Travelta aims for completeness

New Dutch travel portal Travelta aims for completeness. The site at the moment includes travel packages from about twenty tour operators. Arke and Oad are expected to join soon. Travelta expects to cover about eighty percent of the total online travel packages by this spring. From the first second onwards Travelta personalizes the site by giving these options: “I have been here”, and “I want to go here”. Besides visitors can interact with other visitors.

Visitors can write reviews, connect pictures and video clips to locations, and maintain their own profile with earlier vacations and new vacation plans. Via group messages travel groups can discuss offers they see at the site. If you have vacationed with a group of people, you can upload pictures to the information of the vacation, as can the rest of your travel group. Thus the whole group will have all pictures gathered at one location.
The site has no advertisements, no screaming banners or ‘book now’ buttons - it gets commission for travel booked through the site. The tour operators all have to pay the same, so that they don’t have influence on the way the offers are shown. Visitors would immediately see through that, according to Travelta’s director Paul van der Klooster. He doesn’t expect people to hold back on sharing pictures and travel experiences on a site that makes money on booking vacations. “We don’t push people to book. We just make a good selection of options for travel you say to be looking for on your personal page.” (em, Dutch).
And thus the holiday branch is leading the development of personal brands. This might be logical: after all, the holiday branch (or more pure: the leisure branch) is the biggest branch in the world. When travel sites all have realized completeness, in a next step these personal holiday brands will have themselves represented by brand agents. They then also will keep up the dialogue with us during our vacation through our mobile phones, the hotel screen, or any other display available, and thus will help us make even more of our vacation. This new type of brands thus will become indispensable friends during our holidays. This is a huge step in that direction.

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