It’s a brilliant Fall day here in Park City

In the course of exploring tourism blogs for our Publicity for Tourism offering (and coming across the excellent blog at Park City Mountain Resort, inspiring the title for this post), a few interesting perspectives came to light.

First of all, travel is extremely well represented in the blogosphere, with over 4M posts about “travel” (and 675,000 of these tagged as such), according to Technorati. This represents about 7,000-8,000 posts per day, making it a very popular tag indeed. By comparison, “comedy” attracts about 1M posts with travel mentioned, and only 36,000 tagged as “comedy”. So I’m going to suggest that bloggers like talking about travel – places they’ve been and things they’ve seen.

What is interesting is the *relative* lack of presence of the tourism operators. Jane and I have talked about our vision of blogging for tourism operators. What a great way to get inside the experience! Small tourism operators in particular have a lot to gain from bringing out the more specific aspects of their experience. A website for a destination struggles to get beyond a flat, 2 dimensional view (and that is if its doing well). Whereas a blog can layer posts over time to create multiple-perspectives around the experience, bring to life the personalities, the places and the unique characteristics. Have a look at our Tourism offering and let us know if you think we’re expressing this well enough.

Anyway, if there are so many bloggers talking about travel, couldn’t we assume they are interested in reading about travel experiences? Wouldn’t they read interesting content about a travel experience similar to one they have had … or one they would like to? And if they read about it, like it, read some more and really got a feel for it, wouldn’t they be more likely to actually go there? Obviously, I think they would, and I believe the blogging is going to be a great way for small operators to differentiate themselves, and cut directly through to find their clients.

But trying to find what I would consider a good example of a tourism blog wasn’t easy. A lot of junk, quite a few one-post-wonders and static informational blogs (ie. just a quick way to get some kind of site up). Not many like Park City Mountain Resort. Their style is simple, they make use of photos and videos, and you get a great sense of the transition of time, and the excitement of the build up to snow. And of course, when you are ready, you can find the link to the main website, where you can book your holiday. Why doesn’t every small tourist operator do this?

So what about travel agents and the big operators? Well, travel agents will be reading blogs to, and since they respond to the demands of their clients, the small operators who catch their attention may just get some business. And perhaps the major operators – who have sewn up so much of the market – may start to find their market share start to leak. Because when people are given a choice they have a habit of choosing something that is very specifically to their taste, not the mass-marketed, bland options that they have had to choose from before. How big a leak this is will remain to be seen. But it reminds me of last century when everyone felt that the Internet was of interest, for sure, but that it would be a long time before you could actually book your next trip ….

Anyway, I guess we’ll get to see. For now, we are going to back our vision and try to start a conversation with small tourism operators. We want to help them get blogging!

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