My Four Favorite Ways to Use VR with Travel

Virtual reality headsets may not be mainstream yet, but VR is already showing a dynamic range of applications and uses.  A few weeks ago, the CTO of LikeLive gave a presentation and demo of their sportscast app.  It kicked off my thinking of how the travel industry could make best use of the unique features of VR.  The following are my top bets:

1. Showing you new locations

Ok, so maybe this one you could have guessed.  As I wrote in a previous post, a huge part of successful travel marketing is getting the traveler to envision themselves at the location.  Travel agents have historically used incredibly descriptive and visual language, and travel ads always feature colorful and detailed pictures of the property.  VR allows hotels and tour operators to take this trope to the extreme by literally immersing you somewhere else.  Marriott has done a tremendous job of this already.  They set up virtual reality booths (complete with headsets, headphones, and wind and water effects) outside City Hall in Manhattan to catch newlyweds; viewers were transported to London or Hawaii to experience a Marriott honeymoon vacation.

2. Ecotourism (to the extreme)

Besides showing you a new place you may want to visit, perhaps there's a reason you want to stay at a distance.  Ecotourism has steadily gained in popularity as more travelers increasingly seek to choose travel destinations that support conservation efforts.  Virtual reality creates the opportunity to get up close and personal with endangered species and locations (such as coral reefs) without jeopardizing the native balance by disruptive behavior.  Discovery Networks has already partnered with VR company Littlstar to develop videos highlighting threatened and protected animals.  Make sure to click around as the video plays to see the full 360 view!

3. Accessible Tourism

Another niche area of travel is dedicated to trips and excursions that are accessible to those with limited mobility and/or disabilities.  While ecotourists may intentionally choose not to travel to certain destinations, other travelers may find themselves physically unable.  Google has already started making inroads here with their extreme dedication to Google Maps.  See the video below for a view from the top of Mont Blanc, part of an entire climbing experience Google has made available on a variety of platforms.

 

4. Travel...to the Beyond!

What about locations people haven't even been to yet?  NASA has you covered.  As we increase the range and capabilities of space probes, we will be able to experience destinations human beings have yet to step foot on.  Don't forget to click around in the video!

The Mobile Safari: How Africa's Leapfrogging

In March 2015, I had the amazing opportunity of traveling to South Africa with Columbia Business School as part of my international seminar.  While I could go on about all the awesome things I was able to see and experience, one of the most striking things was just how much people relied on their mobile phones.  According to a recent Pew Research report, cellphone use in Africa has exploded in recent years and is nearly on par with the US in many countries.  For example, 83% of people in Ghana have cellphones, just under the 89% of Americans.  Compare this to the fact that only 20% of Ghanaians have access to safe sanitation facilities.

As part of our course, we were paired with local entrepreneurs to advise on a given business problem of their choice.  My team was set up with Quicket, an online ticket marketplace, who was seeking to grow their pan-African presence.  When it came to mobile strategy, whether to develop for cellphone applications wasn't even a question; mobile was integrally part of Quicket's business.  Not only is Quicket able to be seamlessly used and accessed via mobile, their entire ticket scanning platform was based on mobile tickets and was driven by a mobile app.  Every other company we met in the incubator had a similar mobile-forward approach.

The proliferation of cellphone use in Africa is especially striking given the complete lack of other communications infrastructure.  Only 2% of adults in the Pew study had a landline in their home.  From a digital marketing perspective, this a gold mine: an entire population of previously unreachable people (from a digital perspective) are now outpacing other more connected countries.  Compare the charts below that show African nations at the bottom of internet connectivity, yet leading many European and Middle Eastern countries in social networking usage.

Mobile payments have also taken off due to a combination of cellphone proliferation and general lack of banking options.  African nations comprise the most underbanked population in the world, with 80% of adults completely unbanked.  Yet despite this, Africa demolishes the global average for mobile financial services usage. 

As the rest of the world continues to move online and get mobile, Africa stands to have a fantastic leg up in the mobile game.  Whereas the rest of the world is focused on turning existing web applications to mobile, Africa has been forced to develop for cellphone use from the beginning.

The Problem of the Walled Garden: How Apps are Shifting the Payments Space

The Apple and Android App Stores have exploded over recent years with every major retailer releasing their own mobile application.  The time and development costs of building out a mobile website are increasingly being funneled into the creation of apps.  With the ability to create dynamic mobile responsive websites, why are retailers jumping over to the app-side?  While many great arguments can be made about providing a better user experience and greater functionality, one of the biggest reasons for retailers to create an app is control over your purchasing behavior data.

Up until recently, credit card companies were the dominant owners of consumers' data.  Every major card network has a business intelligence unit that sifts through the billions of purchases made every day and sells analytics back to advertisers, merchants, and other third party data consolidators.  These can lead to amazing insights - Imagine being a local shoe store and learning that a large percent of your customers tend to stop in the coffee store across the street before coming to your establishment; wouldn't it be great to directly target people who just bought a coffee there with a mobile coupon to drive even more traffic?

However, retailers have become jaded.  Why should Mastercard make money off data driven by retailers' own customers?  Wouldn't it be so much better if retailers (or other companies with an interest in what consumers are buying) owned all this purchase data themselves?  Enter the payments-enabled app.

Starbucks was the first major retailer to successfully launch an app with native payment abilities.  While it is great that using the app to pay helps you earn rewards and makes paying (and the line) go faster, the real value to Starbucks is total control over all that purchase data.  By removing the middle-man, Starbucks is now the only party who knows when and what you buy at Starbucks.  

LevelUp is another app that focuses on smaller retailers who may not have the resources to develop their own payment-enabled apps.  Largely positioned as a way for these small merchants to reduce the fees paid to credit card processors, LevelUp works by "batching" multiple purchases together and only processing them once a month (rather than real time).  The impact is that card companies no longer see the individual purchases a LevelUp user makes  at these shops and LevelUp alone owns and controls the data.

For companies like American Express who argue that a significant amount of their value to merchants is based on the tremendous data and analytics they have on cardmembers, this is a scary proposition.  As apps with native payment capabilities continue to proliferate, credit card companies and banks will increasingly lose sight over the broader purchase behaviors of their customers.  However, I believe there will ultimately be a peak and eventually a reversal.  While payments-enabled apps are on the upswing for now, the overall fragmentation will become too annoying and cumbersome to consumers - who wants to need a separate app to pay at every store you may want to visit?  This inefficiency will eventually drive a reversion to broader-based payment providers, as we have already seen with the rise of apps like Google Wallet, Apple Pay, and Square.

The Value of Tapping into Online Social Communities

Back in early 2014, I signed up for a gift exchange run by online social community site reddit.  The gift exchange platform is known as redditgifts; started as an online Secret Santa program in 2013, redditgifts has grown to run dozens of themed exchanges between participants worldwide every year.  But back in January 2014, when redditgifts was only just getting started, I signed up for a kitchen apron exchange.  I have always been a fairly avid baker and had accumulated various aprons over the years from family and friends; many of these I unfortunately didn't particularly like, so I figured an exchange was a great way to offload one and find something new.

I quickly filled in my preferences on the exchange form.  After receiving my secret match, I excitedly sent them an apron and then eagerly awaited what I would receive.  And I waited.  And waited.  Three months later, I had resigned myself to the fact that my own gifter had been a "Grinch" and I had been forgotten.  Until April, when the following arrived at my door:

redditgifts has a way of dealing with so-called "Grinches," which is to have people volunteer to be "rematchers." In an amazing stroke of marketing genius, Gold Medal Flour had scooped up everyone who hadn't received gift and sent them a custom embroidered and branded apron, along with a recipe.  

The overall cost of producing the aprons, printing the recipes, and shipping the packages was not insignificant, but probably nominal.  The trade-off was fantastic exposure to a group of high quality, interested potential customers who found huge value in getting recognized by Gold Medal.

For more examples of successful marketing to the reddit community, check out the following great write-ups:

• Seven examples from Maximize Social Business, including awesome case studies for VICE, Ford, and beef jerky 
• Tips on cracking reddit from Startup Bros, including how to avoid epic failure
• An amazing case study for Rock The Pitch from Conversion Rate Optimization, which saw a 7,500% increase in conversion rates

My Good, Bad, and Ugly E-mail Roundup

As we continue to learn about the process and best practices involved with e-mail marketing in class, I wanted to look back on the marketing e-mails I have been getting.  The following is a small sampling of e-mails I have received in the past few weeks, and a short reflection on what sparked - or crushed - my interest in what they contained.

The Good

These first two e-mails from Gothamist and The Reductress are terrific.  I get a Gothamist e-mail every day (yes, seven days a week!) and The Reductress sends a newsletter about six times a month.  Both contain a number of relevant and usually amusing stories whose impact is self-contained within the e-mail, or I can easily click to read more.  

This next e-mail from The American Red Cross came through today.  I haven't had any interaction with them in over a year, but this was a great re-engagement message.  The content is short and to the point; it quickly directs me to helpful links to get me to act (give blood) without beating around the bush with pleas and guilt trips like other charity e-mails and letters I receive (see The Ugly below).  They also include quick links to view the message on their website and the unsubscribe link is front and center.

The Bad

This e-mail from FlatRate Moving almost had something going for it.  It's short and offers a very real benefit ($100) for being a loyal customer.  The only thing is, it's an incredibly poorly timed message considering I used them to move in January last year.  This offer would have been much more useful had it come in December/January, when FlatRate could have guessed my lease would have been up and I would be most likely to be moving again!

Similarly, on it's face, this e-mail from Daily Harvest looks fairly innoculous; a friendly sweepstakes full of things that fit my advertising demographic.  Daily Harvest hits my inbox pretty hard with e-mails like these, and I was originally confused why because I had never heard of Daily Harvest, let alone signed up for their mailing list.  After a bit more digging, I noticed the e-mail address they sent it to, which ended with "+wellpath@gmail.com."  A while back, I had entered a similar sweepstakes run by WellPath (and cross promoted by a company whose e-mails I had signed up for).  Being suspicious, I tried a trick I had learned to use when signing up for potentially spammy sites.  It turns out I was right to be cautious, as WellPath had gone on to sell out my e-mail address; Daily Harvest is only one of many companies that send me e-mails every week to my "+wellpath" extended address.  I learned my lesson that entering any of these sweepstakes with tons of "partners" listed means you can expect to be put on every single on of their mailing lists as well!

The Ugly

The Central Park Conservancy takes the prize for most annoying e-mail marketing I receive.  Not only are their messages regularly dense and completely uninformative, they are always addressed to "Fred."  My name is not Fred, or anything close to Fred.  I have attempted to unsubscribe, I have reported them to Gmail as spam, and I have deleted them on Unroll.me more times than I can count.  The only positive thing I can say about the marketing people for the Central Park Conservancy is that they are incredibly tenacious. 

On top of this, The Central Park Conservancy has clear sold out my e-mail, as I have started getting a string of e-mails for political campaigns, all addressed to the same mysterious "Fred."  Ben Carson was a popular one I got for a while, though here is a more recent (and ugly) example:

The Online Bullhorn: How Travelers Are Using Social Media to Complain

In 2008, a Canadian musician named Dave Carroll took a flight from Halifax to Omaha on United Airlines.  Upon landing, he discovered his checked guitar had been utterly destroyed.  Unable to get United to take accountability or give compensation, Carroll decided to do what he does best - make music.  

After releasing in July 2009, "United Breaks Guitars" gained over five million views by the middle of August.  United, humiliated, quickly attempted to rectify the situation, though it was a bit too little too late for Carroll, who subsequently released two follow-up songs to the original.  United didn't only lose face, their stock fell 10% within four weeks of the first video's release.

Others are getting in on the complaint action.  Angered by the difficulty of getting through to customer service call centers, air travelers are increasingly taking to Twitter to complain about anything from flight cancellations to fellow passengers.  And the amazing thing is it's working.  Airlines now have entire social media teams to handle comments across Twitter, Facebook, and travel review sites.

But sometimes companies fall flat in their approach to social media response.  One particularly infamous example involved Sky Air Services, an Australian travel agency.  When faced with customers complaining about the company, Sky Air Services dished it right back.

So what can travel companies do to mitigate these public relations fiascoes, besides not messing up in the first place?  Business consultant Danielle Graham offers some guidelines:

1. Respond promptly.
2. Respond publicly, but then take the conversation offline
3. Stay positive
4. Be solution-oriented
5. Encourage feedback
6. Acknowledge resolutions back on the social platform

See Yourself There: Six Successful Rich Media Travel Advertisements

Imagine yourself on a warm, sandy beach peacefully listening to the waves with a drink in your hand.  Or how about picture yourself meandering down an enchanted side street in a foreign city?  Maybe indulging in an exotic meal is more your speed?

Whatever your ideal vacation, travel experts have known for years that people are more likely to buy if they can envision themselves taking part in the excursion.  The earliest travel advertisements showed scenes of faraway locales, enticing would-be travelers to partake in something beyond their everyday.

Rich media display advertising has ushered in a new phase of digital marketing that allows travel companies to push this visual trope.  Below are six examples of great rich media use in appealing to travel buyers.

1. Abu Dhabi Welcomes You

The Tourism & Culture Authority of Abu Dhabi created an expandable banner that invited viewers to digitally explore the different things Abu Dhabi had to offer.  By clicking through the different categories, one could find myriad tourist attractions throughout the city that appeal to any traveler.  The banner also had options to save favorite locations and even book trips straight from the ad.

2. The May Fair Affair

The May Fair Hotel in London made use of a similar expandable banner ad, coupled with video content to show amusing situations to "eavesdrop" into around the hotel.  From a trashed wedding reception to a hectic board meeting to Bollywood movie screening, the short clips highlighted various features of the hotel.

3. Vegas Season

The Las Vegas Visitor Authority used a clever marketing campaign to encourage travelers to visit during the hot summer months by playing on winter holiday themes.  The expandable MPU advertisement allowed viewers to flip through a number of holiday scenes that showed off different aspects of Vegas life.

4. Etihad Flight Search

Etihad Airlines sought to bring the booking directly to you by embedding their flight search directly into an expandable MPU.  Married with rich video content and location media, the display ad was essentially an extension of their own website.

5. Lufthansa Nonstop You

In order to show off the service and comfort of traveling on Lufthansa, the airline made use of a vertical ad that, when hovered over, played a short film of a woman traveling onboard.  A flight attendant walks across the screen, creating a playful interaction outside the ad.

6. Discover Alitalia

To literally unveil their new fleet, Alitalia used a fun rich media "game" in their advertising.  The interactive MPU worked by "scratching off" the add to reveal the plane inside.

The Digital Debate: Social Media in the 2016 Election Race

On Wednesday, Fox News announced they would have journalists fully dedicated to broadcasting this week's GOP debate via Instagram, marking the first time a news organization has assigned resources to cover an event exclusively via the social media site.  This represents not only a milestone for Instagram, but also a sign of the increasing impact social media has on US politics.

The first real winds of change came with Barack Obama's campaign strategy during the 2008 Presidential Election, dubbed "The Facebook Election" by media outlets.  On top of a keenly data-driven campaign, Obama's strategists composed an aggressive - and successful - youth-focused appeal via electronic media.  Throughout his two terms, he has continued the trend, frequently appearing on podcasts, answering questions on Reddit, and holding "Twitter Townhalls" through his massively popular @BarackObama and @POTUS handles.

Hello, Twitter! It's Barack. Really! Six years in, they're finally giving me my own account.

— President Obama (@POTUS) May 18, 2015

The 2016 Presidential Election has upped the ante, with social media content featured more prominently than ever before.  It has been estimated that approximately $1 billion, or over nine percent of candidates' media budgets, will be allocated to digital and social media.  Bombastic candidate Donald Trump, already well known for his Twitter eruptions before entering the Presidential mix, has stoked the digital flames a number of times before the Primaries have even ended.  Opponents have also shot back via social media.

Taking the next step from Twitter and Facebook posts, candidates in the 2016 race have focused more efforts on producing video content spread via social media.  Snapchat has found its time in the spotlight as nearly ever candidate sports a regularly updated channel.

Yet in some ways, social media may be hurting campaigns.  Democratic candidate Bernie Sanders launched an aggressive online campaign targeted at millennials, echoing the Obama Facebook campaigns of 2008 and 2012.  However, likes and follows have not converted to votes despite aggressive "Facebanking," as shown by Sanders' poor performance on Super Tuesday.  It seems millennials are more than happy to click a button and send over some PayPal cash, but getting to the ballot box takes a little too much effort.  #FeelTheBern may suffer the same fate as #Kony2012.

As Online Booking Behaviors Change, SEO Gains Importance for Travel Companies

Before the internet, booking travel was a human-to-human interaction.  Vacation-hopefuls relied on experienced travel professionals to recommend the best hotel.  Business travelers, fiercely brand loyal, called their favorite airline to book directly.  While travel service providers posted (and continue to list) their inventory on Global Distribution Systems (GDS) used by travel agents, the true array of options was seldom available to the average end user.  

The world wide web has opened the kimono as Online Travel Agencies (OTAs) like Expedia and Orbitz have grown in popularity and allowed travelers to search the full inventory across providers by publishing GDS content online.  On top of the OTAs, Metasearch sites like Kayak and TripAdvisor arrived to make sense of the overwhelming volume of content increasingly available, steadily shifting search volume from the OTAs.  

Source: Phocuswright Research.

As OTAs and Metasearch sites continue to proliferate, the problem is only exacerbated by the influx of travel-related apps.  With all the options to learn about travel, we find ourselves back in the original conundrum of too much information and no idea where to start.  Enter: Google.

Is Social Media Working for the Hotel Industry?

In late 2013, little known Sydney hotel 1888 was featured in news articles around the world for their latest promotional strategy: they would be the first hotel to give out free stays to guests with over 10,000 followers on Instagram.  Everything about The 1888 - from the name (the year Kodak released its first box camera) to the decor (printed Instagram pictures) - reflected their photo-focus and their promotion quickly gained attention across Instagram's 150 million user base (as of September 2013).  Their original post garnered a whopping 72% engagement and rocketed the small boutique hotel to the #1 Sydney hotel on TripAdvisor.

Over the subsequent years, hotels have continued to embrace increased opportunities to interact with guests via social media.  Other boutique hotels have mimicked 1888's strategy, like the Sol Wave House in Spain that conducts nearly all its guest operations - from reservations to check-in to the concierge - over Twitter.  The hotel itself is peppered with hashtags and their Twitter presence sees regular customer engagement.

And it's not just the little guys that are jumping on the social media bandwagon.  Hilton Hotels launched an incredibly successful multi-platform campaign titled "Our Stage. Your Story." that integrated posts across Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram and awarded free stays to posters every week.  I got to experience the impact of social media myself when staying at the Waldorf Astoria's Arizona Biltmore hotel.  After tweeting about a trail map left next to my running shoes, The Biltmore staff responded by leaving an array of "post-run snacks" in my room.

This is adorable. The @WaldorfAstoria @ArizonaBiltmore saw my running shoes and put a trail map with them in my room pic.twitter.com/EZn9EJ0mYD

— Carly Weil (@CarlyWeil) December 2, 2015

Traveling for work is rough, but not when @arizonabiltmore makes you feel like you're at home! Most adorable series of events I've had at a hotel. #allmyfavoritesnacks #arizonabiltmorehotel #happycustomer #businesstravel

A photo posted by Carly W (@carwheel88) on Dec 2, 2015 at 5:40pm PST

The jury seems to still be out as to how much social media engagement has really delivered in terms of increased patronage.  But it's clear that hotel chains can enrich their brand awareness by embracing new social channels and allowing their customers to interact with the company in new ways.  Social media in the hotel industry seems to be most successful when positioned as a customer engagement tool that bridges across social platforms and across the virtual/physical space.  

So how has social media strategy worked out for The 1888?  They still embrace photography culture, and were acquired by Ovolo Hotels this year.  It seems The 1888 - now known as the Ovolo 1888 Darling Harbour - still honors the offer of a free stay for high profile Instagramers, though it has been scaled back to only one free night.  Yet the Ovolo 1888 Instagram account itself only garners 695 followers, not enough to buy a night at their own hotel, and the various hashtags associated with the hotel barely manage more than a couple posts a week.  #1888hotel, which feeds directly to a screen behind the hotel's check-in desk, has only 2,745 posts.