New Travel Technology

One of the new ways to market your travel business is by the use of email. Fast delivery is the key to a successful campaign. The first thing you need to do is to get permission to send these emails by having an opt-in describing the future content of your mails and the other is to have an opt-out in the actual emails that you send to prospective clients. You should follow guidelines set out by mailbox providers to ensure that your emails get past their spam blockers.

Have you ever heard the term SEO (search engine optimization)? If you havent, you should sit up and take notice, especially if you have your own web site. SEO is a broad term which encompasses various methods of optimization including conducting sometimes exhaustive keyword research and the improving hyperlinks that link back to your own web site. For a travel web site, the best back links would be from other travel related web sites.

If you have your own travel web site you should spend some time spreading your links across the internet by submitting your URL (universal resource locator) to as many travel and holiday web directories as possible. You can also link to other related travel sites and reciprocate this by linking back to them, though it is always better to have a one way link that points to your site.

One of the most important features a travel company needs on their web site is the capability for users to search for holidays, flights; cruises etc and be able to book them online. Any travel web site worth its salt now has these features and their number of sales reflects this. More that 80% of travelers who plan their holidays make their bookings online. See http://www.barrheadtravel.co.uk for an example. These back-end programs though are not for the novice web programmer to construct and unless you are used to producing server code I suggest you outsource for this complexity of programming.

Blogs are the latest thing to hit the internet. These can be a very potent marketing tool that can reach out to new customers. People love to be told travel stories and blogs allow you and others to post new content and update it quickly.

Podcasts are yet another way to reach your customers. Podcasts can contain video and audio so you could shorten or use sections of your promotional holiday video and make it available for download by the millions of people who own an iPod.

In brief, if you are in the travel industry, if you dont embrace all the technology that is at your disposal, you may be left behind.

David Kirkwood - I am reasonably new to the travel industry though find the subject very interesting. I am sure that I can bring something new to the table from the other industries I have worked in. See an example of the type of site I am working on now at: http://www.barheadtravel.co.uk.Cate Blog8756
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