August 2009 Archives

Update: Cambuslangtravel.com now has a bare-bones announcement and a link to ABTA. But the criticisms below still stand... (2pm, August 27)

Cambuslang Travel, which isn't that well known nationally but is a sizeable Scottish agency, has gone down, leaving hundreds of potential lost bookings.

"Fear grips East Kilbride holidaymakers," says a local paper. Let's hope none of those worried holidaymakers tried going to Cambuslang Travel's website for clarification or reassurance, because they would have got this:

Bobcat.

Refresh the site and you'll get another word on roughly the same theme - cue two minutes of chatter as colleagues piped up with "I've got 'jackal'", "I've got 'elf'" and so on. What fun.

Or rather, what an insult to customers caught in the company's wake.

Chloe Berman, who covered the story for us, wrote that

Frustrated holidaymakers have been phoning the company and visiting the two retail shops in Cambuslang and East Kilbride with no success

...so things are no better outside the digital realm. So much for the new age of communication. I've said it before, but it's about the people, not the tools.

If you're affected, your best bet is to contact ABTA, or speak to your credit card provider about recovering your money.

In the profile-based social networking world, things are pretty clear - at least once you're old enough to put MySpace and Bebo out of the picture: it's LinkedIn for business, Facebook for pleasure.

Not so the status-driven world, in which Twitter controls the horizontal and the vertical.

I'll just post these real-life scenarios and leave it hanging...

Scenario 1

You've heard about problems at an airport. You're going to tweet about it anyway, but it could also affect your clients.

Whether or not you think of yourself as a 'brand', the benefits of them hearing about this through you rather than, say, the BBC are obvious.

In this scenario, you want clients following you - they get an extra bit of service at little or no cost to you.

Scenario 2

As everyone does from time to time, you need to blow off some steam. You want to do it within earshot of people who are likely to sympathise.

You're smart enough not to name clients, but you still don't want people to see you moaning about your bookings.

In this scenario, you definitely don't want clients following you.

Third-party clients like Tweetdeck, Hootsuite and Thwirl will help you manage multiple accounts.

Despite widespread adoption of the latter, the Travel Weekly style guide currently says 'Ayers Rock, not Uluru'.

Both are officially recognised, but the name Uluru was there first - the Ayers of Ayers Rock is Henry Ayers, a 19th century senior official in South Australia.

According to our sub-editors, we chose to favour 'Ayers Rock' based on an assumption about search volume. I don't remember whether or not I was involved in that decision - but it's reasonable to assume I was.

When our deputy features editor Joanna Booth raised it the other day, I went to Google's keyword tool to assess whether the two terms' respective search volumes are different enough to sway us one way or t'other.

Verdict? Not really. Global search volume is the same; in the UK the difference is 22k to 18k.

So we'll officially use Uluru, but include Ayers Rock in metadata, and sometimes use 'formerly known as Ayers Rock' in articles.

If you think this all sounds rather mercenary, I sympathise. It reminds me of being in SEO training with someone from Farmers' Weekly, who raised the Bird Flu (most popular) vs Avian Flu (correct) question.

Bird Flu might not be strictly right, said the trainer, but it would bring in traffic.

"How about Britney Spears Flu?" came a rather irritable voice from the back.

The influence of search engines sometimes forces writers to find a balance between being right and being found, and it can be an uncomfortable position.

No comment. We never did find out what it sold - it's in the Bryggen district of Bergen if anyone wants to go and check.

(There are some destination-focused posts from my trip to Norway on our Postcards blog.)

The Ullensvang Hotel in Lofthus, where we stayed last night, has seen a steep drop in British visitors recently. We used to be mixed in with Danish, Swedish, German and Japanese guests, but now we're barely represented at all.

Why? It's nothing to do with the hotel, which is perfectly good, with fine views out to Sor Fjord and a solid Grieg connection  - the composer was a friend of the founders, and his name is to be found in an old guestbook (in the middle of the pic).

Managing director Barbara Zanoni Utne tells us it's largely down to the closure of the Newcastle-Bergen ferry route. DFDS shut it down in September 2008, and operators who used it to get clients to Ullensvang pulled out.

At the same time, the independent travellers dried up, because they could no longer bring their cars over.

Perhaps this is an unfortunate metaphor, but in many places tourism operates in a delicate ecosystem..

Update: After leaving Ullensvang, we heard the same story all over Hardangerfjord, from hoteliers, museum guides, even staff on the hugely popular Flam-Myrdal railway.

They all, quite unprompted, pointed to the loss of Newcastle-Bergen.

It won't do to get too misty eyed - operators can't be expected to offer routes and destinations that are not bringing returns - but this is a magnificent part of the world, and is intimately related to British history. It would be a shame if the decline in British visitors became permanent.

More from my trip to Norway on Postcards...

...and you can follow me on our Postcards destination blog until Sunday ('ternet connections permitting).

First post, on a tour and meal at the viking history centre at Avaldesnes, up now.

Here's a wax viking to whet your appetite.

Eighteen months on, I still remember reading this article about (literary) character in the Guardian's print edition - not just because I like books, but because it uses a great and transferable phrase of Ford Maddox Ford's: 'to get [a character] in'.

In other words: to show at a stroke who a character is and how he or she operates.

Ford and his friend Joseph Conrad loved a sentence from a Guy de Maupassant story: "He was a gentleman with red whiskers who always went first through a doorway."

Ford comments: "that gentleman is so sufficiently got in that you need no more of him to understand how he will act. He ... can get to work at once."

The phrase came back to me while profiling travel inspiration site Joobili (and on Twitter) for Travolution, because it strikes me that it achieves something comparable.

I'm willing to bet you understood what was going on before you even touched the slider; when the events beneath it shuffle in response to new date parameters, you can't fail to get the point.

The site's designers have 'got it in', and it can 'get to work right away'.

Interestingly, this neat focal point didn't emerge, let alone come centre stage, until the site was in beta - and it was part of a honing process that saw certain features stripped back to allow the site's central premise room to breathe.

NB - Alex Bainbridge tells me on Twitter that there's a technical term for this: affordance.

NB: Don't look for the Travo profile yet - coming in the September issue.

A press release arrives from the folks at Rooster PR, who handle a number of travel clients, including Las Vegas and Premier Holidays.

Gap Adventures has appointed Rooster PR to ensure it becomes a household name in the UK ... Rooster will also correct the misconception that the adventure company is a 'gap' year specialist.

I say, I wonder what gave people that impression?

(The name actually stands for Great Adventure People, accuracy fans.)

I sat down for dinner with some independent travel agents last night, which doesn't happen often enough.

One had been in the trade for a long time - we're talking decades - and told me this story about fams:

I went on one to [CONFIDENTIAL!] and really didn't like it. I said as much to my clients, but one couple booked it anyway. When they came back they said they wished they'd listened to me.

Did they return to book with her again? "Oh yes," she said, almost as if this was a rather silly question.

And it was, of course, because honesty inspires people to trust your judgment.

So to anyone who thinks agents go on fams for a jolly, then just come home and sell the product blindly: there's a counterexample for you.

(The occasion was a Premier Holidays / Hong Kong Tourism Board event celebrating Hong Kong Food and Wine Year - see my travelhub image gallery for some vids of a dim sum cookery lesson and pics of agents having a go.)

The Daily Mirror's front page has British tourists in bullish mood after three bombs went off in Palma de Majorca yesterday:

It's good news for our readers, but an odd front page story for a national paper, given that (as I write) there haven't even been injuries reported.

So, silly season desperation? Or a testament to how much Majorca matters to British holidaymakers?

The FCO hasn't changed its overall level of travel advice, which figures - its advice for Spain has been taking Eta into account for years. So have holidaymakers.

A new report, to be released Tuesday by Forrester Research, found that far from embracing the do-it-yourself era, many consumers were fed up with the complicated process of planning and booking travel

1. These complaints are about complexity, not about online booking per se. The will to book online is there. Used to be that security fears were the big stumbling block, which meant the will wasn't even there. (Though never assume that those days could not return.)
   
   
2. Frustration from what? Slow loading? Poorly-worded instructions? Bad design? They can be fixed, but...
   
   
3. ...does the economic situation mean they won't be? It costs money. Estimates of what all this costs in lost bookings would be interesting.
   
   
4. ...even if they are fixed, is there a bedrock of complexity beyond which we can't go? If so, how close to it have we come?
   
   
5. Seriously though, how good was the study sample at data entry?
   
   
6. Okay, scratch that last one.