Richard Turen
If the Internet could somehow be humanized, it would no doubt take the form of a used car salesman. As I approached the development of our agency's website 11 years ago, I decided it would be different. It would need to be different to stand out amid the clutter of "All travel products are luxuriously awesome," which characterizes our industry's collective slice of the information highway.
As a first step to set up our first site, my tech guru, Simon, set me off to "look over WordPress themes and pick out one or two that you like."
Easy enough. After all, my WordPress template choice would need to reflect the quality of what I thought I might be putting out there.
It turns out that choosing a Web presence and identity via WordPress is a tad daunting for the travel consultant with no technology training. You start by looking at ThemeForest, Template Monster, WordPress.org and countless other theme marketplaces that enable developers to sell their WordPress themes, and I learned there are more than 10,000 themes available.
I picked out one or two that looked rather good, somewhat artsy and reflective of longevity. Or so I imagined. Simon didn't like any of them because he didn't trust the developers. They had bad ratings from users.
He picked out five he thought I would like, and we settled on one. Done.
Then we designed the pages. My idea was to enable the general public to ask questions and to get straight, uncensored answers. Our staff saved every interesting question ever posed by clients, and we posted them anonymously.
"Is the free air offer from ___ really free?"
We would respond, "Of course not," and explain why.
There were lots of questions from visitors outside the country. That was OK because we had a business plan. It was one sentence long: "We will strive to be the one travel site that places trust ahead of profits." We would not sell anything on our site except travel integrity. Our site sold nothing and accepted no ads.
Now I don't want to get all preachy about the trust thing, but I do believe that far too many travel agents turn to websites to sell stuff when what they should be selling is themselves.
I also believe that if you're being honest and take a few steps backward, you will see travel hucksterism in profusion on travel websites. Everyone wants the booking. Everyone wants the bucks. Everyone has the best prices. There are deals and ads for deals along with pop-ups with more deals and the wonderful ability to speak with a headset directly from your computer to get a deal. Even the used car dealers aren't doing that.
So we decided to do Q&A on the right side of the page and honest product ratings on the left side of the page. We could afford to be honest because we were not accepting any money from suppliers and because we waited to launch our website after our business had already taken off and we would not be at all dependent on online bookings.
We told visitors to our site how we make money, explaining the industry compensation models. We advised that if they were really after the best price they should find a part-time agent in the neighborhood who was operating out of her kitchen and would gladly rebate 50% of her commission. We told our visitors to never believe weather information on tourist-board sites.
Then there were the articles. We recommended other travel agents, explained which credit cards waive the 3% transaction fees, and we called out airlines that advertise "lie-flat" beds that are really "angled" flat beds.
The site grew and grew. And we started to realize the implications. I started devoting more and more of my waking hours to the care and feeding of the hungry beast. Simon was worried about me. I was a kind of technological "innocent abroad." We were turning away people who wanted to work with us every business day. People loved the site, but I was getting addicted to the information supply chain. I needed to read more, to know more, to post more.
So I did the only logical thing I could do. I told Simon, "Let's start a second site."
After all, how hard could it be? We would, I reasoned, use the same template so I would already know how to input the content, and instead of taking on the entirety of worldwide travel, this second site would be totally devoted to one single aspect of travel: river cruising.
But I quickly ran into trouble because this new site, which also featured a Q&A, would address some of the hard questions about river vessels that were not being addressed on company sites. Again there were reviews. Again, the site was being totally funded by me. It was producing no advertising or marketing income. Visitors could not book on the site. We didn't even list inventory. We simply sold trust and tried as best we could to educate the public about river cruising, employing the same one-sentence business plan.
Unfortunately, this second site took off beyond our fondest hopes. We are averaging 10 serious bookings and contacts per day, and that is happening while we are turning down overseas business and inquiries from the humorless.
I started being teased by friends. My own daughter thinks I have become "a Web nerd." A friend introduced me to some folks at a party as a "webmaster."
The addiction was getting serious. I launched a third site. This one was easier still. We had designed a series of shore excursions for upscale guests on cruise lines who wanted private tours that really gave them a sense of contemporary life in-country. So we started a new company devoted to this purpose, and we started offering tour planning and consulting services to suppliers. In my defense, that site requires very little maintenance. So now I'm up to three sites. Simon thinks I am doing enough. He may be getting tired of my calls although not, I suspect, of my billing hours.
All of which brings me up to the present. Last Monday we launched our fourth site. This was, I felt, absolutely necessary. It took me a year to develop, and we finally found a wonderful WordPress theme with a new approach to content. The idea was that our other sites were interesting, perhaps even entertaining, to a portion of the travel public, somewhat useful to travel writers and journalists but less useful to our actual clients. I decided we needed a password-encrypted site just for our clients where we could really speak openly.
And, for the first time on any of our sites, we would actually allow site users to talk back to us. The site is both professional and personal, and it enables our clients to interact with one another. Again, I pay for everything, including Simon's incredible design. There are no ads, no booking engine, no conversations with headsets. There is, however, a photo of Borat in a mankini on a satirical page discussing travel personality types.
So now, as Simon has pointed out, my addiction is "full-blown." "Mr. Anti-Technology" is now writing and editing four major websites, with the help of some extremely talented Concierge Team Members and my extraordinary wife.
I have finally reached the point where I might require some sort of "intervention." But before I go there, I am really excited about our latest project, a fifth website going live on Aug. 1 that will examine upscale cruising in a hype-free, ad-free, truthful manner.
This one will come out of the gate with hundreds of pages of original content, and it is going to be a ton of work. I have, therefore, delayed my intervention.
Always remember the words of the great philosopher Mel Brooks: "We mock the things we are to be."