Imagine that you would like to plan a two-week travel by car to Corsica with your kids. I tried to “unleash” the power of travel 2.0 communities, but eventually I got the best results via the “old fashioned” way of web 1.0 sites and an excellent travel guide. Why doesn’t the travel 2.0 sites deliver what I would have expected? So, I would have expected more than 10,000 online reviews of touristic sites in Corsica (6.4 millions overnight stays à 14 days and 3 people per trip = 152,000 trips. Of them, 70% of the people with Internet accounts and the usual active contributor ratio of 1% for the web = 1,066 published trips per year. Each trip with about 10 “moments of truth” worth an online publication.).
So, which are the main obstacles?
1. There are “tons” of social networks dedicated to travelling: TripAdvisor.com (5,000,000 members) / VirtualTourist.com (1,000,000) / Qype.com (500,000) / TripsByTips.de (250,000) / Travellerspoint.com (140,000) / Globosapiens.com (20,000) / Globalzoo.de (3,000) and dozens more… So, where is the unified search to look for the specific info you need in order to plan a travel? I am looking forward for the next generation of the web to get other the info silos created by web 1.0 and 2.0 technologies. The question that each person who would like to share her/his travel experience has to answer: where I’m going to publish it?
2. Most of the travel social networks are either large and focus on “standard” features (e.g. hotels & restaurants reviews) or are rather small and limited in the coverage of sites around the globe. Hence, if you travel to sites that are off the beaten track you will get only fractions of the info compared to the “hot spots”.
So, do you think that the “mushrooming” of travel 2.0 sites will soon come to an end and what is your experience with travel 2.0 sites?