Our experience with translating and transforming travel and tourism brands online dates back to 1995, and we’re fortunate to have clients that have been with us from the beginning. We got our start by launching northern Nevada’s first casino hotel web site and have persistently focused on bringing the latest digital marketing strategies to our clients and the industry. With over one hundred industry recognitions and awards for our work behind us, we’re excited to take our extensive experience and capabilities even further.

It’s been both typical –and traditional– for marketing firms to hang their hat on what they attempt to position as a “unique” or “proprietary” approach. We don’t consider ourselves to be typical or traditional. Our approach is quite simply embedded in our name: One to One.

At a time when information has been decentralized and knowledge democratized, strategy development is no longer a mysterious process but an ongoing transparent conversation. The ability to execute on strategy, however, is the challenge of today’s travel and tourism marketer. In this world where there is no longer a majority and no single dominating channel, media or method, it’s your purpose that counts more than your approach. Designing dialogues, catalyzing relationships, igniting performance and amplifying engagement are what drives our purpose.

Economy aside, today’s travel and tourism brands face ever-increasing challenges to reach, develop and maintain customers. Concurrently, marketing expenditures continue to shift from the traditional media mix to data-driven online performance marketing strategies. Amidst these conditions, some travel and tourism brands are prospering.

Is there a common thread among these prospering brands? Well executed online digital strategy.

No one should be bold enough to promote a winning formula, however, our fifteen years of experience in translating and transforming travel brands online has left us with certain, albeit more obvious, strategies are concomitant to travel brands that are succeeding:

• Thoughtful re-engineering of brand promise for social engagement that is deeply rooted in user experience  and social psychology while being vetted with quantitative research
• Multivariate persona identification and development
• Social CRM, or sCRM
• Treating online presence as participation within an ecosystem
• Integration of multi-channel messaging strategies across all
• Loyalty programs that rely heavily on business process automation and that are supported by data-driven performance analytics that encompass lifecycles, not just campaigns.
• A persistent loyalty reach, some travel brands are finding their remarkableness online.
• Finally, a marketing organization culture that incentives and rewards speed, improvisation and where the brand is at stake, individual social empowerment

Social media can’t exist on it’s own. A comprehensive approach is the only way to become relevant in the social space. It’s about transforming your brand to truly be remarkable. The more your brand is remarkable, the more your brand will experience success and not just in the social space but across all channels.

Brands need to take an integrated, multivariate strategy that speaks to many different persona’s through many different channels:

• Rooted in marketing objectives
• Rooted in Multivariate Brand Persona
• Data driven campaign performance
• Congruent with all other areas of marketing

Authenticity + transparency
Without an explicit understanding of your brand and what your brand means in the eyes of those who consume it… any marketing strategy will fail. Mix in social media and it will fail even faster.

Save the Date

Rob Gaedtke and Mike Henderson will be presenting strategies and insights on this topic based on their experience with travel and tourism client work including Alpine Meadows Ski Resort.

Marketing and Measuring A Social Brand Strategy @ IAAPA 2009

• When: November 16, 2009
• Where: Las Vegas Convention Center – South Halls
• Register Now

Approach:
The objective was to create an easy-to-use desktop application which presents the agent with highly relevant alerts and messages concerning Royal Caribbean travel offers and packages. Keep users persistently engaged with up-to-date information in order to facilitate revenue-producing interactions with the following functionality:

•    Reducing emails and faxes to agents
•    Supporting both brands
•    Company news
•    Special offers and deals for agents’ clients
•    Travel itinerary updates (particularly important during hurricane season)
•    Weather alerts, which agents typically share with customers

An additional key feature of this application allows agents to remain authenticated within the application; giving them one-click access to cruisingpower.com site pages and utilities that previously required a separate login for each visit.

Results:
More than 7,000 travel agents have downloaded the desktop application in about a year. The product-launch contest gave those numbers a big boost – there were 1,000 downloads in two weeks.

Tracked metrics that show agents are responding well to the application and using the online tools:
•    More than 90% of agents who downloaded and opened the tool kept it for more than a day
•    46% of agents who downloaded the widget have used it for an aggregate of 120 minutes — a high number because much of the activity takes place after users click through to the CruisingPower website
•    Users who kept the widget for more than a week average 28 interactions per week
•    54% of users are accessing the Royal Caribbean offers page
•    36% of users are accessing the Celebrity Cruises offers page

A built-in user feedback survey provided valuable insight from the travel agents. The response was overwhelmingly positive, with comments such as:
•    Automatic updates so I don’t miss anything
•    Being current with the latest offers
•    Ease and it’s right in front of my face
•    Ease of use. Availability, timeliness of info.
•    Easy to navigate; everything in one place

37 of the Best Web Designs from the Travel Industry
Published August 10th, 2009 in Galleries

“Travel websites often feature large, attractive photos because of their emphasis on visual appeal. In this post we’ll look at 37 well-designed sites from the travel industry for your own design inspiration. Some are state or government tourism websites, and others are for hotels or business involved in the travel industry.”

Additional accolades include:

• “Best Web Interactive” from the California Travel & Tourism Commission (CTTC)
• “Judge’s Choice” awards from the California Travel & Tourism Commission (CTTC),
• “Travel Standard of Excellence” from the Web Marketing Association,
• “Best Tourism Website” nomination from the Webby Awards
• “Gold ADDY” from the American Advertising Federation.
• The website has also received acclaim in industry specific publications such as: Smashing Magazine where it was featured in the article, “35 Examples of Masterful Lighting Effects in Web Design.”

Vail Resorts was one of the very first travel organizations to explore branded desktop applications, widgets, toolbars and social media as a means to improving and deepening customer engagement and retention. Since 2002 Vail has continuously improved this campaign based on analysis of previous campaign metrics. The Vail Resorts SnowMate has served as an example to the travel industry, which has now embraced desktop applications, widgets and social media as an important customer relationship technique.

Download Application

Approach:
The Vail Resorts SnowMate started as a Windows branded desktop application (BDA) and ScreenMate, and has since been extended into a second ScreenMate, a Macintosh BDA, a microbar, a Macintosh desktop widget, an IE Toolbar and a Facebook application.

The Vail Resorts SnowMate suite of Web 2.0 relationship management widget applications employs a variety of content channels to keep users emotionally connected with the resorts, and offer channels to trigger purchasing behaviors. Content channels include:

•    Snow and weather conditions
•    News and events
•    Updating photo/video Galleries
•    Snowboard and skier ScreenMate
•    Animated snow condition alerts
•    Mountain-cam images
•    Screensavers, wallpapers, and animated ecards

The Facebook Snow Fight application has recently launched as part of the SnowMate suite. This viral application lets Facebook users have snowball fights with each other. When it is snowing on the mountains the user gets more snow to throw at their friends.

Results:
The Vail SnowMate has delivered consistent positive ROI year after year. The approximate direct ROI for the last three years (season 2005-2006 to the present) is approximately 18:1. This number represents SnowMate users clicking through to a Vail Resorts website and booking a visit. It is also likely that many other visitors booked their visits through the telephone or other channels after interacting with the SnowMate widget applications.

Beyond simple ROI measurement conversion metrics analysis reveals other interesting trends.

- 50% comes from simple logo clicks – either snow.com or the resorts
- 21% from the snow reports
- 16% from mountain cams
- 13% from articles and offers

This seems to demonstrate the value of general messaging as a sales generator. While specific offer articles do generate sales, a large percentage of sales-generating click throughs are coming from simple logo clicks, snow reports and webcams. It is interesting to note that the 18% of article and offer messages represent some 75 percent of the article and offers revenue, which probably makes sense given that some articles were far more offer-oriented than others.

Usage of the SnowMate also remains very high, with an average of 38 interactions per week with users who have kept the application for more than one day. 58 percent of users have kept the application for more than 30 days, and 52 percent of users have viewed the application for more than 30 minutes.

Last year, Homewood Mountain Resort came to One to One Interactive for a website redesign, which you may have read about here. Like many of our website design projects, we were tasked with organizing large amounts of information into a user-friendly format that satisfies both the client and their end user. A common practice we employ to accomplish this delicate balancing act are module tabs or user interface (UI) design patterns. Whenever possible, we strive to accompany these tabs with both text and graphics to improve the experience.

Smashing Magazine just recently published an article titled, Module Tabs in Web Design: Best Practices and Solutions. The article features Homewood Mountain Resort along with some other exceptional examples of module tabs being used to optimize web pages. Here is an excerpt from the article:

A module tab is a User Interface (UI) design pattern where content is separated into different panes, and each pane is viewable one at a time. The user requests content to be displayed by clicking (or in some instances hovering over) the content’s corresponding tab control.

Module tabs are seeing an increase of use as websites and web applications push for optimizing web page screen areas without sacrificing the amount of information presented at once. For example, in weblogs,  they are used in secondary content sections (such as the sidebar) to present relevant and interesting information such as a listing of blog posts which users can interact with to get to web pages quicker. This inevitably allows for an unobtrusive and compact manner of presenting content.

This article discusses the use of the module tabs design pattern for use in websites and web-based applications. We share with you some best practices to consider when using module tabs, a listing of real-world examples of websites the take advantage of module tabs, as well as tutorials and free downloadable scripts for building and deploying module tabs in your sites.

Give it a read.

Approach:
OTOlabs designed and developed branded desktop application (BDA) and widget which enabled Tahiti Tourism to have an extended relationship with their visitors. The Tahiti Communicator is an easy-to-use desktop application and widget which keeps the user connected to the Tahitian Islands. The Tahiti Communicator desktop application consists of several content channels for the user to experience and interact with including weather, media, offers, and calendar information. Key features of the application include desktop alerts, interfaces to web services, webcams, surveys, and targeting capabilities.

Desktop Application Features:
•    Local weather and conditions
•    Updating photos, video and audio
•    Calendar information with user-selected filtering
•    Special offers and messages
•    One-click loading wallpapers, screensavers
•    Send to a Friend:
•    Alerts for new relevant offers, messages, calendar events, and content
•    Integration with places-to-stay finding and booking interface
•    Built-in map helps the user browse through Tahiti attractions.
•    The user can access various webcams through the communicator.
•    Tahiti Tourism can push surveys to users of the application based on targeting mechanism.
•    Vacation countdown timer: The user can enter their vacation dates, and the application will provide a fun countdown time, with integrated relevant messages.

Widget Features:
•    A multi-platform widget was released to display local weather conditions, special offers and messages, vacation countdown timer, upcoming events, and the picture of the day

Results:
The Tahiti Tourism Communicator has been enthusiastically received with an audience of over 10,000 monthly users:
•    70 percent of PC desktop application down-loaders of the application have kept it for more than one day
•    87 percent of PC desktop application users have kept the application for more than one week
•    The application is interacted with 13 times a week, on average
•    90 percent of Mac dashboard installers have kept the widget for more than one day

Destination marketers benefit by maintaining an ongoing emotional connection with their visitors. By enabling visitors and potential visitors to put the Tahiti experience right on their desktop a persistent experience is enabled. This gives Tahiti Tourism an advantage over destinations relying on websites, to which visitors infrequently return.

Despite all that, we love it here! And while most of us thought Reno 911 was/is hilarious, it was hard not to feel the show gave Reno an unfair representation, especially with most of it being filmed in Los Angeles. Well, so what, right? Is there a marketing point to be made here?

When Thomas Lennon announced via Twitter that the show was going away our client, the Reno-Sparks Convention & Visitors Authority (RSCVA) came up with a smashingly good idea to create a website based on Saving Reno 911. There was no time to do much custom work or anything like that, but we banged it out in good measure and immediately people began letting their intentions be known – bring back the show!

This sort of grassroots, social media endeavor changed the conversation from “Oh no, don’t say that about our town.” – to – “Bring it on!”  and it landed the whole effort in an article in USA Today titled, “‘Reno 911!’: The city it mocks tries to save it.”

Maybe Reno 911 will actually film a show IN Reno after all?

Destinations Showcase Conference & Expos are the meeting industry’s largest forums exclusively bringing attending corporate, government, association, and independent meeting planners together with exhibiting destination marketing organizations (DMOs and CVBs) from the U.S. and beyond.

The details of David’s presentation are:

Meeting Expectations with Greater Integration & Multi-Channel Marketing Programs.

Sponsored by MPI
Never before have there been so many technology-based tools and strategies available to meeting planners. Never before has there been so much confusion and consternation on where, when, what, and how to use them. Compounding the challenge is the disparities between what “IT and Operations” leaders feel are appropriate, and what you need at your fingertips today.

In this session, David LaPlante, VP of Sales and Marketing of One To One Interactive will share with you stories and strategies of how to “sell technology” to your management and what strategies are having a meaningful and competitive impact today.

In this session, you’ll learn about:

• Comprehensive solutions for integrating and automating.
• What new technologies successful and leading meeting planners are relying on.
• How to sell the adoption of new technology to your management.
• Avoiding common pitfalls of implementing new technology.
• Proven strategies for building a better online collaboration.
• Leveraging latent and persistent online conversations to drive greater attendance and interaction.
• Deriving new revenue streams for your events with new technologies.

Once again, if you are planning on attending, please look for us and say hi or leave a comment below. We look forward to seeing you there!