This is the final combined steps four and five in my five step recommendation on what a travel supplier should do to build a social media strategy.

Critical to the first four steps in this recommendation is that launching a social strategy does not mean opening up a Twitter account or Facebook page and typing away.

Instead, I recommend holding off on signing up with social media sites until a series of preparatory steps are undertaken. They are

• Part One: Decide who you want to talk to and what you want to say
• Part Two: Start monitoring social media
• Part Three: Collect data – all of it

Part Four: Craft product and content plans

Using the data collected, plans made and early monitoring, suppliers can now start to craft the product and content plans that will make up the social media plan strategy.

There are two parts to this step – developing product offerings and developing content plans. In the product area it is time to craft targeted deals and offers specific to social media distribution platforms and demand patterns.

Taking first steps at micro-targeting. Using the data collected and information provided from distribution partner and own sales channels to engage in targeted product development.

That is, the development of offers and product specifically designed to target the customers identified in part one and tracking and investigated in part two and three.

The offers/products developed should not be exclusively targeted at pre-sales activities or driving immediate transaction response.

As we discussed in part one, there are many different ways that consumers can be targeted without having to require an immediate transactional response.

Social media content and offers during and post consumption could be just as (if not even more) valuable than transactionally focused product.

This is where the communications development is as important as product development. Using the information collected in the first three steps to plan a whole of company customer conversation plan based on the developed social media goals.

Content creation is just as important as offer creation. The people/department responsible for your social content creation should be looking into both areas of content creation – proactively creating content on your own site and social media platform pages and in responding to user generated content across the web.

[NB: For more on content and UGC see Three rules for a UGC start-up]

It will take time and devoted effort to craft these product and content plans. It cannot be rushed.

Talking, writing, posting, updating and tweeting before you have crafted targeted offers and messages increase the risk of your conversation falling flat and lacking response.

Especially if you try to simply take offline and static web brand approaches and translate them into social posts.  In all likelihood you will find that each social channel requires a different target approach and therefore different content response.  This is a good approach.

With products prepared and content ready to go… it is time for the final stage.

And, the bonus one, Part Five: Start saying it and stick to it

Now you can open the accounts, sign up and start being social.  The critical part of this step is to be engaged for the long haul.

Do not dip into and out of social media. Make a long term commitment to creating content and products targeted to this channel.

Launching a content or product plan and then pulling out if response is low or the time commitment too hard is the wrong response.

If the plans are not working, stay committed but go back to step one and come at the strategy from a different angle.

A social media audience can take time to build and may require different angles that first planned.  Trying once then pulling out will take you out of the conversation – leaving it to others to drive the conversation around your brand.

In parts one and two we discussed deciding who you want to talk to and what you want to say and monitoring mentions of your brand in social media.

But even with these steps completed it is still not time to log on and starting tweeting, updating and commentating.

Next you need to know more about your product and which segments it is attractive to.

Part Three: Start collecting data. All of it. Every single piece you can

To communicate effectively with customers you need to know that they like to do and what they want.

Social media opens up the chance to talk to every customer as an individual. Futhermore it also gives you the chance to talk to different versions of each individual (my EveryYou concept).

I was asked at a recent AsiaPac Aviation Conference to name a successful global social media campaign.

Someone quickly responded with the Queensland Best Job in the World campaign. I proposed that that the long term impact from social media campaigns are not around trying to replicate the massive effort involved in a Best Job-esque campaign.

Instead, it is the ability to develop one on one communications at scale. To develop micro-targeted deals and communications, but at a level that can be rolled out to a large number of people.

In other words: many deals to many people (a one-to-one approach) rather than one-campaign-to-many-people.

For a travel supplier to build a campaign around micro-targeting at scale requires having data. Lots of data. Data about everything that a consumer does in relation to a booking.

Where they click, upstream and downstream links, demographic details, email preference etc. I am talking about more than Ominture and Webtrends.

This is also about collecting data directly from customers’ pre, during and post consumption of a product.  Data that can be used in targeting offers, deals and content.

Some examples:

• Hotel: Recording the checkin and pre-purchase habits of people that order room service or ask for restaurant advice. For example how many people who check in after 8pm at night order room service or ask for a restaurant. Collect data to find out how many as this will open up social media recommendation options.
• Airline: Complaints at check-in by time of day and customer characteristics (solo, family, business). Use this to try to find patterns of how external factors (time of day and nature of passenger) can lead to increases or decreases in complaints.  Use that as a basis for determine communications and ideas to reduce check in complaints.
• Car Hire: where you have GPS units in cars, anonymously track the routes that people take.  Use that to publish a “top routes” list or “favourite drives” list to customers and build up a touring network and conversation.  Use staff profiling of customers (family, work, adventure) to build sub-categories of tours.

Arming yourself with data like this will be critical in finding the right targeting of the right message and therefore essential to a social media strategy.

Suppliers should go so far as to create an incentive structure around data collection. Staff should be rewarded for the amount of valuable customer information they collect.

It goes without saying that you will need to invest in the infrastructure to collect, sort and manage this data (and there will be a lot of data).

So now you have the target audience and what you want to say.  You have started to monitor and are collecting all the data you can.

Next we will combine part four and five into a single recommendation  - crafting product and content plans, and actually doing it.

• Part One: Decide who you want to talk to and what you want to say
• Part Two: Start monitoring social media
• Part Three: Collect data – all of it
• Part Four: Craft product and content plans

In part one I discussed strategy, deciding who you want to talk to and what you want to say. How looking to the messaging and audience is a must do before opening up social media accounts and submitting content.

In part two, I am still recommending that social media accounts are left unopened.

There is still more work to be done before a travel supplier should be creating socially distributed content.

Part Two: Start monitoring social media, make it a customer service and marketing priority

As I discussed here, consumers are turning more and more to social media sites to help them get more information on brands.

So it is important to set up the infrastructure (readers or monitoring tools) that scrape social media and review sites and serve up mentions of your brand, competitors and (if relevant) location to customer care and marketing teams.

Use this in the first instance to listen to what people are saying about you, your brand and competitive landscape.

Then settle and agree on the response you will take to various mentions.

For example:

• Agree the format for Twitter responses when customers make queries and complaints.
• Appoint some one in customer care to respond each day to negative (and positive) reviews on TripAdvisor.
• Find the forum(s) where customers are talking about your area or product or experience and monitor what is being said about the brand (eg Flyertalk or frequentflyer.com.au).
• Publish an internal social media policy that encourages your staff to be watching,  consuming and participating in social media.  But make it clear when they can and when they can’t speak for the company in a response.

In summary. build up a list of tools and set up an agreed and actionable plan for monitoring and responding to social conversations about your brand.

This will initiate your involvement in discussions initiated by consumers and prepare the ground for (hopefully) exerting some influence over that conversation.

Important points to remember:

• Influence is achievable but control is not.
• Be clear in your understanding and expectations.
• You will not be able to exert control over social media as it is word of mouth at the speed of light.

Combining parts one and two is the first step in setting a social media plan and help you find your voice, primarily by deciding which of your customers want to talk to and what you want to say.

The next rung on the ladder is to start monitoring all of the mentions of your brand in social media so that you can learn what is being said already by which segment of your customer base.

• Part One: Decide who you want to talk to and what you want to say
• Part Two: Start monitoring social media
• Part Three: Collect data – all of it
• Part Four: Craft product and content plans

I am often approached by suppliers (mainly hotels) telling me that they have opened a twitter account, started a blog or set up a Facebook fan page but nothing is happening.

“What should I do?” they say. “I joined all the social networks but there is nothing there!”

From these discussions I have developed five steps for a supplier on how to plan, set up and execute a social media strategy.

I have previously covered trend driving social media adoption, but in this post I want to provide more detailed advice on implementing a social media strategy.

[By social media I mean online/interactive user generated content sites where there is no substantive restriction on who can create, share or contribute to content. Includes social media sites, forums, blogs and even comment sections in mainstream media]

Part One: Decide who it is you want to talk to and what you want to say

The assumed first step is to jump straight in, sign up for each and every social network and wait for the customers to come pouring in. This is a bad move.

The correct first step is to do the opposite, to stay clear of any proactive social media interaction until such time as you have decided who you want to talk to and what it is you want to say.

Jumping straight in without this ground work could result in one of these outcomes:

1. Nothing happening and no one cares – you sit there with no followers or friends and no means for building a following.
2. Too much happens and angry customers take over. There is a danger that a poorly monitored or executed social media strategy can leave open a chance for disgruntled consumers to become the dominant content providers. Most extreme example of this is the take over of the Nestlé’s Facebook page by Greenpeace in protest of Nestlé’s use of palm oil from endangered forest areas.

There are number of different angles that can be taken in deciding what to say and who to talk to. The angle chosen needs to be based on the brand identity and vision of the supplier.

Who you want to talk to:

• In deciding who you want to talk to, there are different classes of customers – existing customers, new customers, loyal customers, suppliers and more.  Decide which of these groups you want to talk to is critical before executing a strategy.

What you want to say:

• Similarly there are options in deciding what it is you want to say.  Do you want to push a message around your price, service, location, facilities or expertise?  Are you trying to communicate to people during their consumption of the service, before or afterwards?

It is possible but very very hard to cover all of these in one social media plan. The best approach is to pick the combination of these options that best suit your product. Here are some (hypothetical) examples of different angles that different suppliers could take:

1. A Budget Hotel: deciding on an approach of targeting new customers on rate and cleanliness.  Therefore will look to talk to customers about the deal value and the certainty of the product;
2. Adventure tour company: targeting their social media activity at existing customers that have already bought. Helping those customers prepare so that they get the most out of the experience and soliciting feedback and testimonials to help attract new customers;
3. A hotel near an event location: targeting loyal customers with information and discussion about events at a location and their knowledge of the location rather than the hotel itself;
4. An airline with a large leisure network: targeting new customers with general holiday information for their home market.  Driving discussion around generic holiday options rather than their on board product; or
5. A winter cruise tour company: identifying that consumer information about the destination is the most critical element rather than the specifics of the product. Building up a body of content about a location first rather than the product.

Social media distribution and usage is vastly different to traditional web retail and marketing.

To simply take a deal distribution approach or a join and hope approach will be a certain path to an unsuccessful strategy.

Before you do anything in social media take time to decide the customers you are targeting and what you want to say.

• Part One: Decide who you want to talk to and what you want to say
• Part Two: Start monitoring social media
• Part Three: Collect data – all of it
• Part Four: Craft product and content plans

It is natural for entrepreneurs new to the travel industry to focus on solving consumer problems or pain points.

Solving problems is what entrepreneurs are guided to do and consumer-facing issues are easy to spot and often look ripe for addressing.

Hence we end up with a glut of inspiration websites, social media services or product review aggregators.

Whilst there is certainly an opportunity in these sectors (for the ultimate few who capture sufficient traction to become category winners) it is becoming an increasingly obvious that sites such as inspiration websites are really focussed on web traffic arbitrage between Google and travel product suppliers and are not really winning the battle to become the place to start trip planning research.

That is not a plan for long term success.

Instead, I propose three problems that are crying out for help.

Idea #1 – the easy one suitable for bootstrappers: Tour operator/travel agent discovery

I work with specialist tour operators through our reservation system TourCMS as well as via the SmallFishBigOcean forums.

These tour operators tend to have great products not available via any distribution channel and their marketing can be limited to spending a few dollars on Google and other direct approaches.

Historically they have never worked with travel agents but now they are beginning to think about agent distribution or perhaps dipping their toes in affiliate marketing.

However, they struggle to find agents/affiliates interested or sufficiently knowledgeable in what they are promoting.

In just the last couple of weeks I have been asked who might promote a one month residential yoga teacher training course in India, tours of Ethiopia, mainstream tours of South Africa or walking holidays on the Isle of Wight (UK).

The problem exists in reverse. Conventional agents want to find tour operators/activity providers who have commissionable products that are credible, provide date, price and availability information in a nicely consumable format and who might be worth promoting to their consumers in their geographic vicinity.

Their current method to find new suppliers is exhibitions such as London’s World Travel Market, ITB in Berlin, etc.

There is no web based solution for this right now.

Solution: A central website much like a dating website.

Idea #2 – for a company with a bit of money behind them: Tour operator commission/balance payments system

IATA runs a Billing Settlement Plan (BSP) for airlines, which it describes as:

“A BSP is the central point through which data and funds flow between travel agents and airlines. Instead of every agent having an individual relationship with each airline, all of the information is consolidated through the BSP”

Now the industry could do with that for tours operators/activity companies and travel agents.

However it needs to not just handle balance payments but also affiliate commission (i.e. companies working on the media model). Note that affiliate commission flows in the opposite direction to travel agent balance payments.

There is no web-based (or non web-based for that matter) solution for this right now.

Idea #3 – a toughie, but with the right contacts and partnerships you could be onto a winner: Credit card risk data

Credit card companies are happy to be informed when you are travelling abroad in order to incorporate this information within their risk analysis profiles.

Then, when you are based in the US but suddenly start charging payments from Thailand, the card company may permit the payment.

There are all sorts of problems with card company traveller profiles. For example, some card companies can only hold one trip at a time, causing problems to travellers on a multi-country trip.

I am less confident about this idea than the first two (because I have never worked for a credit card company), however, I sense they would pay for a source of traveller data which helps them mitigate payment risk and understand whether to accept a particular payment or not.

Might be worth looking into if you have the right contacts OR it might be left for a TripCase/TripIt type company to work towards.

NB: Thats it! Do you have any more suggestions on problems that could be addressed by travel industry entrepreneurs?

Given that its customers are the young and restless, Contiki Asia communicates with them at every channel available on the web.

But when it comes to sales, it still relies on the human touch of the traditional travel agent.

Nicholas Lim, director of sales and marketing in Asia for the 18 to 35-focused tour operator, says: “Our customers are very fickle in where they are on the internet so we reach out to them at every point – YouTube, Facebook, Twitter. Then when they’re ready to buy, we direct them to the travel agent.”

“We are not built to be a travel agent – it’s a lot of work, airline booking, insurance, special services and requests. Travel agents are convenient and add value to us.”

In Asia, almost 100% of Contiki’s sales are fulfilled by travel agents. In the US the mix has changed, says Lim.

After September 11 2001, when a lot of travel agents in the US went out of business, the company went direct-to-consumer to sell its tours.

Currently around 80% of its sales are made directly through the web or call centres. Will the business model move this way too in Asia as mobile and broadband penetration increases in the region?

Lim says: “At some point in time, perhaps yes. In certain markets where we don’t get the travel agent support, we will embark on direct sales. In China, for example, we are poorly represented, but that’s a market we need to be in.”

For now, its three biggest markets in Asia are Singapore, Korea and Japan, and the most popular destination is Europe, its core product, even though Contiki Asia also offers Australia and Asia package holidays.

“We get a mix of customers – the first half of the year is mainly student traffic and the second half are professionals and honeymooners,” says Lim.

Globally, about 80% of its customers are single and 60% are females, although Lim says that in Asia, women form a bigger chunk of the market, with 70%.

Travellers from Asia are also getting more confident. They are no longer buying the see-all-of-Europe in one trip. Rather, they are buying shorter trips in more focused areas – Italy, Greece and Spain are popular spots, for example.

“People now want more time to do their own thing,” says Lim, noting that Greece is the current bestseller. “People are also more informed. They actually realise that to do Europe as a do-it-yourself costs more than doing it with us. What they tell us is, don’t include us in your activities, we will do our own thing.”

And while its young customers may be fickle in where they are on the web, they are surprisingly loyal.

“If they buy something they like, they will champion it. They will tell their friends. This is where social media works well for us – they put their videos on YouTube or they share it with their friends on Facebook.”

Thus far, the company hasn’t come across negative reviews of their Contiki Asia experiences. “Usually they complain about the hotel and the food and we give feedback to the hotel,” says Lim.

Lim is also eyeing other new markets in Asia, such as Vietnam, Philippines and Indonesia. Contiki handles around 120,000 passengers a year worldwide, of which Asia forms less than 10%, a figure Lim admits needs boosting.

But the key to Contiki Asia’s success remains the human touch – particularly that of its tour leaders. “It doesn’t matter how we sell or promote, if they don’t deliver, that whole trip has gone.

Out of 100 tour managers that we train, only five will make it. We invest Euro 1.2 million a year to train our 200 tour managers.

“The human touch is very important. In today’s society, we are over-communicating and sometimes, we need to switch off.”

Nevertheless, by 2011 and 2012, Contiki’s coaches in Australia and New Zealand will all be equipped with wifi.

European tour operator Thomas Cook has not let weak financial results hit its ambitions to launch an online travel agency to challenge the likes of Expedia and Priceline in Europe.

The operator warned investors today that full profits would be at the lower end of market expectations, due to “softer” trading conditions as the economy continues to bite and hit consumer spending.

But despite facing heavy costs (£81.9 million) as a result of the volcanic ash cloud saga in April this year and nervousness amongst holidaymakers, Thomas Cook is ploughing on with its widely plugged OTA.

The company says plans to launch the OTA are “well underway” and it expects the division to be “largely in place” for the start of the company’s next financial year, beginning October 2010.

Despite the launch date being just three months away, Thomas Cook has still given away very little information as to its strategy behind the plan, except to confirm the presence of a number of key officials, decision to use Travelport as its GDS, and a desire to possibly acquire another company to give it a leg up.

Thomas Cook’s decision to continue with the OTA strategy makes sense given other figures quoted in its interim management statement released today.

The operator says bookings of mainstream and independent products over the web have increased by 11% year-on-year.

An official says operational details about the OTA will be made available “in the future”.

TLabs Showcase focus on startups featuring US-based day trip planning and content site DayZipping.

Who and what are you (including personnel and backgrounds)?

DayZipping is a site that helps user find and share day trips. Our core team consists of the following four individuals:

• Webb Brown, CEO, background in software development and investment banking. Most recently worked for a SunTrust Robinson Humphrey investment banking coverage group.
• Paul Godfrey, CTO, over 12 years of web development experience. Previously a senior web designer for a leading foodservice provider.
• Emily Brown , CMO, approximately ten years in the advertising industry. Previously represented Martha Stewart and National Geographic.
• Dan Cho, social media consultant, five years of experience in the digital advertising industry

What financial support did you have to launch the business?

Our business was initially seeded by our founding partners. However, we quickly acquired capital commitments from a group of angel investors to support our growth.

What problem are you trying to solve?

We are trying to help people that have a short period of time in a city that they are unfamiliar with.

Currently, people are likely to call or email friends that know the area.

Our experience has been that this leads to forgotten details, inaccurate directions, and valuable information that is quickly lost. DayZipping attempts to solve all three of these problems.

Describe the business, core products and services?

By using Google Maps technology, our site allows users to geographically search for daytrips.

The social aspect of our site lets users see which activities in the area their friends recommend.

Who are your key customers and users at launch?

At launch, we had approximately 400 test users. These users are located across the United States with approximately 75% between the ages of 25-34.

We were in discussions with the North Carolina Department of Tourism along with numerous regional companies to provide services to our users.

Did you have customers validate your idea before investors?

Yes, we had 30 users in our initial focus group. These users ranged in aged from 24 to 60 years old and were spread across the eastern United States.

What is the business AND revenue model, strategy for profitability?

Our revenue modal is to provide local discounts and promotions.

Additionally, our discussions so far have shown us that departments of tourism and commerce are interested in sponsoring the site.

Our business model is to remain agile by building our services around an active community of users that provide the majority of our content.

We have been able to appeal to these users by providing lesser known travel ideas and the prospect of future discounts.

SWOT analysis – strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats?

Strengths:

• Agile, versatile skillset, experienced core team.

Weaknesses:

• Limited resources.

Opportunities:

• Many adventure travellers looking for a universal option for planning short trips.

Threats:

• Other geotagging sites focusing more and more on trips.

Who advised you your idea isn’t going to be successful and why didn’t you listen to them?

Several initial users believed that other travel sites could provide a lot of the information that we were hoping to communicate.

Even if this was the case, we believe that by focusing specifically on day trips without providing excessive travel services brings value to our user.

Also, we feel that our Ajax development makes a much more fluid user experience compared to other sites in the industry.

What is your success metric 12 months from now?

Our success metric is unique monthly visits. By focusing on creating a valuable and entertaining user experience, we hope our user traffic will continue to see rapid growth.

TLabs Showcase is part of the wider TLabs project from Tnooz.

So that was the end of that – just two and a half months after supposedly being acquired by Google the trip planning and tour operating service Ruba is no longer.

The site has a short message thanking members, readers and tour operator partners for their enthusiasm and business before the acquisition was made.

This was the site before today:

At the time of the announcement there was confusion as to whether the business had been bought or just the people behind it, in particular co-founders Mike Cassidy and Arnaud Weber, the former a CEO of three startups Xfire, Direct Hit, and Stylus Innovation, and Weber working as technical lead on Google Chrome.

Google and Cassidy never disclosed exactly what they would be doing once sitting at their new desks in Mountain View, California.

The last noteworthy piece of news to come out of the Ruba camp was in June when it urged members to join travel guide siteEverytrail, effectively giving those who had spent time uploading pics and contributing content a new home… if they wanted one.

But still one of the interesting points to emerge from the Ruba saga concerned the fate of those fronting it and the technology behind it.

The guide content and user experience featured on the site was not too dissimilar to the reams of other travel sites on the web, so probably not of concern to Google.

But the site’s clever way of building a metasearch tool for activity and small tour operator products was extremely interesting and, by all accounts, well respected.

Now given that the industry now understands a little bit more about Google’s aspirations for the travel (spending $700 million on buying ITA Software indicates a pretty strong desire to take the sector seriously), snapping up the brains, and probably their technology, behind a metasearch system for tour operators could be seen in a new light.

TLabs Showcase focus on startups featuring Australia and Europe-based TourRadar.

Who and what are you (including personnel and backgrounds)?

Shawn and Travis Pittman (brothers) co-founded the online travel site Bugbitten.com back in 2003. TourRadar was spun-out of Bugbitten in June 2010.

• Shawn, 38, is based in Sydney, Australia. His background is in finance industry, who was employed as an Investment Analyst from 2001 to 2006 for LMS Capital, a boutique Venture Capital company (circa £200m) based in London with investments in the UK, Europe and USA. His role saw him travel frequently to New York, Boston, Cleveland, San Francisco, Moscow and Edinburgh to meet with the Funds to discuss and analyse their portfolio of investments.
• Travis, 31, is based in Europe. He is an engineer with a varied background of public and private sector experience in both Australia and Europe.  Travis’s last position in London was as the Project Controls Manager for Atkins Rail who was responsible for the Comms installation of the £30b London Underground Station Refurbishment programme.

Since 2004 the team behind Bugbitten has been researching and developing the tour search technology which now is at the heart of TourRadar.com.

What financial support did you have to launch the business?

Both bugbitten and TourRadar have been bootstrapped by the Founders.

What problem are you trying to solve?

Our goal is to make every tour in the world discoverable by bringing the key players in the Tour Industry closer together. The only way that can be done is by creating a single platform that provides integrated solutions for each segment, which respects their individual business models.

We’ve seen in past few years websites come and go who have focused on developing solutions for the tour industry that always revolve around the booking engine/commission model.

Bookings are obviously the end result operators want… however it’s an old model which isn’t suitable to creating an online solution that benefits ALL the key players in the tour industry (plus many operators have invested heavily in their own booking technologies and don’t like being dictated to by these sites).

Describe the business, core products and services?

TourRadar provides individual solutions for the four key players in the tour industry.

• Tour Operators can add their individual tour listings into one platform (TourRadar.com) and then choose (via a click of a button with our Self-Service model) which Publishers in our advertising network they would like to ‘turn-on’ their tours with and pay for direct leads to their website on a simple Pay-Per-Click (PPC) basis.
• Publishers can add a free ‘Tour Search’ plugin to their website as an additional feature for their site visitors and generate ancillary revenue on a PPC basis from this (as our experience has shown that CPA-based Affiliate programs are worth very little to Publishers).
• Travel Agents can create a private login to TourRadar where they are able to easily search for tours suiting their customer’s criteria (instead of aimlessly flicking through brochures or just getting high level results from the major search engines, without being able to filter by Price, Trip Length, etc).  Agents even have the ability to select their preferred suppliers and search only from their tours if they want to.
• DMOs (Destination Marketing Organisations), like Publishers can add a free ‘Tour Search’ plugin to their website.  We do not charge DMOs or their members (who’s tours that are included in the DMO’s plugin) for any clicks generated from the plugin.

Who are your key customers and users at launch?

Tour Operators and Publishers. The more Tour Operators who add their tours to the TourRadar platform, the more choice a visitor to Publisher’s websites will have when looking for a tour to their next travel destination. The more Publishers we get on board, the more choice the operators will have on the audiences they can reach to market their tours around the world.

Did you have customers validate your idea before investors?

Yes. We have been working with some of the world’s best and largest operators (Contiki, Intrepid, Topdeck, etc) for years as we developed our tour search technology (listening to feedback along the way).

We’ve also partnered with some of the best traditional Print Publishers (TNT Magazine, Student Traveler Magazine) who have given us invaluable incite into the needs/wants of Publishers who operate both offline and online.

Other publishers we’ve been working with include large-scale travel communities like tripwolf.com and Tourism Organisations like TTNQ in Australia. All this experience and feedback has been used to create TourRadar.

Like everything – we know our solution is not yet the perfect solution for everyone… however by listening to the feedback from all the players who use our technology, we’re pretty confident we’ll get there soon enough!

We are now at the point where we are starting to look for investors, as we are no longer a technology start-up seeking seed capital to build the platform; we are now looking to raise capital to recruit a sales team, marketing/PR team and expand our development team.

What is the business AND revenue model, strategy for profitability?

TourRadar employs a PPC model for charging/paying operators/publishers. For agents, after a free 30 day trial, they pay on a Software-as-a-Service monthly subscription basis costing them less than a cup of coffee per week per user account.

TourRadar is a complete self-service model and is hosted in the cloud, so our running/operational costs are much lower in comparison to others.

SWOT analysis – strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats?

Strengths:

• We have long-standing, paying operators who are seeing success from our platform.  We have publishers who are generating ancillary revenue from their website traffic.

Weaknesses:

• Not having the funding to expand at the rate we need to, to stay ahead of our competitors.

Opportunities:

• With the aggregation of nearly all travel products (flights, hotels, car hire) – Tours still remain one of the only sectors where there still is no clear market leader. TourRadar has a fantastic opportunity to be this market leader.

Threats:

• Google’s foray into the online travel sector (recent acquisitions of ITA Software and Ruba) is still an unknown factor, as to what they are actually planning to do with these technologies.

Who advised you your idea isn’t going to be successful and why didn’t you listen to them?

Like every startup – we’ve had our fair share of criticism and people thinking we were crazy to be doing what we’re doing.

Because we started out developing Bugbitten in 2003 which was a community where travellers could share their blogs, photos in an online travel journal, it has been quite difficult to get to where we are today – launching what has been our ultimate goal all along, a platform that brings together all players of the tour Industry, where it’s a win-win for everyone.

We knew we had developed the technology to serve an entire industry, however Bugbitten was always viewed as a publisher site aimed only at the 18-35 year old market, hence the need to create TourRadar.

The feedback from friends, operators and publishers since the launch of TourRadar has certainly validated our reasons for going to the effort of developing an entire new brand and platform.

What is your success metric 12 months from now?

• For tour operators to recognise TourRadar as one of the must-have channels in their online marketing strategy.
• For publishers of websites (both small and large) to add our free plugin to their site to start generating more ancillary revenue from their visitors.
• For travel agents to think “How did I ever find a suitable tour for my customers before TourRadar?”
• For DMOs to install our free plugin to help promote their member’s tours without the hassle of building (expensive) stand-alone solutions.

TLabs Showcase is part of the wider TLabs project from Tnooz.