In this guest post Michael Phillips of iGuidez.com explains why videos are so useful in travel planning as they give you a much better feel for an attraction or destination as opposed to a short description accompanied by a static photo.
“Travel guides have failed to catch on early that online location based services are the next big thing in travel. This was obvious a few years back because a search for a specific museum, restaurant, nightlife, park would have listed many sites that would have only displayed brief details – perhaps for those that really did demonstrate a willingness to go that step further they may have had a single paragraph. Even today this market is wide open and its only the likes of Yahoo, Yelp, Google, Expedia and a few others that are harnessing the power of user-submitted material.
Saint-Pierre cathedral, Geneva, Switzerland
In fact, only quite recently a site called Townme in the US began to concentrate on geolocation information town by town. It was subsequently bought by Twitter on December 31st 2009! At iGuidez we were one of the first to identify this new market and immediately began producing videos of buildings and landmarks for Bologna, Italy since 1996. The theory goes like this: you’re going to Bologna and are interested in seeing a bit of the city. Normally, you would consult a travel guide which would of course summarize the main places or categorize places by ‘museums’, ‘nightlife’ and so forth. The problem with books is that they only ever display a short description, may be a photo and perhaps even a rating for it. But as many of you can attest to, often this falls far short of what the place is really like. So one way around this is to make a video guide which shows the subject for what it’s really like – a documentary style film that also provides exact details in a matter of a few minutes.
Youtube of course is the daddy of video. This in itself indicates that video is not only one of the biggest future markets but an area where nearly any commercial venture can get involved. Let’s face it, the next generation who only understand the digital age are not going to carry books around but mobile devices that will instantly bring them up to date information in easy to view formats such as video and images. As most marketers will tell us we like being spoon fed. Therefore, travel related data in short bite-sized videos may just solved that need when we’re planning a trip.
To prove a point, our page on Bologna has almost 150 video guides covering a vast range of buildings and landmarks. Nobody can possibly compete with us, not even in Italian. The amount of data we’ve got on our database is huge yet, anyone can access it very easily and freely. Traditional travel guides cannot match it because they are limited by space, time and a lack of understanding about the whole geobased market. Just try looking at LonelyPlanet, RoughGuides or any other online guide and begin an in depth search about a city. Your search will come to an abrupt halt since these guides still only cover the highlights – which is fine, however, the future need of this market changed yesterday.
Palazzo Comunale, Bologna, Italy
Unfortunately, one of the greatest downfalls of this jump in trends happens to be the speed of a technological catch-up. When Youtube was bought over by Google, it soon transpired that the main telecom companies around the world were seriously caught off guard and for a long time afterwards had no idea how to cope with the sudden burst of activity eating up their networks. It’s definitely improving now but still has a long way to go.
For smaller fish like us at iGuidez the near future is a very exciting time as everyone is climbing aboard the video market but in particular location based services. Again companies like Twitter are suddenly leading the way and as soon as the textual based data is conquered you will then see a major effort to improve video and images being transferred via mobile networks.”
