• Little to no representation in the supply chain - In both the vacation rental market and the tour & activity market, there is very little distribution in the current supply chain.  Except for a few larger players like Viator, Isango, and Homeaway, these products are not distributed at all and there are certainly very few vacation rental or tour operator software solutions out there for small tourism businesses or individual property owners to use that allow for distribution.
• Lots of non-traditional marketing opportunities - A lot of tour & activity products can be sold on a freesale basis (unlike hotels and air), and as such, they are a great candidate for non-traditional marketing opportunities more commonly associated with traditional tangible products.  These may include Ebay, Craigslist, Vast.com, or other on-line marketplaces.
• Ripe for consolidation - There are many smaller software solutions out there that provide small tourism businesses and individual property owners with reservation capabilities but there are only a few leaders that have embraced distribution and, it is these products that will set the stage for the next step in distribution.
• No distribution standards - This is where organizations like OpenTravel Alliance can play a significant role in determining the standards for this sector.  Unlike air, hotel, and car, there are no widespread standards for this sector of the travel market.  Tour and activity products, adventure products, and attractions can (at their core) be supported by a common set of xml messages.  Additional messages can be appended to support new media and content distribution requirements.
• Destinations & Travel Resellers are looking for products - Destinations around the World are not generally in the booking business and as such offer only limited capabilities to stakeholders.  By providing standardized methods of connectivity, destinations can get access to a wider range of products and simplify their technology requirements.  This is always a good thing when working with shrinking technical budgets.

What I found most interesting about presenting in Finland, a country I had never been to, was just how similar my experiences were to theirs in terms of working with small tourism businesses.  The internal & industry research that we gathered during our beta development was almost identical to the research that the LEO group and the academics in the Lapland had gathered.  It seems that the same SME tour operator anatomy exists all over the World:

• The majority of SME tour operator businesses are single owner/operators.
• Most of the owner/operators come from a guiding or experience background.  They love the outdoors or they are passionate about their chosen are of expertise (i.e. kayaking, river rafting, skiing, etc.)
• The operators don’t have a formal business background and so they tend to lack the underlying foundational business knowledge and concepts.
• Most of the businesses lack formalized best practices or documented business processes.
• The businesses generally have little or no access to capital for technology.

It may seem odd to invite a technologist to speak when the theme is about the experience economy, but actually, it makes a lot of sense.  I believe the reason for having me participate was to demonstrate how small tourism businesses can use leading edge web technologies and on-line tour operator software to sell their experiences around the World.  How else is that snowmobile tour operator going to attract the customers they need to make their business viable for the long term.  Well, traditionally, they would have relied on the efforts of the local destination marketing organization to help drive visitors to the region.  With the increased potential of what I like to refer to as “Supplier Generated Content“, there is immense opportunities for DMOs and other marketers to aggregate, repurpose, and reuse the text, photo, video, geotag, pricing, and availability data that is being created by tour operators for their own marketing purposes in order to drive more visitors and customers.

What is Supplier Generated Content? Quite simply it is all the content created by tour operators that they control in their various content management systems.  In the case of Rezgo, this content includes rich text descriptions, itineraries, experience photos, videos, geotags, pricing, and even real-time availability.  Other supplier generated content may include blog posts, marketing collateral, reviews, presentations, or other materials specifically created by the tour operator.  The key is that the content is created by the provider of the service rather than an intermediary.   The biggest challenge with supplier generated content, however, is that the quality of the content can vary from supplier to supplier.  In my opinion, DMOs and intermediaries need to be focusing on ensuring that, as an experience industry, we encourage and develop the skills required to relay and describe those experiences with the authenticity that can only come from the tour operator who ultimately delivers the experience.

One of the presenters, Pål K. Medhus, is a small tour operator from Norway.   He changed his whole business after implementing the Experience Pyramid, a framework for analyzing, understanding, and enhancing experience based products.  His company, Høve Støtt, has seen tremendous growth and is now considered one of the leading tour operators in Geilo, Norway. Pål attributes this growth to the shift away from a service or product model and to an experience model, like the one developed in part by LEO. If you are interested, you can see the Experience Pyramid on the LEO (English) website, and also read a description of the Elements of a Meaningful Experience. Both are worthwhile and certainly could have a profound effect on how a tour operator envisions their product offering.

In conclusion, I feel strongly that, as an industry, tourism needs to stop focusing so much on the commoditisation of travel and put more focus on developing and delivering superior experiences to visitors. Before we can do that, we need to educate operators in the development of experiences and in the documenting of those of experiences for the purposes of marketing them to visitors. Ultimately, the flight, the hotel stay, and the car rental are only small parts of the overall visitor experience and yet they are the three most readily marketed and purchased travel commodities. By shifting the model and engaging suppliers in the creation of Supplier generated content, destinations can focus on marketing and delivering experiences that are unique to them and desirable to visitors while ensuring that local tour operators are generating the revenue they need to remain viable for the long term.

* Photo Credit: Iisakki Härmä, www.iisakki.com

One of the reasons why I love tourism is because I believe that unlike any other industry, tourism gives individuals the opportunity to build a business without a huge upfront investment in time, materials, or capital.  I watched Slum Dog Millionaire recently and there is a scene where the lead character finds himself becoming a tour guide to German tourists at the Taj Mahal.  The tourists pay the boy a relatively large amount of money to have him guide them through the Palace and give them an insider’s view of the history of the attraction.  He soon realizes that he can make a good income by becoming a guide.  He even finds additional ways to make money like taking photos of the tourists and selling the photos to them.  Although this is a fictional scenario, it struck me that anyone in any destination in the World can be that little boy (a.k.a. tour operator), if they have the wherewithal.  My challenge, from a technology standpoint, has always been how do I help make that tour operator successful.

I believe the way that I can help that tour operator be successful is by making sure they have lots of tourists waiting for them at the Palace and that they’ve already paid them so they don’t have to worry about collecting money after the fact.  The other way I can help that tour operator is by making sure that every traveler going to the Taj Mahal knows that the tour operator is there and what they can expect to experience if they pay for a tour with them.  The caveat is that the tour operator must be able to price their products with enough of a margin to make it competitive but still leave room to pay a commission to a reseller.  This one caveat, however, is tied to a much greater issue and that is coming to grips with the concept of selling globally.

There is no easy way to instill the concept of distribution and resale pricing in tour operators, it really seems to be something that has to be promoted by local trusted organizations like the tourist board or CVB.  That said, if the technical capabilities exist within the tour operator on-line booking software, then the tour operator is more likely to experiment with distribution.  In the next few years we are going to see more and more tour operators distributing their tours & activities through websites and resellers all over the World.  In advance of that day, we can expect organizations like OpenTravel to build standards that promote interconnectivity and we can expect to see tour operator software companies develop tour & activity distribution platforms that set the stage for more global delivery of local tourism products and services.

One of the major benefits that small tourism companies have over larger competitors is that they tend to me more nimble and quick to respond to opportunities with technology.  The other clear benefit is that the owner/operator or someone very close to the company can add a human face and element to the organizations social media efforts.  If you have not yet jumped on to the Social media bandwagon and are considering it, here are my top 5 recommendations:

1. Know your goal with Social Media: This seems like a pretty basic point, but it is critical.  You need to define what your expectations are with Social media or it can become a time and energy vortex.  Is your goal to open up communications with your current and potential customers or do you want to write interesting stories that will bring more potential customers to your website?  Both of these are perfectly good goals, but the social media approaches are different.
2. Philosophy NOT technology: Okay, being a techno-junkie this seems counter intuitive, but my point is that your customer philosophy and your goals should drive the type of technology you choose and not the other way around.  If your goal is to build content and engage with potential customers then using a blogging platform is probably the best way to go, but which blogging platform really depends on your comfort level and your technical abilities.  For starters, I recommend using Wordpress.com, a hosted blogging platform.  There are many others out there to choose from.  As you become more comfortable with the technology, you can find the one that best fits your needs.  If you are looking to engage with customers in a more casual way then you might consider Twitter, FriendFeed, or even Facebook (now that it is more like Twitter).  These applications present conversations in a “lifestream” format giving people updates on what you are doing as you post them.  They are not good for writing long posts but are very good at notifying your followers of what is going on and for starting or continuing conversations.
3. Walk before you Run: If you have not yet tried social media, I recommend you start slow and begin by joining one or two networks.  Just like on-line bookings, you have to prepare yourself and your products for on-line bookings before you can actually start taking advantage of your tour operator software.  A good way to engage with a social network and prepare yourself for further engagement is to join http://travelblogexchange.ning.com/.  This travel blogging social network is built on the NING platform which hosts many niche social networks.  The benefit with NING is that you don’t have to create multiple logins.  Start by commenting on posts you like, photos that you find captivating, or videos that interest you.  Once you get a feel for participating you can move to the next step of contributing your own content by writing your own blog post or posting your own photos.
4. Be Yourself: Those of you who are Saturday Night Live fans will remember the immortal quote from Stuart Smalley “I’m Good Enough, I’m Smart Enough, and Doggone It, People Like Me!“.  Well, it’s true.  If you are yourself, share your experience and expertise in an open and authentic manner then, generally speaking, people will want to engage with you.  People are drawn to others who share and who do so without expectation of reciprocity.  Don’t get me wrong, there are a lot of negative people on the Internet as well, but when it comes to social networks, the people that you attract to your posts, photos, videos, etc. will relate to the way in which you compose your content.  Positive words feed positivity, negative words feed negativity. It’s really that simple.
5. Pace Yourself: It is easy to burn yourself out with Social media.  At one point I think I had about twenty different usernames and profiles to manage.  Eventually you will find the balance that makes it easy for you to remain engaged with the networks that are important to you and the ones where you contribute the most.  Just like real-life, how engaged you are with a particular network will depend on how much of an impact you feel you have on the community as a whole.  There is no reason not to join a community if you feel that you might be able to contribute to it at some point, but if you find that you are not able to continue contributing becuase of time constraints, then focus on the communities where you have the greatest impact.

On-line social networks are very much like their off-line counterparts.  Your local Chamber of Commerce, business association, or club are all examples of real-world social networks.  From experience, I can tell you that being a member of these organizations requires commitment and time if you expect to see tangible results from your membership.  The same is true for on-line social networks and social media.  The more you participate, the more you contribute, the more impact you will have on the community and the more likely you will be to achieve your goals.

Photo: That’s me going for an ice swim in the Kemi River (I think that’s the name) in Rovaniemi Finland.  Like technology, I believe in just jumping in and giving things a try.

Okay, back to the point. Mobile devices like the iPhone are so capable now that you can write content and submit posts where ever you happen to be. The benefit to tourism is obvious, at least in my mind, and that is that you can now share experiences in real-time from where ever you happen to be. As a small tour operator or activity provider, you can post images to the web or even take small snippets of video and post them without having to go back to your office. Take my recent trip to Prince Rupert, BC for example. During my visit, I witnessed the most amazing scene of forty bald eagles feeding off a local pier. I was able take a photo with my iPhone and post it to twitpic within minutes. This is an experience you can only have in few locations in the World. The more you can share what makes your destination, tour, or attraction unique, the better off you’ll be.

Besides creating compelling and timely content, mobiles like the iPhone and Nokias give you access to some powerful business tools. Many of the tour operators I work with, for example, offer printable on-line vouchers as part of their on-line booking process. Many, however, have experienced increased voucher fraud, or duplicate vouchers. The challenge is that there is no easy way to check the vouchers until the tour operator is back at their computer. To address this, we decided to print out a 2D barcode on the vouchers produced by our tour operator software, Rezgo, which could be read using the iPhone using an app like BeeTag or any web enabled camera phone. The benefit is that any tour operator can now check the validity of a voucher by simply taking a picture of the 2D barcode using their mobile device. As long as they have a connection, they can make sure the voucher is valid. No special hardware is required and the feature is standard in Rezgo. There are a lot of new opportunities presenting themselves in the mobile space. The key for tour operators is to focus on opportunities that increase their ability to market & sell their tourism products and to reduce their administrative burden and costs. If you think of your mobile as a tool rather than just a phone, the opportunities very quickly present themselves.

On-line credibility is very much like your real world credibility. In fact, I would argue that they should be part of the same strategy.  The difference between the off-line and on-line credibility however, is that your on-line credibility tends to be driven more by your brand, design, and professionalism of your website and not by you as the business owner.  In the off-line world, a customer can meet you and your staff and determine your credibility with personal contact.  In the on-line world, a customer must make a judgement on your credibility based on the information you provide on your site, the design of your site, the way you conduct your bookings, and the way you follow up with communications.  For many small business, this can be a challenge, especially when faced with competing with large on-line brands.

Here are some ways that you can build and maintain your on-line credibility:

1. Professional appearance & quality design: This is critical to your on-line credibility.  Why? Because you have about 8 seconds to impress your visitor enough to convince them to explore your site further.  Remember the old saying… “You don’t get a second chance to make a first impression”. When that saying is doubly true for the web.  If your website is poorly designed or broken, you will probably lose that visitor to a competitor.  Here are examples of small tour operators who have professional designs:

Both these designs are clean and well branded.  The products are easy to see with readable text, lots of attractive photos, and compelling calls to action.  Both of these sites also clearly display their memberships and association relationships.

2. Content, Content, Content: Need I say more? You are an expert at what you do, so share your expertise with your visitors.  That said, you may not be a great writer, so if need be, find someone who can translate your message into compelling text for your visitors.  Be careful though, your message needs to be compelling, interesting, and AUTHENTIC.  Your customers can tell when you are spinning a marketing message versus just telling it like it is.  Your greatest advantage over your larger travel competitors is that you can tell your message in your own voice, because for many of you, your company and brand are intricately tied to you as the business owner.  In this seemingly impersonal World, people are craving connections with authentic local experiences.  You have a very real opportunity to build your on-line credibility by becoming the voice for your business and, in part, your community.

3. Share your credentials: Are you a member of your local Chamber of Commerce, Tourism Associations, Better Business Bureau, or Travel Association?  Make sure that you clearly display your memberships and link to your profiles on these sites.  The Better Business Bureau (BBB) for example, has an online certification program that allows visitors to view your company’s profile with the BBB.  Assuming you have a good reputation and have been diligent about customer service, you should be proud to display this badge to your customers.  The same may be true for other organizations but you may have to contact them directly to find out.  Be careful of fake business sites that will create a certified badge for your company for a fee but with no background checks.  A fake badge can do a lot of damage to your credibility and will destroy your trust with your potential customer.

Here is an example of our BBB badge for reference:

4. Embrace On-line Customer Reviews: Don’t fear on-line review websites.  They can, in fact, be a powerful referral source for your business.  Sites like TripReviews.com, which is one of only a few travel review sites that supports tours and activities, can add a lot of credibility by allowing you to collect and display your customer reviews on your website.  Some booking engines, like Rezgo.com for example, also provide integration with customer reviews, so you can often combine the review process directly with the booking in order to support the sales process.  Other sites, like GetSatisfaction.com, are not necessarily designed for tourism related businesses but can still be used to facilitate open customer communications. The most important thing to keep in mind is that you must take control of your reputation on-line or you will miss out on the conversations that are happening around your service.  A simple way of taking control is to send your customers a follow-up email after they take your tour with a link to your TripReviews.com or TripAdvisor.com page and ask them to write a review of their experience.  Don’t worry, over 70% of the reviews on review websites are positive, so chances are good that your customers will give you praise.

5. Security & PCI Compliance: If you offer on-line bookings (and I highly recommend that you do), you absolutely MUST have a booking process that is PCI compliant.  PCI stands for “Payment Card Industry” and the compliance refers to a strict set of rules that your website must adhere to in order to reduce your liability as an on-line merchant.  By ensuring that your booking engine is PCI compliant, you reduce your risk of fraudulent transactions and, more importantly, you protect your customers from possible credit card fraud.  Using a hosted booking engine, like Rezgo.com for example, you can easily check if they are PCI Compliant by looking for a “Credit Card Safe” logo or security mark.  If you have installed a stand-a-lone booking software, you may need to undergo the PCI compliance yourself which can cost between $99 - $7,000 per year depending on your volume of bookings.  I recommend you contact Security Metrics if you need a good PCI service provider.

Here is an example of our Security Metrics PCI Compliance Mark for reference:

In conclusion, there are a lot of little things you can do to build trust in your on-line visitors.  All of these credibility building measures mean nothing, however,  if you don’t provide a good service or product.  When combined with a solid offering, building your on-line credibility can go a long way to keeping you one step ahead of your competition and top of mind with your current and future customers.

The first in my series is about the costs associated with developing your website.  There are a number of parts to a web project, however, there is one thing for sure, the overall costs of web projects have decreased.  Applications such as booking engines, content management systems, and hosting have all decreased in cost since they were introduced in the mid to late 1990s.  There are, in fact, many software as a service applications that can help your business get up and running without a large capital investment.

1. Website and Content Management System - There are a number of ways to go about designing your website.  You can choose to use a professional web designer to design your site from scratch, you can use a pre-designed template and have it professionally customized, or you can use a pre-designed template and modify it yourself.  The quality of the result will depend greatly on the quality of the original template and your skill or the skill of the designer.  If you have the budget, I would highly recommend using a professional designer where possible.  My reasons for this are:

• The design will be finely tuned to your brand.
• The navigation structure will be specific to your company and your product type (this may not be true if you use a template that is generic in scope).
• Your design will be unique (as opposed to a commonly used template).

Once your site is designed you will want to consider using a content management system to make it easy to manage and control the content of your website.  There are a number of CMS (content management system) applications available including opensource and proprietary brands.  As a start, I would recommend using Wordpress as a start.  Even though Wordpress is considered a blogging platform, it can be used as a traditional content management system with support for pages and a wide variety of plugins.  In addition to Wordpress, you may want to consider using Drupal or Joomla.  Both CMS platforms are opensource and have a very large (and strong) user/developer community.  Remember, the key is to use a system that is easy for you to use on a daily basis.  Before you choose a solution, make sure you try them out or ask for examples.

COST OF WEBSITE DESIGN & CMS IMPLEMENTATION: $3,000 - $8,000 UPFRONT

2. Web Booking Engine - In my opinion, if your website is not transactional, then you are losing out on a huge opportunity.  Your website is available 24/7/365, so why not give your customers the ability to book from you even if you’re asleep or out on tour.  There are a number of booking engines that are available, but only a handful have been designed specifically for SME operators that provide tours and activities.  A few things to consider looking for in a booking system include:

• Make sure you can fully co-brand the booking process. This is important because you want your customers to have a seamless and continuous experience.
• Ensure that the booking engine can integrate with your payment gateway or offer a secure manual payment method.
• Make sure the system is PCI compliant, which means that it has been tested by a certified security professional for possible vulnerabilities.  PCI compliance ensures that your transactions will be secured and that your customer credit card information is safe.
• You’ll want to make sure the system supports rich media including a photo and video gallery.  This is particularly important now because, according to PhoCusWright, videos can increase a consumer’s decision to book a travel product.  I believe this is especially true for experience based products like tours and activities.
• Your booking engine should be search engine friendly.  Look for systems that use search engine friendly urls and that products are easily indexed by the search engines.  This will save you a considerable amount of work in search engine optimization.
• I recommend that you consider using a hosted booking service or a software-as-a-service.  Booking engines that are provided as a service (as long as they meet the above criteria) are generally much easier to maintain then stand-a-lone systems and are more cost-effective.
• Distribution is a huge opportunity for every SME tour operator.  The biggest issue is that there are very few booking engines that provide distribution opportunities or channel management.
• Pricing for booking engines can vary greatly from one-time set-up fees, flat monthly payments, or pay-as-you-go pricing.  Ultimately, the best pricing will be based on your specific needs and the value delivered by the system.  Many of the most popular e-commerce systems, such as Shopify.com, are embracing a pay-as-you-go pricing model.  The main benefit of a pay-as-you-go model is that you only pay for the system when it delivers bookings.  There are generally low or no set-up costs and no monthly fees other than the transaction fees.  The draw back is that pay-as-you-go pricing can be expensive if you experience a high volume of booking.  Generally, many booking engines will negotiate better rates with you if you can show a high volume of sales.

COST OF WEB BOOKING ENGINE: $1,000 - $12,000 ANNUALLY

3. SEO and Online Marketing - Depending on your budget, you will want to consider making your website optimized for search engines.  The best way to go about this is to ensure that the content management system and the booking engine you choose are already optimized for search.  Wordpress and Rezgo for example are both optimized for search out of the box and provide RSS feeds for content.  There are even additional seo features available through Wordpress, like the Google Sitemap generator and SEO Optimizer, which allows you to customize the title, meta keywords, and descriptions for every page and post on your site.  In addition to your basic seo efforts, you will want to ensure that your company and products are available for review through sites TripReviews.com, which is one of the few customer review sites that supports tours and activities.

COST OF SEO & ON-LINE MARKETING: $500 - $4000 ANNUALLY

So, in conclusion, there are a number of options available to you as a business owner.  The web can be a powerful source of both marketing and sales for your tourism business.  The most important thing to remember is that your online presence will most likely be your most pervasive marketing tool and will be seen by more consumers than your rack card or brochure.  When considering how much to budget for your web strategy, consider how much your brochures cost to design and print and their conversion rate, not to mention the environmental impact of all that paper and ink.  Done well, your website can be a powerful and much greener sales channel for your tourism business.

Photo Credit:
Tour Bus http://www.flickr.com/photos/solarscot/2577242866/sizes/s/
Boat Cruise http://www.flickr.com/photos/wdwbarber/3030149814/sizes/s/

The Tourism E-Kit covers a variety of subjects from the basics such as planning your success, assessing your needs, planning your website, and email best practices to more advanced subjects like choosing a booking engine, search engine marketing, and even customer reviews & Tripadvisor.

The complete kit is about 250 pages and takes about eleven hours to read, but it is a worthwhile exercise.  I had been thinking about working on a similar tool kit for Canadian and U.S. tour operators and I am convinced that the ATDW Tourism E-Kit is the model to follow.

For more information about the ATDW Tourism E-Kit, visit http://www.atdw.com.au/tourism_e_kit.asp

Big Thanks to Fabienne Rabbiosi from UntangleMyWeb.com for her help in getting Rezgo added to the Tourism E-Kit.

A Closer Look at the TripIt App

Once installed you have to sign into your TripIt account using the Open Authentication method.  This means opening up Safari and allowing the app to access your profile.  I have to admit, I am not a big fan of this method of signing in because it is jarring to the user.  The first question that popped in my mind was “Why would I need to provide permission for the app to access my TripIt account”.  Given that this is a branded TripIt app, it seems a bit unncessary to go through the authentication procedure and use some other behind the scenes method for connecting the app to the user’s account.

Once connected, the app downloads all your itinerary information and makes it available for off-line use.  This is the most important part of the app, why? Because the earlier iPhone enabled web interface didn’t allow you to access your itinerary information when you were off-line or in airplane mode.  Trust me, paying $15 to download my itinerary was not an option when traveling abroad.  The TripIt app now gives you access to that information on the go regardless of whether you are connected or not.

The screen shots give you an idea of the interface, which is simple and to the point.  Busy travellers do not want to have to click through a multitude of screen to get the information they need.

This screen is the “My Trips” screen and gives you access to your upcoming trips.  These are sychronized with the trips on your TripIt profile.

When you choose the trip you want, you are presented with the details of the trips in a similar manner to the TripIt site, sorted in chronological order and identified by flight, hotel, restaurant, etc.

If you click on the flight item, for example, you are presented with a variety of details about your flight including where you booked it, confirmation number, and even customer service phone number.  Most of the components are tied into iPhone native functions such as the ability to one touch dial the phone numbers and one touch integration with Google Maps for location based information like hotel or restaurant address.

So what do I think?

I think it’s a great start and an excellent example of taking a purely web based application and porting it to a mobile environment.  One of my biggest pet peeves is applications that mimic exactly what a website does without taking into account the features inherent in mobile devices.  I think TripIt has a pretty good job of taking advantage of the iPhones native capabilities.  I think future versions of the app could benefit from a better sign-in process and a more branded interface (just from an aesthetic standpoint).  Additional functions that I think would be of benefit include:

1. Adding itinerary items from within the application and pushing them to the TripIt website when connected.
2. Emailing or sms messaging itinerary items to contacts. (This would be handing for things like meeting friends at a restaurant or hotel).
3. Synchronizing TripIt contacts with phone contacts (or using TripIt contacts to search iPhone contacts) so that you can call (or contact) friends who are “Close to me”.
4. The ability for the iPhone app to auto synchronize location data back to you TripIt profile so that you can see friends “Close to me” on a map interface.

Overall, the app is a great next step for the TripIt platform and I look forward to seeing the app evolve.  For more details or to download the app to your info, visit the iTunes App Store.

In emerging markets the tourism boards are often underfunded or quite new and the stakeholders are few and far between.  This opens up opportunities for technology companies to provide solutions that help bring much needed marketing to stakeholders but also provides the tourism board with an effective means of aggregating and distributing products and services from their stakeholders.  Obviously, this can only be done in markets where some sort of technology infrastructure exists.  In South Africa for example, one main challenge is access to reliable and fast Internet connectivity.  In some areas, even those around major cities, the Internet connections are equivalent to a 56K modem (or worse).  For a Web 2.0 company, that means dealing with speeds equivalent to those in the late 1990’s.  For those regions that do have infrastructure however, it means that small independent businesses now have access to a whole host of new online tools that they can use to build their businesses.  The key is that tourism boards, who are considered the trusted partners in most regions, must help to educate their stakeholders about these opportunities.

In less than a week I’ll be speaking at the Online Revealed Conference in Niagara Falls.  The reason I mention this is because the conference is designed to be an educational experience for tourism boards in Canada and is a model of what, I believe, other regions around the World should be doing.  Firstly, training the trainers is fundamentally important for tourism boards because they are the ones who have the access to the local stakeholders and because they are more likely to have success in educating their members than any commercial entity.  Secondly, conferences like this act as a forum for members of tourism boards to come together and share best practices.  In my opinion, the old days of treating every other destination in the World as a competitor are long gone.  Like every other successly aspect of the tourism industry, each destination needs to focus on what makes them different from the destination next door.  Those differences are driven as much by geographical conditions as it is by the people, the culture, and the experiences that potential visitors can have at the destination.  Until very recently, it has been very difficult and time consuming to aggregate those experiences, activities, and attractions.  Thanks to new technologies there are now options for gathering this hard to find data and to engage stakeholders in meaningful and rewarding marketing opportunities.

I hope that this year will be the tipping point for many tourism boards.  With the current economic climate and the affect that this is having on tourism Worldwide, I am expecting that many boards will be looking at new and innovative ways to add value to their stakeholders, finding ways to automate their processes, and finding new ways to generate local tourism revenues.  I expect that in times like these, there will be many more tour operators and suppliers coming up with new and innovative products and services.

*Photo Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/tuliobertorini/ Creative Commons.