It’s not altogether surprising to see more experience based travel sites popping up. Unlike the “all-in-one” travel sites, this segment still has a tremendous amount of room for growth. Enter on the scene, Kijubi.com, the experience marketplace. It took me a moment to realize that the name, as twodotohish as it is, is actually pronounced “Could you be”, hence the “Could you be… having fun right now”. I hear the collective...

During the OpenTravel Alliance half day session at Eye for Travel’s Distribution Summit in Chicago, we had an opportunity to discuss new and emerging distribution channels including, believe it or not, destination marketers.  Although many of the comments were not particularly supportive of this model, I think there is a huge opportunity for destinations to open up distribution and generate revenue, not only for themselves but for their...

In 1999 I had an opportunity to work with a variety of best of breed e-commerce products for a large retailer in the U.S. midwest.  One of the products I worked with was NetPerceptions.  The software was developed out of a research program at the University of Minnesota in 1992 and is based on the concept of “collaborative filtering”.  Essentially the software analyzes patterns in purchase history and then makes recommendations...

One of my favorite things about speaking at conferences and seminars around the World is what I learn while I’m there.  I often find that I learn just as much being at these confernences as the attendees learn from me.  One such experience was at the Creative Lapland Seminar in Rovaniemi, Finland.  The theme of the seminar this year was “The Best Show Cases in the Experience Economy Focused on Tourism”.  My contribution was...

Scott Woodhouse, CMO of Travellr.com contacted me in early March to invite me and my readers to participate in a private beta test of Travellr.com, a new website he has launched.  What I really liked was the fact that Scott was proactive and created a beta code “t4blog” before he contacted me.  For all you other Web 2.0 marketing types out there, this is a great example of how to engage with a blogger effectively. I released the...