Travel 2.0 describes the second wave of travel information websites.
What makes Travel 2.0 different from the booking-oriented first wave (e.g. Expedia, Kayak, AA.com) is that it is crowdsourced, fully interactive, and helps travel planners make decisions through content. user generated.
A Travel 2.0 site is structured to allow users to contribute words and pictures, reviews, and travel diaries. Consequently, those who visit a Travel 2.0 site can gain multiple perceptions about a destination, hotel, or other aspect of the trip.
The term Travel 2.0 was coined by PhoCusWright, a company that specializes in travel research and hosts high-level business conferences for travel innovators.
Various Travel 2.0 sites encourage visitors to add their own videos. Travel wikis, mashups, and blogs that allow comments are also considered Travel 2.0. For taxpayers there is no compensation involved, other than the satisfaction of seeing the words or images on a public website.
For couples planning a vacation, a Travel 2.0 site offers them the opportunity to see and read about places other travelers have been and recommended. There’s a catch: life is short, and how much can you spend reading or watching other people’s amateur videos? On the flip side, you can discover tips that you won’t find anywhere else, and then you can have fun creating your own content for the world to see.
If you want to learn more about Travel 2.0, explore the following sites, where you can join the conversation:
Travel 2.0 websites
Trip advisor
The Original Journey 2.0, a site with more than 5 million reviews of hotels, destinations and attractions written by travelers
Flickr Travel
Millions of travel photos uploaded by people around the world; some of the pictures are pretty good
Travel the World Wiki Wiki
small and self-editable travel 2.0 with approximately 2,500 pages
YouTube Travel
You Tube is the go-to site for watching others and uploading your own Travel 2.0 videos. At the most recent count, it contained more than 30 million travel-related videos.
WAYN
Originally designed to keep track of the whereabouts of friends and meet fellow travelers, Wayn is now part of the lastminute.com group and with nearly 25 million members is dedicated to helping people figure out where to go and what to do, with advice of the locals. and others. Many of the questions and answers are undated, so it is difficult to find out if the tip is new.
Wikitravel The
largest of the travel 2.0 travel wikis with the goal of being a world travel guide built by individual contributions. According to the site, it now has more than 110,000 pages in English and more than 300,000 writer-travelers visit daily.
Travel 2.0 Sites that no longer exist
Since this article was originally written, half of Travel 2.0 has stopped working. Like much of the early Web, many sites that gained popularity and attracted viewers failed early. Some couldn’t attract a large enough audience, some couldn’t find a sustainable way to monetize, and still others were operated by staff and owners who simply decided to move on to other things. These were some of the best of the bunch and what became of them.
Hotel Chatter
This Travel 2.0 site featured smart posts on all hotel-related matters. A few years ago, it was ‘verified’ and is now redirected to cntraveler.com
IgoUgo
One of the first Travel 2.0 sites to offer advice in a community-oriented environment, IgoUgo has been taken over by Travelocity. Your hotel ratings are now powered by TripAdvisor.
Taste
A 2.0 travel recommendation site that combines elements of MySpace and Delicious sold its attractive name and is currently promoting itself as an ‘all-in-one RR site. H H.” That “automates administrative stuff so you have time for meaningful work.” It’s hardly a vacation travel site anymore!
Realtravel 2.0 Blogs, Photos and Videos from an online community of frequent fliers who shared experiences and provided recommendations through blogs, forums and photos. It was acquired by Uptake in 2010, which was later acquired by Groupon.
Turn here
This Travel 2.0 site, which focused on providing videos with a higher level of professionalism (some from established travel 1.0 businesses like InterContinental Hotels) has morphed into SmartShoot, a community / marketplace for photographers and clients.
Where is yours?
Originally a travel 2.0 site for nature lovers that allowed them to identify their favorite spots on the US map, Where’s Yours was taken over by the Nature Valley bars. The utility no longer exists there.
