I know that I promised this post over a week ago but things have been so busy.  I read an interesting post by Michael Gall on how busy he was and therefore unable to post and whether posting about not posting really counted.

Nonetheless, the solution in this case was to ask Bruce Thurlow to help us out.  Given that Bruce has been involved in the planning of the Oz Experience system from the outset I asked him to show you how the MyOzEx travel planner works, why it is powerful tool for a traveller and agent, and the plans for its development in the future.  The remainder are Bruce’s words:
As Dan noted in his last post:

“The backbone of the whole (Oz Experience) website is the travel planning software, known as MyOzEx. I will walk through the functionality tomorrow but the main jist of it is that while a user traverses the website, they add destinations, things to do, accommodation etc to an itinerary builder. From the bundle of products they select as wanting to do, a recommendation engine then suggests the best pass to buy that suits the customer’s itinerary.”

Let’s have a look at the core features.

Throughout the site the destination, activity and pass pages have an button on them, which bookmarks these individual features to a users travel planner.  These items subsequently appear as pat of a “shopping list” within the travel planner.  Each item can be scheduled onto a calendar by simply dragging them on to the date or dates on a calendar view.

The user builds up a clear visual travel plan dragging their activity, destination, accommodation and travel arrangements to the calendar.  There is also the facility to add a free format personal note to a calendar date to remind yourself or keep information or a phone number, catching up for a beer with a friend, special day trip etc.

Displaying plans in this calendar format mimics the way many travel agents plan a clients travel with a paper desk calendar to work out dates of travel and schedules.  in this way the power is in the travelers hands and is stored online for editing at any time.  Direct booking links for pass or accommodation supplement the travel planning.  Considering that most Oz Experience travellers book up to 3 months in advance there are obvious advantages to the system.

Throughout the site all passes/destinations/activities are presented on Google Maps using a unique data model.  In the travel planner the users basket of items are also displayed on a Google map.

Finally the travel planer has some basic profile functionality.  Within the MyOzEx area a user can build up profile information about themselves, import their own travel blog and also their photo albums from sites such as Flickr and PhotoBucket.  Travel plans can also be made private or public.

If you are keen to have a play with the system please feel free to create your own log in today, you don’t have to be an Oz Experience consumer to utilise the system.  Is it successful? - in the first week of the site going live there are on average 35 travel plans being created each day which is something very positive for something so new.

The obvious implications are the travel planner will enhance the social nature of travelling on Oz Experience – something that is already a core reason why people choose this dedicated travelers network – creating a platform for an Oz Experience travellers social network.

…  Bruce

It has taken what seems an eternity – the last 2 weeks being held up by an SSL Cert, but finally the new Oz Experience website is live! I will break this post into 2 parts – today being an overview of the functionality and tomorrow being an introduction to the travel plan.

When I first looked at the Oz Experience project in October 2006, we came to the hypothesis that it was in fact the sum of its parts that were more important than the product itself. By this we mean that it was the destinations that the bus went to, the activities along the way and the places to stay that were more important to the travellers experience than the actual bus pass itself. To present this on the website meant a complete change in the way we were selling on the web.

Over the following 6 months, we created a strategy that looked to emphasise the destination, activities and places to stay rather than just the bus pass. We broke every bus route down into the short hops travellers liked to do (where they hopped on and off the bus.) We then mapped these onto a Google map. Making the Google maps actually move along as the bus route is traversed with next buttons was quite a challenge.

In the backend, we created a page in our content management system (Bootstrap) for every product, activity, destination etc and then added extra data editing fields where we added geo-code data, descriptions to appear in roll over boxes on maps and relationship tables to map accommodation and activities to a destination which is subsequently mapped to a bus route.

In order to tie everything together, we devised a set of icons that are consistently used throughout the site.

With recognition that the customers were now basing their purchase decision on which bus passes they wished to buy (or even more to the point whether they chose Oz Experience over competitors) on the destinations they wanted to visit, we looked to bulk up the destination information. The first area is by adding random images taken as RSS feeds, from Creative Commons searches of the destination rather than using the standard marketing stuff. The second area and probably the coolest was to offer Oz Experience access to the Travel Generation destination guide data. Setup as a wiki, Oz Experience customers can read and edit destination information on the Oz Experience site without leaving that site but from a much larger pool of content being collected and moderated on Travel Generation. Travel Generation content now extends to over 125, 000 users per month with the Base website also drawing and adding to the content. The integration into these sites uses the media wiki API.

The backbone of the whole website is the travel planning software, known as My Oz Ex. I will walk through the functionality tomorrow but the main jist of it is that while a user traverses the website, they add destinations, things to do, accommodation etc to an itinerary builder. From the bundle of products they select as wanting to do, a recommendation engine then suggests the best pass to buy that suits the customer’s itinerary.

This is such a cool site that there really is too much to talk about here, but some of the other things are:

• One of the first sites in the world to use the chromeless You Tube video API. You will see that the instructional videos throughout the site are not in your normal You Tube frame but have our own speech bubble border and controls. It is using the You Tube API to receive the video ‘chromeless.’ It looks simple and really effective – but it’s really cool and we are one of the first sites in the world to do it.
• Use of Sifr which uses flash to convert text headings to non-standard web fonts which maintaining the search engine readability of the headings. It means that the headings throughout the site look great but are still search engine friendly.
• Use of a content footer throughout the site to assist the user with cross-navigation. At all stages, bus passes are recommended that match the page content as are things to do and previous page visits tracked.
• The booking engine is linked real-time into the Response reservations system API.

That will do for now. I could probably talk about this site forever so if you have any comments please let us know. In the meantime, many congratulations to Bruce Thurlow who is leaving Oz Experience at the end of this month and certainly leaves them with a great asset as his legacy.

This project is the brainchild of Greg Zammit from Adventure Tours and is an amalgamation of over 25 Australian operators to produce an awesome 90 page brochure for the European market. By all accounts the brochure which was launched earlier this year has been a roaring success and we hope this site follows suit.

At the moment only agents can book online using the recently launch Tourdesk product from Respax. It is expected that we will integrate a customer booking interface with Respax next week and hopefully then in the next few months Xebidy will redevelop the booking interface using webservices.

In it’s first incarnation the site is pretty much a replica of the brochure but over the next few months new content will be written for an Internet selling perspective and also new functionality. The target market is a slightly older market so we have not gone for the more Web 2.0 functionality that you see on sites like Base, Backpacking Queensland and the new Oz Experience site (coming next week).

A big thanks to the crew in the office here at Xebidy who have pulled some really long hours getting all the content into the site. It was a really hard site to work out navigation, content and design as there is a huge amount of information and each product is so vastly different. I think they have done a great job.

Click here to check out Australian Adventures website.

It may have taken some time coming and many feel like they have been waiting too long - but SwuzzleBucket was launched in its’ entirety on Friday.  Xebidy has been lucky enough to be involved in this project since the beginning.

SwuzzleBucket is an online advertising network aimed exclusively at the New Zealand and Australian ‘backpacker’/adventure/budget travel market.  SwuzzleBucket has signed up a network of high profile websites and Internet Cafes to display SwuzzleBucket advertisements.  The first sites to be launched are the BASE Backpackers Global Gossip Internet cafes and the Backpackers World Travel Global Gossip Internet Cafes.  Together these alone account for over 500,000 unique customers annually across 275 computers.  The next site expected to be displaying ads online is the new Oz Experience website that is currently nearing completion in the Xebidy studio.

SwuzzleBucket has immediately started serving over 1 million ad impressions per month and has some great advertisers on-board committing to 3 and 6 month campaigns.  By advertising with the SwuzzleBucket network an operator, accommodation supplier etc can increase their exposure directly to their target market at a fraction of the cost of alternative advertising media.

Xebidy developed both the new website and the ad serving software based on the Open X Open Source solution.  The branding and launch design was completed by Fluid Designs also in Queenstown.

We recently upgraded the look and feel of the Base Backpackers hostel pages and introduced a feature we had been developing for awhile (those who have seem the Adventure Tours Australia website would have seen it before) - that is, the displaying of images onto the website that sit on Flickr.

The idea here is that we take an RSS feed directly from our these pages and then display the most recent 20 or so images. This works fantastic for a company such as Base which has 14 hostels across Australia and New Zealand and a continually growing mountain of images that are taken almost daily by staff, customers and friends.

A lot can change in a week in a hostel and there is just so much going on from regular parties in the hostel bar to activities and local events. By using a Flickr account we can give access to all the hostel and bar managers who can easily update their photos in real time without the need to continually go back to the website content manager to get new photos. It keeps the images fresh and gets everyone from the crew to the customer buy in - hey that’s me in the bar the other night!

I have said this before in my articles etc, but Flickr also provides a parallel marketing medium. For example someone looking for images on Magnetic Island on Flickr might come across Base or the Full Moon Party and subsequently be enticed to investigate Base Magnetic Island hostel as the place to stay.

We are currently in the process of extending the functionality such that we also pull in the description and tags of the images as they appear on the Flickr site and are displayed on Base, Adventure Tours etc websites.

As promised last week this post is an introduction to some of the thinking behind our pre-Christmas launch of the new Adventure Tours beta website. I say it is a beta version as we have really only launched the framework to which so much is going to be introduced including the much awaited travel planner.

The whole idea behind the Adventure Tours website was to simplify the user experience, make it easier for them to find the information they wanted and to understand how tours could be combined to create packages - or purchase prepackaged combos. We also wanted to bring a lot more inspirational photography into the site as it was thought that experience of the trip was poorly conveyed on the last site.

In redesigning the home page probably the most important concept here was to simplify everything. We use a technique called spearfish shopping to highlight the tours that are most popular at a particular time of the year. Adventure Tours runs some quite sophisticated analytics and analysis so they pretty much know what tours should be selling at what time of the year etc and therefore focus these featured information on those products. The “ads” down the right hand side are direct promotions for internal pages and can be used to highlight tours or products that there is a special on at the time or that is selling below par etc.

The flash map that works as a secondary navigation was developed by our friend Davis Hammon at Rising Tiger Media in the US and like everything on the site is in first release. There are plans to continue to develop this map with most, but still simple, information.

The individual product pages are really the key to the success of this first release. The tour highlights at the top of each tour are designed to speed up the decision-making process for the user. It is felt that visitors to the site sort of have a list of things they really want to do on our tour in Australia and that by showing them quickly which tours contain these things we are making it easier for them to make decisions without wading through the itineraries.

The flash draggable map at the bottom of the itinerary is the first launch of the dynamic map which will be the backbone of the Oz Experience website. There is a huge amount of information that is going to be built into this map in the coming weeks, particularly with destination information and hopefully some imagery.

Finally, each individual page is completed with popular packages and add-ons, which are designed to make it easy for customers to understand how they can combined tours or use pre-made packages.

Has the site been successful so far? Well, that’s the best bit - in the first 30 days sales are over 20% above all previous records!! Likewise, the feedback from International travel agents has been very encouraging, for example; “On behalf of the Copenhagen office at MyPlanet, I am writing you because I want to praise you for the new website, I think it is very nice looking and friendly to the eye.”

It has been 5 weeks since my last post due pretty obviously to the festive (read drunken) season. We are also waiting on a new design for the Xebidy website to come out of the US and while we had hoped to have it live by the 15th January it has been held up - so rather than hold off anymore best I just get straight back into the swing of things as I have so much to say.

It has taken me nearly an hour this morning and go through and moderate all the spam comments that appeared on the site over the break - nearly 300. That does my head in and I think one of Google’s highest priorities this year should be to stop sending it’s ad-sense network to sites that are nothing more than thinly disguised spammers. It does my head in the continual bombardment and when you visit the site you find nothing more than a bunch of Google cost per click ads.

So, we actually finished 2007 on a bit of a mad rush and in all the haste I did not really get time to talk about everything we had going on. For starters we launched a new website for Fletcher Living at Jacks Point. This was not so much a new site for them as we simply took their old site that was developed in flash and developed it purely in HTML on our Bootstrap content management server; which is much better for both search engines and users. Obviously, we will be looking for a dramatic improvement in traffic this year from this site and we have undertaken a year long project to improve this traffic, sales and content on the site.

We also developed the site for Waiata Lodge, a new luxury lodge being developed on Queenstown hill, onto our Bootstrap content management platform. This site was designed by our mates at Fluid and we simply put together the code for them. Hopefully, we will continue to work with them this year on this.

Finally, in the heat of the December rush we launched the beta version of the new Adventure Tours website. This is going to be a great site, but it still in very early days. I will explain some of the features that we have already designed into the site later this week as Bruce Thurlow is as we speak winging his way from Sydney to Queenstown to work with us on this and the new Adventure Tours website.

So, what does 2008 bring for Xebidy. Well, we recently launched a cost per click search marketing campaign for our mates at The Park Travellers Lodge in National Park and we will be working with them all year to develop their site for both traffic and content. Likewise, as I said Fletcher Living at Jacks Point.

The Australian Adventure Tours Group, consisting of Wayward Bus, Adventure Tours and Oz Experience still remain core projects for us with a heap of the promised Web 2.0 functionality to got into Wayward Bus and Adventure Tours in the next month and the new Oz Experience website which I think will be awesome to go live early March.

For our mates Base Backpackers we continue to redevelop their site and have been introducing a new look and feel to some pages slowly. I won’t make too much noise about this yet as we have a long way to go and are working on some pretty exciting stuff which should come to fruition int he coming weeks. Needless to say , congratulations to the team at Base for their three new hostels (2 acquisitions in Brisbane and 1 brand new one in Taupo ) which they sneaked in before Christmas.

Finally early 2008 has Xebidy undertaking a few new projects also, in particular the launch of the Swuzzlebucket Advertising Network which we will make a big song and dance about in the next week or so, Travel Generation in about 6 weeks and the very exciting Breathe project, which we have been quietly (if we can do anything quietly) working on for some time and should see a sprint to the finish in March. There are a few other cool projects and I am looking at a few interesting strategy projects also with some high profile companies - so without letting any more out of the bag. Let the year begin in earnest!!

As promised we have converted the news clip that features the Backpacking Queensland website. Once again thanks to everyone for the support and the great week last week - I hope to see you all in February.

In yesterdays’ post I introduced some of the new functionality in the new Backpacking Queensland website (you can see that post here). In this part two I introduce some more.

Reviews and ratings: As I discussed yesterday the ability to review a product and have your say, and the ability to make purchase decisions based on other peoples’ input is an important part of Web 2.0. It was agreed very early on that this was a desired feature of the new Backpacking Queensland website. We added one “new” feature, if you like, to this; and that is the ability to add images to a review. If someone has something bad to say, such as the room was dirty, then they can back this up with an image. Hopefully, however, it will lead to users sharing good images as well - “had a great time, here’s me at the Calypso pool table soaking wet - don’t ask”. The greater the users interactivity the more successful the site will be.

Google translations: In a second part to Mr Geherts’ email that I have quoted in my two earlier posts on Backpacking Queensland he comments negatively on the use of the Google translator tool for different languages on the website. You will see in the top right hand corner of the Backpacking Queensland site flags for the different languages and then clicking on these a user is redirected to the Google server where the site is automatically translate. Of course, this is not ideal as inevitably the translation is not of a very high quality, however, it does provide a good intermediary solution to Backpacking Queensland. Anyone that knows anything about websites will know that translating a site can be both expensive and very time consuming. The intention here is for Backpacking Queensland to monitor the traffic and clicks over the next six months or so and should one or more languages prove very popular then they will consider the resources needed to do a proper translation. The Google tool, however, is not all that bad; one of its’ cool features is that it allows users to correct the translations that are not right through the “suggest a better translation tool” and also view the content back in English to assist with deciphering the content. Hopefully, travellers may even contribute to bettering the translations so that it becomes more useable for Backpacking Queensland over time.

On-site advertising: The Backpacking Queensland website uses the Swuzzlebucket onsite advertising network. This is a very new concept that offers an advertising network for the Australian and New Zealand backpacking industry only. It focuses on providing advertising only on adventure tourism and backpacking websites and only shows relevant ads. It means that the users are getting a better experience as they are getting appropriate ads and that advertisers are getting much better value for money as their ads are displayed to their target market. The Swuzzlebucket network works on a minimum charge per 1,000 times an ad is displayed and a cost per click meaning that advertisers only pay for when their ads are working for them.

Newsletters: The newsletter functionality is based on the Open Source solution PHP List. It is all managed on the Backpacking Queensland server and is using probably the most popular newsletter serving software in the world. Like my previous posts on why Xebidy chose the Silver Stripe framework for the Backpacking Queensland project (which you can read here), we chose PHP Lists because we do not see the point in reinventing the wheel. PHP List is awesome, it has great reports and monitoring ability to see who opens the newsletters, which are deleted and the links etc., that are most viewed. On the Backpacking Queensland site we have used the functionality to the fullest by collecting some demographic data as part of the sign up process. The users are asked when they are traveling to Australia, how long they will travel in Queensland for, some demographic information like age, sex and nationality and then there are options for their interests. Armed with this sort of data Backpacking Queensland can now run specific targeted newsletter campaigns; for example, they may want to send a newsletter to all females, from the UK, aged between 20 and 30 who are interested in diving, that are coming to Australia and Queensland in the next six month, offering some special diving products. There is enormous advertising revenue potential here.

So that’s the Backpacking Queensland new website in more than a nutshell. Its’ really a very large site and one that we at Xebidy have enjoyed working over the last four or five months. The girls at Gate 7 in Sydney, who are charged with maintaining the site, have been a wonder to work with and hopefully we can work with them again to extend the site. We already have lots of ideas about how to make it better and increase the reach. I am off to Cairns tomorrow for the launch of the site and look forward to hearing all the feedback first hand, positive and negative.

So continuing on from my earlier post about Backpacking Queensland (which you can read here) going live and “that’ email from Simon Gehert, I quote:

“Rarely have we seen something more obviously shoehorned into existing technology where it shouldn’t be. Take an open source CMS you didn’t develop complete with tag clouds, social network site links, unrelated blog headline feeds, google maps etc ,which was never intended for this purpose, add some crap interface design, a link to your site in the footer which says “Well made in New Zealand by Xebidy … and you have all the makings for a car crash of epic proportions.”

In my earlier post about the site I discussed the Silver Stripe content management system. One of things I said was that in the whole scheme of things Silver Stripe is not a very large Open Source project, which means that unfortunately at this stage a lot of the functionality such as tags, social bookmarks, RSS feeds, maps etc we have had to develop ourselves - plus there is not enough people using the Bootstrap interface yet. So I thought I would use this post to introduce you to some of this functionality and explain what it means and why we have chosen to use it in the Backpacking Queensland site:

Tags: I posted last month on the tags in Backpacking Queensland (read that post here) and my belief that in fact the tag system we have used in this site are more meaningful that many of the tags I have seen on other sites. The way they work is that users can add their own keywords to pages throughout the site as they travel the site to use to remind them of the pages. When an internal page is tagged this tag helps to build up the tag cloud which appears on the home page. The larger the font of the tags on the home page, then the more pages within the site that have been tagged with those tags. Tags, subsequently, provide an informal navigation structure created by the users. We added a little twist to the whole tagging concept by also then providing the user with links to You Tube for videos, Flickr for photos, Wikipedia for definitions, and del.icio.us for other pages across the Internet tagged the same. That means, if a user tags a page Cairns and then wants to see videos and images of Cairns from where they are on the Backpacking Queensland site the functionality is there.

Social network links: The social bookmarks facilitate users saving the Backpacking Queensland pages in popular bookmarking websites. Sites such as Digg and Del.icio.us are where users save their favourite web pages instead of saving them in their browsers. This is very pertinent for travellers who are never in the same Internet Cafe, or on the same computer, and so use these social bookmarking sites save pages they might want to go back to for booking or more information. By providing these links we think we are making it easier for the users, one less impediment to use, and therefore hopefully increasing users likelihood of returning to the Backpacking Queensland site. We included the ability to save a page to Facebook as well, because lets’ face it, everyone in this market uses Facebook.

Blog feeds: I have written and presented so many times before about the importance of user generated content. In the new Internet users are seeking information from their peers about the products they are consuming, whether they be travel products or otherwise. Reviews and ratings sites, forums, and blogs provide a user with a great deal of independent content to help them evaluate their options. In the same way as a traveller will talk to other travellers in the hostel common space so too do they use the Internet to research their travels. On the Backpacking Queensland website we have introduced links directly to blogs about the member products. Like the concept of linking the users to You Tube and Flickr for same tag images and videos, we believe that by providing this information on the Backpacking Queensland users will be able to get the independent feedback they require about the products without necessarily needing to go searching elsewhere. The travel stories are all received through our Xebidy Xefeed product where the feeds can be checked for relevancy and then fed back to the Backpacking Queensland website. It means that “unrelated” feeds do not appear. We have handed this completely over to the girls at Gate 7 to manage on a daily basis - although we do offer a complete Internet and social media monitoring service in house here, which you can find out more about here.

Google maps: I think the functionality is pretty intuitive here and don’t quite know what Mr Gehert is referring to when he says “… which was never intended for this purpose”. The maps show you where the member being shown on that page is, and an aggregating map shows where all the members in the area are. Rather than using stylised maps which are meaningless to a user who has not been to, say, Toowoomba, a Google map can be traversed and can show different views from street levels to satellite. On the Backpacking Queensland site we default to satellite maps for the aggregating views because they are fun and make the site look cool, and then use hybrid maps which combine the satellite map with streets for more purpose (unless the satellite view is not high enough density and we just use street view). The user can easily change these views. As many know mapping is something we take quite seriously at Xebidy and unfortunately it becomes a function of time and cost as to how much mapping functionality to include to a client. We are currently undertaking a very extensive development with another client that would see the maps being able to change the content on the page around them and also have a lot of information around the main focus of the map, for example, a hostel can show where supermarkets, ATM’s things to do etc are relative to them. Hopefully, we can extend Backpacking Queensland mapping in this direction at some point in the future.

There is lots more cool functionality in this site, and lots more to Mr Geherts’ email and I will introduce all this tomorrow - need to get on with some work now. As I am sure you can all see, loving the new Backpacking Queensland site though, well done guys.