Although it has been a few weeks since we released the new look and feel for Travel Generation I have yet to sort of declare it open season as we iron out a few bugs and have the super elite beta testers go to work on it. However, for most now they would have seen the massive overhaul we have done to the Travel Generation website and most obviously the blog and the home page.

In my post on banner advertising I said “it staggers me how few companies actually consider their click through rates from search results even though they are so preoccupied with their search results rankings” and subsequently received a barrage of enquiries as to what it was that I meant.

The Rainforest Group in Franz Josef consists of three separate brands on a massive property. Our job was to create three websites that shared the same Rainforest brand but were independent for their respective markets.

In training for long distance running or bike racing we talk about effective training and training junk miles. Junk miles are those that really achieve very little to your overall training regime because they are not specifically targetted to your goals or are not functioning within your training programme. I think we should adapt the same philosophy to web traffic. There are quality visitors and junk visitors.

The new Hostelworld iPhone app – HostelHero looks friggin cool (and you can do all your research offline):

I was pointed to a recent blog post by Alex Bainbridge about conversion rates and the need to create DESIRE in marketing travel product. DESIRE was a term Alex coined as he explained that travel products needed to create a real want by potential customers for the product. Interestingly we heard a similar argument from Karen Gussman the Marketing Manager for the Central Europe Region on behalf of Tourism Northern Territory at the ATEC Backpacker Conference.

Banner advertising, or any web advertising for that matter beyond cost-per-click, is one of the most frowned upon advertising mediums. However, in my opinion this is completely without good reason.