Online tech has helped tourism transcend limitations

Published on : Tuesday, November 12, 2013

images-32-300x164The rapid development of online technology over the years has resulted in the tourism industry evolving from the way tourism players managed their client booking to the manner by which the tourists survey the best places to go on vacation.

However, such rapid development in online technology is useless for tourism players or travellers if they do not know how to fully utilise and transform it from a normal tourist information provider to a vital catalyst to develop the tourism industry.

For Google’s managing director of travel, Rob Torres, the key action for this is quite simple but yet not many do it or know how to do it properly, that is tailoring the vast information and application online to the needs of a certain country’s tourism industry.

“Now, travellers are connected all the time, thus creating a lot of room to market tourism products…but many tourism players did not fully utilise the online technology and when they did, many of them didn’t tailor the information specifically enough,” he said.

Torres was speaking to Bernama at the sidelines of the recent World Tourism Conference themed, ‘Global Tourism: Game Changers and Pace Setters’, attended by 678 delegates from 46 countries including United Kingdom, Portugal, China, Australia, Argentina and South Africa.

He said in tailoring the information and application online, tourism players must be specific to a certain place, not the whole country, and most importantly, they must remember to fulfill the traveller’s dream.

He said the most underrated tools in pulling the travellers using online technology was online video because unlike pictures or audios, videos can give a wider medium for the players to ‘feel’ the place.

“When travelling here, I was really touched by an online series video made by Malaysia Airlines in YouTube where they showed so many beautiful sites people can go to, using the airlines and the reality video how travelling with the airline feels like…this is wonderful to catch the heart of travellers,” he noted.

Torres said another important aspect was creating a tool-like online marketing campaign that people could understand and online application people could easily use.

“It is useless to do a full tourist information provider in a single website if people can’t find the information they wanted…better to do a fun, simple and interactive website that gives simple information to a traveller and if they want further information, link them to other pages,” he said.

The same thing applies to tourist online application; like booking application, the application must have a simple, interactive interface that makes the job easier, not over complicating.

Tags:

Comments are closed.

arrow2Follow Us
 
facebook-logo  twitter-logo  LinkedIn_logo  stumbleupon-logo   rss_logo 

SUBSCRIBE NEWSLETTER:

Email 
 

ADVERTISEMENT

    TRAVEL INDUSTRY EVENTS

    More Events...