Virtual Tourism

Hoping to entice new visitors, more tourism boards and hotels are increasing their presence on the web. Three new sites have emerged that will allow web-surfers to exchange information with fellow travelers. The Mayan World on Second Life allows visitors to virtually experience Mexico's history and culture; yatt'it, a division of Hyatt Gold Passport, provides insight and tips from Hyatt employees and regular guests; and the Pure New Zealand channel on YouTube provides quick glimpses at different parts of the country with comments and commentaries from other visitors.

Second Life, an online “virtual world,” allows users (“Residents”) to interact with each other through animated avatars in both imaginary and realistic locations from the comfort of their own homes. The new Mayan World, called Ruta Maya, features a photo-realistic three-dimensional recreation of five different popular Mayan sites and “will enable more than 13 million of Second Life’s residents to become familiar with the major attractions of southeastern Mexico,” says Eduardo Chaillo, director, Strategic Business Unit, Mexico Tourism Board, U.S. & Canada. After six months of development, supported by the Mexico Tourism Board, the program launched on April 3, and has already seen several thousand virtual guests come by. “There is a lot of buzz around Second Life regarding how much people are enjoying Ruta Maya,” Chaillo says, adding that the site “is getting so many visitors that Second Life decided to put it on the cover of [its] home page."

Inside Connections
yatt’it, a more traditional Web 2.0 site, allows Hyatt Gold Passport members to compare information with one another and with Hyatt employees. The site launched on March 31 and has averaged 2,400 unique visits per day, as of April 6. Rene Mizwicki, director, Hyatt Gold Passport, says that yatt’it was “created in response to our customers becoming increasingly more savvy and sophisticated about online travel resources. Today, more and more people rely on the Internet, specifically user-generated content, because they want authentic advice and information. That is why we created yatt’it. We wanted to develop an online community where our guests could connect with each other and also with our expert concierges around the world in order to obtain the best travel advice possible.”

Although anyone can view the information on the site, only staff from Hyatt hotels and Hyatt Gold Club members can contribute content. “Hyatt Gold Passport members are confirmed frequent travelers,” Mizwicki explains, “so the information they post on yatt’it is tried and true. In developing this online community, we wanted to make sure we were offering a forum for authentic information, so users could have the utmost confidence that everything they read on the site is reliable. Limiting the user-generated content to our expert concierges and Hyatt Gold Passport members was a way for us to ensure that all users would benefit from the site. User-generated content is at its best when it is dependable, and that is what we have created with yatt’it. We believe users will appreciate the element of authenticity.”

Mizwicki’s numbers show promise, even at this early stage. “Visitors are averaging five page views per visit and we’ve received more than 500 new tips and comments. We’ve also had more than 1,300 new yatt’it members, 87 of whom are new Hyatt Gold Passport members who joined the program via yattit.com,” he says.

Video Vacation
On YouTube, visitors can view and comment on video clips, sometimes responding to one video with another, forming a visual interconnected network. Individuals and organizations can create “channels” for any kind of video they desire, whether informative or entertaining. Last September, Tourism New Zealand brought 600,000 people to its channel by advertising on YouTube’s homepage, and within a month, the channel had almost 670,000 visitors. TNZ’s chief executive George Hickton says that the company’s “executive management and consumer marketing team, together with its advertising agency, came up with the idea of taking over YouTube as part of Tourism New Zealand’s strategic business plan to move away from more traditional media to embracing digital media and more interactive ways of connecting with visitors.”

The move to embrace new media, Hickton explains, is one of the pillars of the new campaign strategy. “But while technology is seen as the way New Zealand can take our message to the world,” he says, “that message is very much one about New Zealand being a place that can offer visitors life-changing experiences through the power of our landscapes, the personalities of our people and the stories that link the two.”

While TNZ cannot say how many more visitors came to New Zealand because of the video content on the channel, Hickton did note that total international visitor arrivals to New Zealand grew by almost 2 percent this past year to almost 2.5 million.

Travel agents can also use these sites to further acquaint themselves with what different locations and hotels have to offer their clients. All of the sites are free to view, and memberships to participate are usually easy to get and free as well (Hyatt’s requirement of Gold Passport membership notwithstanding). Armed with the information these websites provide, agents can more easily customize a vacation for any kind of client, and can be aware of what visitors are experiencing all over the world.