Search the travel papers: a short cut for tour operators and travel pr companies
November 8, 2007
Garri Rayner from HolidayPad tells me me he hasn’t seen much activity on this blog recently. Thanks (I can’t remember, is there a smiley for sarcasm?). Normally, the associated guilt would mean I’d chop him off my Christmas list (except I never get round to that either).
However, Garri was pitching something called Travel in Papers, which provides a quick way of checking what’s been in the travel sections of the main UK press lately, or at least as far back as they’ve kept open archives (which means you get all of one result from the Times Online if you search for me - a pretty poor return for 17 years of hard graft, jet lag and cocktails on the world’s greatest beaches).
The site is a clever use of Yahoo! pipes and RSS. I can imagine travel PR’s using it to check on client coverage but it will take some marketing to get it into the bookmark folders of the general public.
Still, they’ve got ambitious plans for the service, including rolling it out to a bundle of different countries and incorporating a social media module which will scour Flickr, delicious etc. for travel-related content.
Back to the travel sections: tour operators and travel pr people will be glad of anything which extends newspaper coverage - or at least helps make it more accessible. In the explanation of the what and why of Travel in Papers, Garri gives the example of holidays in Greenland and how a search on the site leads you to an article by the novelist Irvine Welsh in the Observer.
I remember it well, four pages of prime Sunday real estate. I also remember that the holiday company involved received just one enquiry on the following Monday. Tally up the cost of sending Welsh to Greenland for several days as well as the administration costs of organising the trip, set it against the value of just one phone call from a potential customer and there is a classic example of why travel PR’s need to look beyond newspaper coverage these days to help their clients publicise their products.