VisitSweden Development Blog

Some time ago I was approached by a french travel blogger named Claude Bernard who was interested in an interview. He runs the french blog Les Explorers which is a part of the network Creative Weblogging (8 million pageviews / month)

Some of the questions were quite good so I urge you to read the interview on Claude´s blog if you’re interested in some more extensive answers.

Here’s an excerpt:

Internet is going faster and we talk now about Web 2.0 and Travel 2.0. What do you think about this evolution in the tourism & hotel market place ? Social media and User Generated Content are the big trends for Travel 2.0 ?

The way we use internet is constantly changing and evolving. I think the current trends are a natural progression of this development.
What’s interesting is not so much about these trends or buzzwords but more why some actors in these businesses are so slow or unwilling to adapt themselves to what the users want.

We see important impact of news technologies (RSS, AJAX, podcast, blog, socialnetworking tools, Google mashup,Vidéo etc), what is your point of view in the travel area ?

All these technologies have some important things in common: they put the importance on the individual and it’s content and they make things easier for the user to consume their content of choice.

We’re already using many of these technologies and plan to use more. For example we use RSS feeds in our external and internal blogs, like the devblog(http://devblog.visitsweden.com) and the swedish CEO blog. We’re implementing Google maps in our map service which is almost ready for release. The online community will probably have some ajax where appropriate and surely some podcasts and video.

We’re also looking on how we can improve our PR-work on internet by using some of these technologies.

Any advises for DMO’s and Tourism Board who want to start a online community!

They might want to read our Development blog where I blog openly about our process. I’m sure there will be some lessons learned along the way

Don’t underestimate the amount of work the community will need after the launch. I think we’ll need to be active in our own community to support and encourage the members.

Share This, thank you.