Piaras Kelly PR - Public Relations in Ireland

I’ve spent some time in Japan on holidays and was working in Barcelona for a couple of days recently. Both experiences underlined the importance of the Internet for the tourism sector and reiterated Francois Gossieaux’s point that brands are defined by the user interface of an organisation.

On the first point, I spoke last year at Tourism Ireland’s eSymposium about ways social media can be used by organisations in the sector to attract tourists. Since my holiday if I was to give this presentation again, there are a number of things I would change. The main thing would be that people need to step back and forget about all the ’sexy’ stuff like making YouTube videos and starting a social networking profile, and instead check to see if they’re doing all the basics right.

We live in the Information Economy. What I mean by that is that we make a lot of purchasing decisions based on the information available to us. When it comes to holidays, consumers do a hell of a lot of research before making their final purchasing decision. Interestingly the information sources we use for doing something like booking a hotel isn’t the hotel’s website, it’s sites like TripAdvisor. It’s fair enough that people would want to see how other consumers rank the hotel, but what’s shocking is that TripAdvisor has basic pieces of information that aren’t on some hotel websites.

For example, the hotel I stayed at in Kyoto involved getting a subway from the main train station in the city. Of course, my travel company and the hotel didn’t actually tell me this. Just look at the Karasuma Hotel website and the lack of any real content on it. the very first review on TripAdvisor tells me exactly how to get there. If I didn’t google the hotel prior to travelling to Kyoto, I would have ended up having to get a taxi.

Organisations should be in information overload mode, giving every single piece of detail that could make them a more attractive choice for potential customers. Organisations can incorporate use blogs, social networks, etc to achieve this, but their primary purpose should be to provide information instead of trying to be seen as innovative. For example, a social networking presence provides a handy way to field ongoing q&as or using Google Maps to show how to get to nearby attractions. Concise directions to the hotel on your website is better.

Here’s something clever Guinness developed recently as part of their sponsorship of the Hong Kong Rugby Sevens - the first Cantonese-speaking mobile guide (via Adrants).

On the second point about the fact that brands are defined by the user interface of an organisation, I had the misfortune to fly through Heathrow last week. Despite flying with British Airways, my fears were allayed when I saw I wasn’t flying through Terminal 5. How wrong I was as my luggage got lost anyway, but I’d almost forgive British Airways given the general state of Heathrow at the moment. Transferring to my flight to Barcelona was a nightmare as there is construction going on at the moment and no-one has bothered to move half of the signs in the airport. Myself and a group of other passengers headed in the same direction, wandering around like lemmings as we continually ended up in dead ends despite the sign pointing us that way. A piece of paper and some sellotape would have made the experience ten times better.