The virtual age is here – change of the travel marketing during two decades
In the past two decades, we started to live in age of internet and our lives moved into the virtual reality more and more. Is it a good thing or no? The virtual world is now everywhere and got a big influence on daily life in good and also i bad way. And what about impact on marketing? Is everything on the social networks, like every commercial, just for the filling the space? No, so look at it now in this blog post.
Before the internet it was really hard for companies to sell the travel product, they got just the catalogues in the office. After that came the change with the virtual world – 1990s. They could put their commercials and travel product on place, where everybody could look at it, doesn’t matter from which part of the world. This was a big challenge an also opportunity in travel marketing. In 2000 travel companies started to provide the booking services, interactive tours and much more. Now costumers could go on their dreamed holiday just trough the virtual world and see, if this destinations is the right one. Also in that time was established the most famous portal for travelers – Tripadvisor. This portal started to give the advices for independent travelers – where is worthy to go, which hotel to pick and more. Now we could find the Tripadvisor also on another social platform – instagram. In this time the Tripadvisor got 50 milions inquiries monthly from the internet users.
Also another big chance for the travel marketing were the big searching internet engines such a Google or Kayak. Nothing is more easy then to just type the name of destinations and push the button for searching, in a second you will got so many opportnities to go on your next holiday. Also you can book your hotel trough many internet websites, for example Booking.com .
One of the „new“ things is still the Instagram platform or Snapchat, both of the named apps for smartphones got a huge impact on travelling. Instagram was established in 2010 by App store, in 2012 was also able for Google play. Instagram is the easy way, how to put photos on social networks sites in second even with filters. The hashtags, that are offer using are the smart marketing commercial for travelling – destinations, hotels, atractions – „free of charge commercial“. Also the snapchat is more and more popular, but is not that easy to measure the impact in marketing, they are not hashtags and pictures are delated after sending.
The internet got a huge positive impact on travel marketing. We don’t know, where the social networks will improve in few years. One thing is sure, we are starting to be a virtual society and in the future we will see if in good or bad way.
Reaction on article: Tourism marketing from 1990-2010 (Two decades and new paradigm), Daniel R. Fesenmaier and Zheng Xiang