mission statement
AllTravels mission is to become a useful part of the online travel ecosystem and to empower both our visitors and our customers.
about the current site
The alltravels.com domain name was registered in February 2000 and has been held in reserve until time was available for development. We think it’s a great brand with which to enter the online travel industry at this interesting time but available development time to date has been limited.
The web site has been under construction part-time since late 2005 and has been online since mid 2006. Currently in the prototype stage. About six months intensive development is required to take it to the beta testing stage. When completed there will be an informative public site and a highly personalized and functional members area.
This is a database driven site which means that pages are generated “on the fly” and the content of the pages depends on what’s in the database. There’s actually a lot more in the databases than you can see on the site at the moment and these current databases are only the development core of those to come.
The site is listed in the indexes of the major search engines but not yet heavily trafficked. There were just over 2,700 pages (and one broken link) listed in the Google index at the beginning of 2007 but the site has very little page rank as we’ve been keeping it under wraps during development. As there are (deliberately) very few inbound links to this site at the current time it is not yet highly ranked by any search engine and therefore attracts little traffic. However, the site has a very long and fat tail from a search engine’s point of view so we expect traffic to the site to increase dramatically when we start to add inbound links and then increase exponentially when the site is fully developed.
For the technically minded the site uses a PHP middle layer to generate HTML from a MySQL database. Currently there are about 70,000 pages being generated by 15 PHP pages and about 10 includes; the pages are controlled by a single Dreamweaver template, one style sheet and one JavaScript file. In future the public content will be published to the server rather than generated on demand; any dynamic content required in the public area of the site will be handled by AJAX requests. The members area will be 100% dynamic based on the same data as the public site but with a lot of added functionality and personalisation.
Note: Currently there are some errors in the data when drilling down through more complex administrative regions (states and provinces) of countries and in the accommodation section but these will be fixed at the next database upgrade.
where's this site going?
user centric & destination focused
The online travel market is maturing, Travel 2.0 is here, customers are displaying a preference for destination specific and user orientated services rather than product orientated, catalog style booking engines. They want “real” reviews and information from their peers and they want to make their own choices about how to book travel products.
AllTravels.com is being developed to meet the requirements of Travel 2.0. The site is user and destination centric rather than product orientated, user generated content such as travel information, advice and reviews will be a key component and generous rewards will be offered to top contributors.
site main sections
destination guides
The main backbone of the site, from an information architecture point of view, is the destination guides section. Everything else hangs off of this backbone and is cross linked where applicable. Currently there are some 35,000 destinations listed and we expect that there will be in excess of 100,000 listed in the next phase of development. Anywhere that the customer wants to go they will be able to research and/or book via AllTravels.com.
multimedia & interactive content
Multimedia and interactive content will be a key component of the public site in the near future; currently there are just a few experiments and placeholders in this section. The multimedia section is a huge undertaking in itself but from experience I know that it will draw a lot of traffic. (Not all the visitors will be customers but there will be many customers amongst them.) It will also attract inbound links from web sites in the destinations that it displays.
accommodation
Different people book their travel accommodation in different ways, some like the convenience of instant online booking and confirmation and others want to talk directly to the accommodation provider. Currently we only offer the option of affiliate branded links to some 21,000 hotels but in future direct web links to a hotel’s web site and other direct contact options will be available.
We will be offering free basic listings and enhanced advertising options to all bona fide travel accommodation providers so as to offer the widest possible range of options to site visitors. The customer will be able to book online or offline, directly with the hotel or indirectly via an online booking service.
other travel products
Besides accommodation there are a wide variety of other travel products and services. There’s too many to fully list here but they include, tours and cruises, travel insurance, security and evacuation, car rental, travel guides, equipment and baggage, tickets to attractions and special events, currency exchange and so on.
Eventually we will be offering a full range of online advertising, booking and purchasing options for everything travel related. Again a free basic listing will be available to the travel industry world-wide with enhanced advertising options available to those who want it.
prizes & coupons
If you’re involved in online travel you might have noticed an increasing number of prizes and coupons being offered in 2006. Everyone likes prizes and discount coupons, AllTravels.com intends to offer as many prizes, gift certificates, coupons and upgrades as we can find to our members.
alerts & auctions
Last minute deal alerts and online auctions, name your price services, these are all becoming very popular with online travel customers.
members area & site personalization
Probably the key component of the site will be the member’s area; this is where things become very interesting. Like Amazon, Google and Yahoo (for example) visitors to the public area will be recognized via a persistent cookie if possible and basic personalization applied. When signed in the user experience will become very different as many of the constraints required of a search engine friendly and 100% usable page structure will be removed or can be managed.
Site personalisation combined with the use of advanced coding techniques and technologies will result in a very advanced, flexible and customisable user experience. Site member’s preferences plus other data such as records of contributions and planned trips will be stored in a separate database.
The travel industry will be encouraged to offer discounts, upgrades and coupons to site members who will also be eligible for extra special discounts via email alerts and be able to participate in online auctions for travel products, (as per ebay travel for example).
travel industry services
AllTravels will be a place where the travel industry can connect to, and interact with their customers. They can advertise, offer coupons and discounts, answer questions and discuss/resolve negative feedback and complaints by our members.
Further down the track we plan to offer back end and marketing systems to the industry, either as small desktop applications or as hosted services. There is also the option of offering a range of other products such as research data and multimedia services.
The online travel industry is always hungry for content, if the demand is sufficient we plan to offer syndicated content and data feeds once we have enough of it.
notes to the above
- Many of the above services and systems are already in place around the web and especially the online travel industry but nowhere, that we know of, are they all offered in the one place like they will be here.
- There’s quite a few distinct subjects and concepts mentioned above. We’ve tried to keep to the outlines and minimized the technical jargon. Please contact us if you have any questions about this project.
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