, 2006
Jim Donelly, co-founder and vice-president marketing, IgoUgo says the company will continue to inspire great travel. (5/4/2006)
Ultimately, we want to be known as the place to come for travel inspiration for every type of destination, activity, and traveler. All of our efforts over the next few months, and beyond, will be aimed at making this goal a reality, said Donelly, as shared his plans with EyeforTravel.com's Ritesh Gupta.
Donelly feels consumer-generated media is becoming more and more commercialised by the day. As an example, IgoUgo works with dozens of travel companies to launch communities that address a wide variety of business issues.
These sites leave the community building to us and focus on the best way to integrate the community into their existing business model. The quality of that integration ultimately drives the successful commercialization of the content. Our experiences indicate that user-generated content and community functionality is having a very direct impact on the following key issues:
Reach: The number of people coming to a site through the viral components of communities can be huge. Implementing a variety of viral marketing features is fairly straightforward. Also, user-generated content is very search-engine friendly. With a little search engine optimization work, the traffic coming from Google and Yahoo is impressive.
Cross-Sell: Community content tends to focus on the entire travel experience. When travel communities allow users to submit more than just hotel reviews, they can get a leg up on selling more than just a hotel room.
Conversion: When the user-generated content is trustworthy, it has a direct impact on online conversion rates. When used appropriately, we have seen increases in conversion rates of as much as 10% when user reviews are used as part of the transaction flow.
Loyalty: Sites that allow user participation tend to have more loyal site users. When someone takes hours to submit a compelling travel journal, they tend to come back to the site where that content is housed. Likewise, anyone that has been inspired by a wonderful travel journal and found that the reality on the ground is equally compelling, will always come back.
Content Acquisition Costs: Creating (and updating) compelling, unique content for a large number of destinations is next to impossible without a community.
When queried about how he thinks creating an online community can provide customers with targeted content and advertising, and increase repeat business and loyalty, Donelly said: then you have thousands of active contributors, you will generate fantastic content for every destination and every type of travel experience. With a team of 100 professional travel writers and 6 months of time, you couldn't put a dent in the amount of content that IgoUgo.com generates in a month. Once you have all of that content the challenge becomes pairing the advice with some type of potential action (i.e. targeted advertising).
Donelly added: in our case, we have solved the difficult part of the equation (the content) and we are doing several things to partner with the best travel providers (the advertisers) to insure we are a site that provides both inspiration and a way to act on that inspiration. As we do that, we will continue to use a set of guiding principles (i.e. make things contextual, let the community drive the advertisers rather than vice versa). As long as we use these principles, gather great content, and pair the content with the best travel providers, we will generate customer loyalty and repeat visitors.