Mashery

Over the last year or so, the travel industry has started to shift more time and attention to local travel. More consumers are traveling local and experiencing destinations near their home as the cost of travel increases.  The ever increasing fuel costs, high unemployment levels and ticket prices (airlines, events, parks, museums, etc.) has lead to the “travel local” mantra. This travel local movement even has a word invented for it “staycation.”

Staycations may be easy if you live in or around, say for example Orlando Florida, and have the means to partake in the parks nearby. But what if you have the need for information about places to visit nearby somewhere with less obvious activity centers? The answer is the web and open content, which is also the opportunity for the Travel Industry. We see immediate opportunities for the travel industry to take advantage of staycations and expand their open content offerings:

• Provide supplemental content and/or programs to local newspapers, chambers of commerce, local parks, museums, etc. Any local travel stakeholder that could benefit from consumers traveling locally. The content could include general travel stats, recommend driving routes, hotel ratings, or points of interest near a hotel, restaurant reviews, etc.

• Invest in partnerships and data sharing agreements with sites that focus on a specific target audience. Staycations require travels sites to get information to people and the site they “belong” to; reach your audience in other places they gather as part of their daily routine. An example target could be a site like Lonely Planet and their Blue List content. Blue List is a site for recommending “anything and everything travel related”. As Russell Johnson, President of California-based TravelMedia, which hosts a trade site at travelmedia and a consumer site at connectedtraveler told TravelDailyNews.com, ‘The Web is becoming a collaborative mesh of activity rather than linear portals.’

• Expand mobile application offerings for people to find interesting information about what is nearby the area they have driven to (places of interest, hotels that are available, etc) via their mobile device

• Don’t forget the casual developer. Maybe a  travel aficionado that wants to create a cool mashup in facebook of not only the places they traveled but the things they have seen, the hotels they stayed, how they got there, ratings, comments, opinions, etc.

What this means from a business perspective for the travel industry is finding new outlets to reach beyond typical travel destination websites. The focus needs to be on niche and local activity oriented sites.  These sites range from the likes of City Search to city specific websites and guides or even local travel on Yahoo.

Creating new distribution channels means making your content and services easily available to others through web services.   While the travel industry is just starting to move in this direction, other industries fighting the economic changes have started to make the move.  Industries including the likes of retailers and media companies.

Are you in the travel industry? Has the model of staycations affected how you present your business data online, how you make content available, your partners, your overall business? Drop us a comment here. Or better yet, if you will be attending the PhoCusWright Conference, come visit us, we will be exhibiting.