Travel 2.0: Creating travel communities

I thought I would also write a little bit about the necessity to create a ‘community’ in order to ensure the success of our feature.

Everywhere on the web, and more specifically in travel, sites that connect individuals across the world are taking over even the big search engines as the online destinations of choice. This phenomenon has been nicknamed ‘Travel 2.0” (see descrption here)  - a play on Web 2.0- the name given to websites that are all about social networking, online communities, slick technologies and user-powered content.

The success of early 2.0 sites like MySpace and Bebo have spawned a number of similar sites, a lot of which now have a focus on travel. They include 43places.com, where you learn what 43 places that thousands of travellers are planning to visit, their stories, and their reasons for going.

Another popular one is tripmates.com, which includes travel reviews, photos, and blog, and has a useful tool which will put you in touch with locals and other travellers if you may be going solo.

Lastly, gusto.com, aims to connect you with other people who have similar travel preferences and lifestyles.

Even though our site is offering a new service in the form of our how-to guides, I think it is important that we still try to build up a sense of community to ensure our audience’s continued interaction with our site.

The first method of doing so, (which most of the above sites have employed), is to create a forum. Which will be doing. Incorporating social media sites like Facebook, twitter and Flickr will also help achieve this, and we should use these platforms to encourage interaction, participation and feedback from our users. For example users can post tips, questions and photos on Facebook and Twitter when they are on the move. We could also hold competitions (such as ‘Name this city’ or caption competitions) that will further user engagement, increase publicity and also build a sense of community. In doing this, our social networks will not feel like passive, redundant separate entities, but rather complements our feature in a productive way.