Great Article that I just found by USAToday
Posted 1/26/2007 4:26 PM ET
If you visit Sheraton.com, you will see something completely different from other major hotel websites. Instead of the usual advertisements for exotic locations and special offers crowding the home page, you are immediately struck by the phrase "Welcome to the neighborhood" in the center of your screen, and a U.S. map covered with pop-up photographs and the words "Your story. In your words."
The photographs are all amateur, taken by Sheraton customers with no more travel logging experience than the average person. There are no actors or models masquerading as guests in these snapshots and they are not the views most hoteliers would choose to display. There are no wide-angle, enticing displays of guest rooms, meeting rooms, the lobby, the restaurant or the grounds. There are no seductive panoramas of pristine beaches, perfectly manicured golf courses or local tourist attractions. These photos and the accompanying captions and narratives have been submitted exclusively by Sheraton customers who want nothing more than to tell you about their recent trip and stay at a Sheraton hotel.
Welcome to the world of Travel 2.0, a new approach to Internet commerce that travel providers hope will revolutionize the way you shop for travel. Internet 2.0 is the buzzword for new technology and tactics sweeping the cyber world, and Travel 2.0 is the travel industry's adaptation of this latest craze. Travel 2.0 is all about "empowering" users, encouraging travelers to create content online to be shared with other readers, and, as on Sheraton's website, intertwined with the official content offered by an established travel vendor.
"It's not about technology; It's about the guest, what the guest wants," according to Jeff Mirman, director, Sheraton interactive marketing, Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide Inc. Mirman believes Sheraton is enabling a human connection through the new website. "It's not just a search for a room," says Mirman. "We're trying to have our users tell a story." Mirman demonstrated the website at a recent conference sponsored by PhoCusWright, an independent travel research firm.
As the online travel market matures, users are no longer content just to find the lowest price or read destination information written by marketers. Now more sophisticated online users are looking to take control and identify the perfect trip. Along with the rise in popularity of social networking websites like MySpace and Facebook, and the virtual-reality site Second Life, the travel industry is spawning a slew of 2.0 websites specifically designed for travel discussion forums and information exchange.
It should be noted that frequent travelers began conversing with one another on hundreds of topics on FlyerTalk long before the MySpace generation discovered the Internet. Other popular online forums for business travelers include those offered by FlightAware and FlightStats, but Sheraton's new site paves the way for established air, car and hotel vendors to open up their websites to customer participation.
Internet 2.0 has been described as a "disruptive" technology, a platform that facilitates "viral" proliferation of information passed along from user to user to user. But despite these ominous sounding labels, it is a technology that users readily embrace.
BootsnAll, Gusto, Real Travel, TripTie, Virtual Tourist, WAYN, Wikitravel and World66 are just a sampling of the proliferation of community sites where users share itineraries, adventures and other travel information.
Most travel guidebook publishers also offer online forums – one of the first and best is Lonely Planet's Thorn Tree. If you ask a question in one of these forums you might receive responses from thousands of other users. Many travelers live by the peer advice they receive on these sites.
Though many social networking websites are designed for the leisure traveler, business travelers can also use these sites to find an activity to fill a few open hours on a business trip or plan an itinerary to keep their family busy if they come along. Peer review travel websites (see related article) such as Trip Advisor and Skytrax actually predate what marketers are calling 2.0.
User community websites often specialize to fill a niche. For the gastric connoisseur, AirlineMeals.net lets users share photos and descriptions of airline meals (if you're lucky enough to get a meal these days). And if you've forgotten what an airline meal looks like, you can also view airline meals from a previous decade, when shrimp cocktails and filet mignon were a standard fare in the sky. I remember a very tasty shish-kabob dinner I enjoyed on a TWA flight between Chicago and New York many years ago. Too bad I didn't take a photo of that one.
Some websites like Groople, TripHub and Triporama cater specifically to group travel and offer forums to facilitate discussions among the group members planning a trip.
And if conversing with other travelers online isn't enough to satisfy your social needs, you can even join an online matching community such as Flight Club, Tripmates or AirTroductions where you can search for the perfect seat mate on your next flight, a travel companion on an upcoming journey or more.
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