Travel Agent - March 31, 2008 - (Page 149) BUSINESS OPER ATIONS TECHNOLOGY BLOGGING AS THE INTERNET CONTINUES to revolutionize the travel industry, social networking sites are making it possible for tourists to learn about where to go and what to do—not from agents, but from one another. Websites like TripAdvisor.com, for example, let visitors share stories about every step of their vacations, encouraging a free-flowing exchange of ideas and opinions. A more targeted site is Holland.com, the official website of the Netherlands Board of Tourism, which encourages users to learn about visiting Holland from those who have already been there. “People are not only informed by tourism boards,” says Conrad van Tiggelen, the director of the Netherlands Board of Tourism, “but also by other consumers.” The Wave of the Future BY JENA TESSE FOX Holland.com provides viewers with usersubmitted material, as well as up-to-the-minute information about Holland from other sites Social networking sites add a personal touch to planning a vacation maintain blogs about their experiences. “We didn’t force them to write anything or ask them to write anything,” van Tiggelen emphasizes. On their own, the blogs took off in popularity, and suddenly people all over the world could experience the daily details of travel throughout Holland. “That’s a site where you hardly see that the tourism board is behind it, because students don’t want to be informed by the tourism board,” van Tiggelen explains of the still-active student-blogging site. “They want to be informed by their peers.” Content from Consumers With websites that rely on user content (called Web 2.0 sites) gaining in popularity over websites that exist solely to provide pre-approved information from a vendor, consumers are opting for advice not from professionals, but from people with similar interests and tastes. “There is a shift from the official information sources to more personalized information sources,” van Tiggelen says. “People tend to rely more on other peoples’ opinions, other travelers’ opinions, than on the official sources.” Other Sources of Information Beyond blogs and user-submitted material, Holland.com actively searches for up-to-the-minute information to share with its users. “We get feeds from different sources —not only from consumers but also, for example, Yahoo news and Google news,” van Tiggelen says. “So if there’s anything on Holland or the Netherlands in the news that comes on the Internet, it is fed to our website, and then we select what’s interesting for CONTINUED ON PAGE 150 March 31, 2008 TravelAgent | 149 Holland.com was born from an experiment in which the board sent students to the Netherlands with instructions to http://Holland.com http://Holland.com http://Holland.com http://Holland.com
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