Thanks for sharing The Four Stages of Travel Planning.

I like to think in terms of where the various stages taking place, and how I can engage travel dreamers in the places where they are.

If I think of the online content that would engage a traveler in stage 1 and 4, I imagine photo galleries, blog posts and videos.

When I think of stage 2, I imagine someone comparing four or five sites that offer a similar travel experience, with slightly different options…

And it would seem to me that stage 3 takes place at the kitchen table over the morning coffee.

I’ve recently found that you can vastly improve your effectiveness in Stage 1 and Stage 4 by establishing an active presence on the biggest photo and video sharing sites like Flickr and YouTube.

In addition, you can greatly improve your conversions in Stage 2 by gaining social recognition on Travel Review sites like TripAdvisor, Mapness and TravelPost.

Cheers, and all the best in YOUR tourism marketing!

Doug

The original idea of the first wave of OTAs, of course, was to provide travelers with a tool allowing them to book their own trip and eliminate the need for relying on a travel agent this has made Travelocity, Expedia, Orbitz huge companies but still mainly focused on selling air and hotel and a pretty much pre-packaged vacation product.

What the perfect storm describes is what we tried to provide with EuroVacations.com in 2000, a website that starts at the Dream stage and provides an integrated tool all the way to the Go – or booking phase while at the same time allowing the traveler to self-design and assemble their own trip with multiple components.

Unfortunately the online travel audience wasn’t ready for this kind of website, except for the few who didn’t leave immediately from the home page because it didn’t ask for a departure city / date and destination, which is still the basic approach, one that no longer satisfies consumer demand.

Now, eight years later the pundits are starting to catch up. It’s about time they do!

The disconnect between the various elements is definitely one that is responsible for what is often described today by online travelers a disappointing, frustrating and too much time consuming process. My own take on this is that if dreaming and preparing ones next vacation wasn’t such a basically fun thing to do, a fair number of people – especially time starved ones, and who is not time starved! – would abandon the web to do the task, especially when it comes to a major multi-destination long distance trip, and go back to have a travel agent do it for them.

The industry is challenged to offer up a much improved overall, smart one-stop experience along the entire chain to move online travel to the next level. It will be interesting to see who rises to the challenge and what tech tools will be developed to make it a reality.