• by Margaret A. Starvish , April 21, 2008

Community travel sites are going places and taking names

Tinsley Mortimer, a svelte, shiny-haired Manhattan socialite, is used to traveling in style. Describing a recent outing to Colorado's Beaver Creek ski resort, she writes, "This trip has been so amazing! We honestly have been treated like royalty, which of course is the only way I like to travel!" Mortimer's "we" consists of 11 other high-profile members of asmallworld.net (an invitation-only social networking site that intends to have among its members no more than one percent of any city's inhabitants worldwide) who accompanied her on a free vacation. The ski weekend was sponsored by Vail Resorts in the hopes that Mortimer et al would spread the word about the brand among their high-profile, high-society friends on the site and beyond. "We are considering developing a deeper partnership with aSmallWorld to continue on the positive word-of-mouth marketing we were able to capitalize on," says Katie Richardson, marketing manager for Vail Resorts.

Word-of-mouth marketing figures prominently into the forays of many travel companies into online social media. While search engine marketing is still king - "That's the number one medium," says Lorraine Sileo, vice president of research at the travel research company PhoCusWright - brands in the hotel, train and airline industries are spending more time and dollars in places like Facebook and MySpace. "People love to talk about where they've been and where they want to go so travel is just a natural subject area for social networking," says David Woodrow, vice president of partner integration at the gather.com social networking site. "It's something people can talk about."

To the Point

"Advertising is changing how travel is integrated in the social media experience," says Randy Petersen, a frequent flyer expert and founder of Boarding Area, a site that aggregates the best of the business travel blogs. He recently worked with points.com to put together a campaign around its newly launched GPX program, which allows users to trade frequent flyer points and miles across airlines and around the globe. That campaign included the sponsorship of two of Boarding Area's blogs: PointsWizard and TravelTechTalk, along with more traditional advertising on sites like FlyerTalk. "We wanted to compare and see what type of creative we could come up with," says Ian Berkowitz, manager of online marketing for points.com.

While they ultimately decided to go with a banner ad on PointsWizard, they chose a different direction, sponsorship, for Travel-TechTalk. "Sponsorship," says Petersen, "offers the opportunity to set a deeper relationship with the reader because over time they haven't been interrupted."

"We understood how important community-based commentary on frequent flyer miles is to the travel community," says Berkowitz, who added that early metrics showed an increase in traffic to their site from FlyerTalk. "We're quite happy with the initial results."

Railroaded

Train travel tends to be viewed through the hazy half-light of the past by many Americans. "Everyone knows about Amtrak. But most people don't consider it when making travel plans," says Julie Kimball, vice president and account director at Media Contacts, which handles Amtrak's digital planning and buying. Amtrak has built up a presence in social media to change that, including a relationship - now in its second year - with the social networking site gather.com.

Gather, which is unique in that it awards viewers for their participation in the online community with points they can then redeem for gift cards or charitable donations, "offered us a baby step into social networking," says Kimball. Amtrak's presence on the site started small, in the form of a travel group called All Aboard. The group focused on North American travel - with an emphasis on train travel - but the positive response it got from the community led to a deeper relationship.

"Next Stop," a highly interactive yearlong program, is one off-shoot of that relationship. Each
month, Amtrak invites a new All Aboard group member to take a free trip on one of Amtrak's North American routes. In return, the member takes pictures of and blogs about his or her experience. One member a week is paid $50 to write an article about a city along the route, while other members are welcome to contribute their own articles, photographs and tips. So far, members have written 300 articles with over 40,000 page views and more than 3,400 comments. The All Aboard group itself has 4,355 members. "The passion that people brought to the table was surprising to us as the agency," says Kimball.

Amtrak was also pleasantly surprised with the results. Gail Reisman, senior director of national advertising and marketing at Amtrak, had a fear of social media common among advertisers: "I was concerned how we would control content," she says. "But don't be afraid. I found that you can still maintain a certain level of control, and customers these days value the opportunity to get more
perspectives than just the marketer's."

Self-Centered

Not every travel advertiser is afraid of Facebook. The Spanish hotel chain Sol Meliá has been promoting ME, its new experience hotel brand, on MySpace, Orkut, Bebo and through a blog on WordPress. "We're really trying to cover the entire social network gamut because the hotel brand is growing within the next year rather rapidly and we are hoping to grow the campaign with it," says Bill Teubner, president of THAT Agency, the agency behind the campaign.

It also has a presence on VirtualTourist, an online global travel community that's ancient in Internet years (it's nearly 10), gets 5 million unique visitors a month, boasts of 25 member marriages "that we know of" and prides itself on the integrity of its tips, comments and discussion boards. Teubner knows the importance of preserving that integrity: "It's about engaging the community in the way they want to be engaged."

On VirtualTourist, that means a campaign that is "a mixed media of traditional banner advertising and text link advertising that pushes people to a local merchant page." Those pages have images of the hotel and information about it, including links to each hotel's Web site (there are a total of three) and to profiles on other social networks. "In the future," says David Snyder, online marketing manager at THAT Agency, "we will be expanding our relationship with VirtualTourist and trying to utilize their social network more. It's an exciting experience for everybody involved." Everybody? Somewhere, Tinsley Mortimer is shaking her head.