German are on the way for Travel 2.0 and travel community.

Today I talk with Uwe Frers, TripsByTips CEO and futur leader in german speaking travel community.

Look at the screens and process, they make a remarquable job ! and great content are already inside the web site

Can you give us an outline of your goals at Tripsbytips?
Tripsbytips.com (http://www.tripsbytips.de) is the community for the honest exchange of experiences between travelers. Travel tips, hotel reviews, restaurant recommendations, travel diaries and travel pictures which are published by members provide transparency and offer inspiration for other travelers. In addition Tripsbytips.com brings together travelers with similar interests through intelligent match-making methods. We translate the Amazon principle of “What A bought, B bought too” for the world of travel.
Our goal for Tripsbytips.com is clearly formulated: by 2009 at the latest we want to be the biggest German speaking travel community.

Tourism is a people business and a destination experience with personal encounters. Do you think the community can leverage a destination or a product thanks to a web site and tools like Tripsbytips?
This is exactly where we can see the potential in Tripsbytips.com: personal recommendations help products (and therefore also tourist destinations) much more than classical marketing. Our members have no reason to promote a hotel or a destination, it’s about real experiences and honest impressions. Whilst classical travel guides (for example books) always have to deal with a subjective selection of topics, the scope of content at Tripsbytips.com is unrestricted. This means that even smaller or to-date unknown travel destinations have a chance at gaining a larger audience. In addition, a community is the perfect answer to the problem of the increasing heterogeneity in our society. Target groups are diversifying and demands are becoming more individual, in that even very individual information and answers are demanded, which Tripsbytips.com can deliver perfectly. The matching up of similar members e.g. through groups and travel topics offers an additional possibility for inspiration.

Who uses your services? Do you have a target audience?
Here we have to differentiate between passive readers and active members. Experience shows us that around 99% of visitors use a community only as a source of information (that is to say just for reading), whilst 1% get actively involved as a member by writing and interaction. Regarding the members, we concentrate on those who understand travel as a passion or who combine another passion such as sport, photography or culture with the topic of travel. Our members therefore provide information about their travel destination in a knowledgeable way. As a result our focus isn’t on experiences relating to package tours rather it is on experiences of individual travelers.

Do you plan to work with professionals as well, like travel agencies, tour operators…or is it only for the end customer?
Later this year we are going to make Tripsbytips.com accessible to professionals. It makes sense, for example, to let a travel operator specializing in travel in Kenya report about their experiences in the country. What is important in doing so is that the readers of Tripsbytips.com know that the content has been posted by a professional. In so far we will indicate content by professionals where it appears. Ultimately professionals will also be able to generate new customers through this channel, therefore this topic will also become a business model for Tripsbytips.com in the medium term.

Internet is going faster and we talk now about Web 2.0 and Travel 2.0. What do you think about this evolution in the tourism & hotel market place? Social media and User Generated Content are the big trends for Travel 2.0? Is Tripsbytips riding the wave of these trends?
Social Media and User Generated Content will lead to a radical change of the media market, but also of many industries such as, for example, the tourism industry. First of all the perfect allocation of all information is possible, which will lead to a continuing weakening of intermediaries (media companies, but also large tourism companies).
From our point of view there is a further great advantage here: there rarely exists comparable industries in which a community, as soon as it reaches a noteworthy size, can be monetized similarly sensibly and without damaging the community. Demand for suitable tourist products by members can be met perfectly, therefore here it is not about heavy-handed advertising but about context related product information.
For hotels and other providers on the one hand this is a chance for direct interaction with customers and therefore higher margins, on the other hand potential weaknesses will also be discovered much quicker. In addition, in the near future market pressure from multi-national tourism businesses will no longer be solely determined by the success or failure of hotels or destinations.

We see the important impact of news technologies (RSS, AJAX, podcast, blog, socialnetworking tools, Google mashup,Vidéo etc), what is your point of view with respect to the travel industry?
Technology based on a personal internet site must remain purely a means to an end. The cautious use of Ajax for example can lead to a better usability. New technologies then become exciting when they are used as a marketing means. The success of cartography information for Facebook shows that contact to several 10,000 users can be built up within no time at all. Therefore here it is about clever ideas, which, using new technologies, lead to new target groups.

Canadian Tourism Commission ( www.canada.travel) is working on a very exciting and innovative initiative with Real Travel (a travel social networking web site) that will launch in the next few months. VisitSweden is in the process of building a travel online community. In France, DMO’s are looking at travel social networks with more and more interest. Tripsbytips will be a new player in the market place. Are you considering a partnership with DMO or other destination management companies?
It makes sense if destinations use this new means as well. A possible problem area may be honesty which is the basic prerequisite for communities. At Tripsbytips.com we have no problem with a member in hindsight criticizing a trip to Canada for understandable reasons and recommending the USA instead. Whether Canada Travel will look upon this in the same relaxed way, remains to be seen. We can well imagine acting as Know How and technology partner but don’t as yet have any concrete plans.

What are your tastes?
Travel:
My personal goal: to have always visited one more country than my age at the time. I’m working on it as best I can!

Travel destination:
On the one hand I love pulsating cities such as Barcelona, Vancouver or London, but on the other hand also the solitude of the Swiss mountains or Umbria, Italy. Next on the agenda are South America and the East as there’s so much to discover there.

Hotel:
I like hotels that offer a coherent, harmonious overall concept. That applies to both a stylish design hotel in Paris as well as to a romantic country house in Tuscany. I like the selection at http://en.escapio.com.

Business:
It’s a small world out there. When it comes to business both partners must be able to say, even after years have passed: it made sense to me. To date I have been happy to cross paths a second time with every business partner that I’ve worked with.

Thanks Uwe. Congrat for this excellent work and all the best for your travel community

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