The Tourism Australia team did a great job in redesigning this site.
The huge images of Australia in the background are like looking through a window into the country. Yes, that’s a trend in tourism website design (see the Santa Barbara CVB’s site, South Lake Tahoe and many others), but Australia keeps it unique with ever-changing background images.
The map is also key. Not only does it do a great job of showing visitors where various cities in Australia are in relation to one another, but the red dots (which also change with each reload of the page) showcase unique Australia experiences shared by locals. The stories are a little bit of a lagniappe - I didn’t know they were there until I clicked around. It’s a welcome surprise, engaging, and the sort of thing that will keep users coming back over and over again.
Hubspot knocks it out of the park with this thorough post on setting up Timeline for a Facebook page. They’ve done a very good job of specifying what you can do and, just as importantly, what you can’t. (Don’t even think about putting “Book now!” on your cover photo, for example.) A very worthwhile read.
Great link pointed out by Troy of Travel 2.0. A study of two Longwoods ad campaigns (one for Michigan and one for Philadelphia) show that ad spends lead to visitation. Meanwhile, in the other corner, we have the well-known example of Colorado, which lost 30% of its tourists when they stopped advertising and still has not recovered its market share.
The shuttering of the Washington State tourism office affects not only the state as a whole, but great cities like Seattle. As Colorado showed in the 1990s, shutting a state tourism office can negatively affect visits to the region for decades. Short and thought-provoking article.
About half of those in the list could be relevant to presentations on tourism and social media. #30 is rather troubling to me personally, as I’ll soon be traveling to Central America on American Airlines.
Well, this is a very different spin from STR’s prediction. Or is it?
85% of business travelers will travel “as much or more.” That “more” is not as optimistic as they skew it. Only 27% of 18-44 year olds and 16% of those 45 and over will increase their business travel. The missing number in this article: 15% will travel less. If there’s growth, it is very small and very incremental, and if you think we’ll be back to the go-go 90s next year, it’s time to revise your forecast.
I’m a big believer of looking on the bright side, but does this go too far? Bruce Baltin of Colliers PKF Consulting makes lemonade, saying that a down economy means that no one is opening new hotels and therefore there aren’t an increasing number of rooms to fill, and that the economy also keeps labor costs down. But if labor costs stay so low, will people have the money to continue to travel? An interesting read in light of STR’s recent downgrade of their RevPAR predictions for 2012.
Google has an algorithm, it’s true - but it also employs humans that rate websites based on their quality. The manuals for those search quality raters was left exposed recently. The above link gives a very good idea of what Google is looking for. To sum up: be useful and don’t do anything sketchy.
As we close out 2011 and move closer to 2012, STR, the parent company of HotelNewsNow.com, has released new projections for the U.S. hotel industry. Honestly, we hope we’re wrong. STR’s new forecast for 2012 predicts industrywide revenue per available room to grow 3.9%—a major revision from our previous estimate of 7% released at the Hotel Data Conference in August.
