Keeping Travel Agents Relevant

You probably remember the song, “Video Killed the Radio Star”. Well, travel 2.0 is trying to kill the travel agent. Review all the new travel websites whether they are social networking sites, hotel review sites, fare comparison sites, dynamic packaging sites, or large OTA sites, all of them have one primary thing in common; they promote self-service travel which effectively renders the travel agent useless. So what can travel agents and smaller travel agencies do to increase their value to the consuming public? One answer is to for agents to find their niche and share their knowledge. I wrote about this a little bit in a previous post; “Travel Agents can increase Trust by Sharing“. However, unlike my previous post, I would like to elaborate on the marketing side of contributing.

Users are flocking to social networking and review sites to find destinations and accommodations that are recommended by others. Who better to make recommendations then those who have traveled to these locations. The key here is to focus on building a niche or market that is either untapped or is extremely lucrative and setting the agency or agent as an expert in that region, destination, or product. Many agencies, for example, have cruise specialists, vacation specialists, and family or group travel specialists. How many of those have blogs to which they contribute on a regular basis? Probably not that many. Imagine, for a moment, that these agents all wrote a 500 word post once a day (about the equivalent of a long email) about a specific destination or product. Now compile the contributions from five agents and you have 2500 words a day of unique content all with links back to your travel agency website or online booking tool. It has been known for some time that unique content is king on the web. The myth has been that there is no one to write all the unique content. This myth is, ofcourse, completely untrue. As we have seen over the last couple of years, formal, marketing driven, content is less credible to savvy online shoppers then the off the cuff editorial from every day netizens.

So, the bottom line is that although it may be easier to use a pre-written travel guide like Fodors, Rough Guides, or even some other cheaper online travel guide services, the problem is that these world wide travel guides do not add anything to your Google or other search rankings. In many cases, the content is simply marked as duplicate content and will be penalized by Google. In addition, the content is written by professional writers, is not unique and is not written for a specific niche or target market. To win at the online game, travel agents are going to have to re-evaluate how they sell to the online market. In order for shoppers to accept the recommendations of agents and trust them as valued allies, the agents are going to have to work hard to participate in the education of their would be clientele. One small OTA who has done a very good job of writing their own content is Escapes.ca based in Vancouver.

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