These days, you hear a lot about the importance of social networking in hospitality marketing. But what networks should you focus on? It depends on your goals, but here are some of the most popular:
WikiTravel – similar to Wikipedia, this is a user-written travel guide that was launched in July 2003 by Evan Prodromou and Michele Ann Jenkins. It was the recipient of a Webby Award for Best Travel Website in 2007, and recently became available in a printed version. It’s good for providing in-depth information on obscure destinations.
TripAdvisor – the grandaddy of review websites, covering more than 212,000 hotels and 74,000 attractions in over 30,000 destinations worldwide. With more than 20 million reviews and nearly 30 million unique visitors a month, TripAdvisor is the largest travel community on the web.
VirtualTourist – purchased by TripAdvisor in July 2008, this site features user-written destination guides.
Yelp – another big review website that seems more popular with the younger, connected crowd. (I’ll often type in reviews with my iPhone while at a cafe.)
Boots-n-All – calls itself “the ultimate resource for the independent traveler,” and offers articles and trip planning services
World66 – travel information on over 20,000 destinations, with nearly 80,000 articles written wiki-style
Lonely Planet Thorn Tree – probably the most popular discussion forum, published by the famous travel guide company
TravBuddy – provides more social networking than the others, letting you meet people and share photos, reviews, and blogs
TravelersPoint – lets 100,000+ users write travel blogs and share advice
Related posts:
- The top user-written review sites in Europe
- EyeforTravel’s Social Media Strategies for Travel 2010
- 5 Simple Ways To Proactively Encourage Social Media Reviews
- Uptake – a different breed of travel website (and why it matters to you)
- Six Basic Types of Social Media (And Which Is Best For You)
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{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
I think traveling has gone to a whole new level with the power of the Internet. It’s wonderful how people can contribute their knowledge about locations that we might not have even known about thirty years ago. Social networking and travel definitely go hand in hand.
Yelp is fantastic and only growing. Its ranked #24 out of millions of websites and has something like 34 million website hits per month–which I believe is unique hits. I’ve noticed, however, that I’ve done a couple searches on my iPhone on Yelp and various businesses have had the wrong addresses or no telephone number. For hotels wanting to capitalize on this social network its critical to provide updates to this info. Nothing like leaving money on the table when you could have rectified the situation in 5 to 10 minutes.
Hotels are uniquely positioned to host Yelp events if they are in a major city (NYC, SF, LA, DC, ATL) which tend to have elite Yelp groups. They could host an app, beer, and wine tasting. I don’t know what Yelp charges to set up these events, but its a great way to offer your services to community influencers who are extremely passionate about food.
Hello,
nice post, with nice US sites….I’d also suggest some more ones:
http://www.trivago.co.uk
http://www.hotelcombined.com
http://www.kayak.com and http://www.travelpost.com