With the growing number of Internet users, travel
has considerably changed over the last years. Indeed, people are now able to
book their whole trip by themselves thanks to a simple “click” directly online.
But travel specialists also noticed that people are more and more becoming interested
in creating (customizing) their own trip, to make their experience more unique
(lefigaro.fr). Following this
trend, some tour operators have decided to innovate and to concentrate their
activity on this new market. For instance, PlanetVeo, newly renamed “Marco et
Vasco”, (an on-line tour operator specialized in customized travel) moved from a
turnover of 1 million Euro in 2008 to 60 million in 2013 (lefigaro.fr). No matter which tour operator one takes into
account, they all focus on the same goal: the customer’s satisfaction. They
design all aspects of their website in order to make the navigation, the
booking and the planning as easy as possible. One of them has decided to base
its whole strategy on this: secretearth.com.
Secret Earth (www.secretearth.com)
is a new trip planning website which aims at helping travellers to plan their holidays. According to the
website’s creators, more and more people want to avoid depending on a tour
operator to travel, but at the same time, they are afraid of planning their
trip alone since they often lack time and information about the country
(culture, values, type of accomodation, safety, currency, etc). Indeed, there
was no offer, no option to help them create their trip by their own so far. Matthew
Roach and John Kat, Secret Earth’s co-founders, have identified that
independent travellers needed three things to book their holidays: “good
recommendations, a way to plan them together, and an easy means to book them”.
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As a result, they
decided to create a website whose purpose is to simplify the process of
researching, planning and booking worldwide, independent holidays. They thus offer
an easy-to-use trip planning, price comparison tools, insider tips and a wide
range of tourism service providers from all around the world: 1,300
activities & attractions, 550 hotels, and 650 restaurants and bars, 100
destination guides, etc. Instead of spending hours to pick up information on
different sources, independent travellers can now focus on one website,
gathering both information and tools and making travel planning easier for
them. They even can discover travel experiences they never knew of or even
imagined. Indeed, Secret Earth invests significant time and resources to
showcase the world’s greatest travel experiences and work with the very best
travel writers to review them.
The website is
initially being launched as an invitation only website to create mystery,
stimulate curiosity and excitement about a ‘secret’ new find. Members who get
three others to sign up are rewarded with access to extra high value tips and
recommendations. Indeed, today, people do not want to go to very touristic
sites (known by everybody) anymore. They want to feel them as « specials »,
discoverers, explorers, etc. The rise of social media and user generated
content websites over the last years has been a good start to help travellers
find this kind of information and share tips, but we are now reaching the
limits of this trend since more and more people are realizing that a vast
volume of poor quality information has been generated, requiring substantial
time to read and review. Secret Earth’s creators thus want to provide a high
quality and accessible content to help people plan great holidays quickly. For
example, users can search for options based on the category of activity,
distance from current location, fly or drive, etc.
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