In today’s Travel and Tourism industry, business environment and technologies are changing all the time. In order to stay
competitive, practitioners in the sector should always keep an eye on their development. ITB World Travel Trends Report indicates recently two major focuses on the future development of the industry: Social media and Mobile service.
(http://www.traveldailynews.com/pages/show_page/40841-Facebook-instead-of-postcards)
Social media
We’ve been long discussing the importance of social media in the T&T industry. It enables people to share and exchange opinions and experiences to build more social interactions via user-generated contents. Today, travelers are increasingly turning to their peers as a valued source of information, guidance and recommendation; they now trust reviews and their communities more than they do professionals and agencies.
Over the next few years social networks will become an everyday form of communication. Already 52 per cent of the 152 million adult vacationers in the USA are using social networks in order to discuss their next intended destination with friends, or to obtain direct information from travel companies.
There is no doubt that tourism companies and organizations should be aware of this phenomenon and reactive to its potential marketing impacts. Today, businesses in the industry are starting to embrace social media as a new opportunity to promote themselves. DMOs, hotels, tour operators etc. have been actively engaged in Facebook, Twitter, blogs in order to take advantage of this new interface.
What’s more, social media now serves not only as a communication platform, it gradually begin to have real functions for tourism companies. It will be widely accepted for the purposes of making reservations. By far, this changing trend of tourists’ purchasing behavior will represent big opportunities for tourism businesses to realize deals directly via social networks.
Mobile services
“Mobile devices such as the iPhone are revolutionizing the travel market and are creating new openings for our industry. Now we must endeavor to make best use of this technology and to continue to develop it, because improved information and booking facilities definitely help to increase sales”, states Dr. Martin Buck, Director of the Competence Centre Travel and Logistics of Messe Berlin.
For example, in Japan Smartphones are already being used to make reservations for 20 per cent of domestic flights.
On-line booking now is widely spread, people can finish all the bookings before they start the trip, but people tend to communicate and make decisions or modify them during the trip, they use social media to communicate and search information all through the way. Travelers use their phones on location; they look for attractions, restaurants, activities and try to find recommendations for the place. They can navigate the website with a smartphone, but it’s easier for them to book the resort with a smartphone application. For tour operators, hotels or DMOs, the usage of mobile travel applications and the development of mobile website are indispensable.
Mobile payment methods are another current trend, enabling purchases to be made using one’s own iPhone. However, high roaming charges are a continued obstacle to the use of Smartphones abroad. “The lack of simple and fair regulation of the worldwide use of Smartphones imposes massive obstacles to the use of online services while travelling”, says Dr. Martin
Buck. ”This is one area where viable solutions must be applied as soon as possible.”
Even in European union, roaming charges of mobile phones are very high, for international trips, some facilitators will stop the service and automatically transfer to the local facilitator, this may arise chaos or even cause lost of information. As now this problem is unavoidable in international travel, some traditional booking channels need to be considered as an auxiliary.
Labels: Trend, Social media, Mobile service
Photos retrieved from:
http://www.traveldailynews.com/p
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