Unwrapped travel

Just walking down the footpath can be a memorable experience in Southeast Asia — you could easily cross paths with an elephant, meander past a blind musicians or step aside to make way for a column of monks — yet one of the most memorable facets is the food. Clayton, Chad, and Lyndon, three Canadian chef-travellers, decided to record their experience as they cooked — and ate — their way across Southeast Asia. We did a short interview with the guys and have showcased some of their videos on the site — you can read the full interview with Chefs Without Borders here.

So now that the last of the Free Travelfish Guides have been credited out and leaving just some Twitter freebies to be tied up, here is a bit of a reflection on what worked and what didn’t — hopefully will be help to others thinking of running competitions on Twitter — and in general for that matter.

Summary
On Sunday, July 12 we ran a series of competitions commencing at 8am (GMT+8) and completing at midnight the same day. There were three major prizes and a bunch of smaller prizes (t-shirts, Flickr upgrades, Travelfish Guide giveaways).

The small prizes were given away via regular (roughly hourly) “Quick Quizzes” through the day — on both Twitter and the Travelfish Forum.

The big prizes were given away via a 30-words or less competition on the Travelfish Forum. For each prize a contestant had to say in 30 words or less why they should win the prize. These opened at 8am and closed at midnight.

Results at a glance
Including duplicates and double answers, we saw the following number of entries (and views) on the Travelfish forum:

$1000 travel voucher 48 (933)
Four day live aboard 23 (514)
PADI course 25 (511)
Free Travelfish Guides 56 (762)

Separately we saw the largest number of new members join the site ever, site traffic was up roughly 20% for a Sunday along with a significant spike in Adsense earnings (the easiest bit of advertising on the site to quantify). Travelfish Guide sales spiked on the celebration day (odd as we were giving them away) and the Monday was our largest day ever for sales (by value).

Pre publicity
Aside from a couple of tweets through last week, the competition was mentioned in the Travelfish newsletter and the Facebook group. As the prizes are being paid for by us (as opposed to being donated by a company looking for exposure) there was no pressure on us to overly publicise what we were doing. In our view the prime reasons behind the competition were about giving something back to the community (yeah I know a lot of PR people are probably gagging reading that — sorry) — rather than getting out there beating the drum.

Thoughts on the competition in general
It was a lot of work
It was far more work to manage than I expected. While the twitter and forum quizzes and the major prize quizzes were pre-written, it was still time consuming to pick winners, close old threads and add new questions. This was complicated by a spammer who repeatedly hit the forum midway through the competition. Tracking winners in Twitter was particularly problematic (see Thoughts on Twitter below).

It was too complicated
Some people complained they didn’t realise the big prizes were being given away all day; or that there were too many different quiz threads. I forgot to close some threads (when we were being spammed) which led to people adding their answers despite my already awarding a winner on the thread. These answers then bounced the forum thread back to the top of the forum, and more people answered. It was messy.

A lot of window shoppers, not many buyers
Almost one thousand people read the thread about winning a $1000 travel voucher yet less than 50 entered – a 5% entry rate. That’s pretty dire. It’s not like they had to undergo a chromosome test to enter. Particularly as the east coast of the US woke up we say a spike in reads, but not more entries. Admittedly we’re a travel website for independent travellers, but you can see similar hit rates with the diving prizes. Overall we were under whelmed by the number of answers. What did do better was free stuff.

People love free stuff
To get a free Travelfish Guide, all people had to do was add an entry to the message board saying which guide they wanted. It doesn’t get any easier right? We saw a better response rate (albeit still pretty poor) for this part of the competition. Interestingly, the Vietnam pack was by far the most popular request — something not borne out by site usage. So either there’s something wonky with how people use the site, or when people are offered a range of goods for free they take the most expensive — regardless of if they need it or not! (The Vietnam pack, retailing for US$19.95 is our most expensive good for sale — most guides are around the $4.95 mark.

It was difficult to pick the right question
Ask an easy question it goes in five seconds, a hard one (or not even all that hard actually) and nobody knows the answer. Some of our readership are totally new to travel and Asia, others are more expert. It was more difficult to find a balance. For example an easy question, “Name Singapore’s international airport” was answered immediately, while a vaguely difficult one “Name two islands in Laos” was never answered. Finding the right balance was difficult.

Why on Sunday?
That’s just when the Travelfish birthday is. Sunday actually isn’t a bad day at all for traffic for us.

Timezones
We’re based in Bali and some of our top readerships are in Australia, US, UK, Thailand and Singapore. As we didn’t want to let the competition run unwatched (a view vindicated by the spam attack) and I wasn’t up to staying up all night, we decided to start earlyish and finish late. This let people in North America and the UK/EU access the comp at the start and/or end of their day, while people in Asia and OZ/NZ got the most convenient viewing slots. There was never going to be a way to do this that worked for everybody and short of me deciding to stay up all night, I don’t see a better way to do it.

Some people struggle with simple instructions
The big prizes had a 30 word limit on the answer. Many entries went over 30 words. Our preferred entry for the $1000 coupon was for an entry that was over 30 words. Moral of the story? Enter a competition and follow the instructions and you’re already in with a good chance!

Thoughts on Twitter
The majority of the new site members came from Twitter. So, assuming we’re able to convert these new members into participating members longer term, the Twitter effort will be worthwhile.

While I use Twitterfox day to day, I used Tweetdeck to manage the competitions so that I could set up different columns to track the hashtags and mentions. There were a few problems with this.

a) When answering a quick quiz, people didn’t always use the hashtag. As a fictional example, a contestant may enter “Phnom Penh is the capital of Cambodia” as:

Phnom Penh is the capital of Cambodia
Phnom Penh is the capital of Cambodia #travelfish5
Phnom Penh is the capital of Cambodia #travelfish

@travelfish Phnom Penh is the capital of Cambodia
@travelfish Phnom Penh is the capital of Cambodia #travelfish5
@travelfish Phnom Penh is the capital of Cambodia #travelfish

d travelfish Phnom Penh is the capital of Cambodia
d travelfish Phnom Penh is the capital of Cambodia #travelfish5
d travelfish Phnom Penh is the capital of Cambodia #travelfish

Or they’d Direct Message me and one Twitterer (who I know personally) insisted on emailing me his answers each time!

b) There seems to be a lag between the live feed (the left hand default column in Tweetdeck) and the search results (whatever columns you set up to the right). People who had a standing search on a word — for example “Cambodia” would also answer, thinking it was just a question, not realising it was a competition.

c) This was particularly complicated by people who would direct message me answers as initially I wasn’t even tracking that!

The easiest way to get around the above it to either (i) specify exactly how an answer should be formatted (good luck in under 140 characters!) or (ii) steer all answers to the TF board for answering. While (ii) would have seen some drop off as people who wanted to answer wouldn’t want to register on TF to do so, from an answer management POV, it would be how I’d do it in the future.

d) For the Twitter questions, we wanted to give away two prizes on each question, so sticking with the above example, we would say something along the lines of “2nd and 5th correct answer get a prize”. In practise this didn’t really work all that well. Generally the first prize would go, but the second — especially if it was above the fifth reply — would drift unanswered. I put this down primarily to people following large numbers of people and not tracking the #travelfish5 tag. If I was to do this again, I’d run more individual quizzes but one prize apiece.

Would I do it again?
Yes, absolutely — but not for a year

Any advice?
If you’re using Twitter for quiz questions and answers, set yourself up with some kind of a spreadsheet already loaded up with the questions. As the answers come in, add them in with the timestamp for each answer, along with the users TwitterID. If they’re a winner, follow them and direct message them telling them they’ve won and you’ll be in touch at the end of the day/next day with more details. Going back at the end of the day and dissecting all this information, which was my approach — was a real pain.

Choose a short hashtag — we should have used #tf5

If you’re posting URLs to promote the quiz midway through it, have one landing page and plug that and that alone. If you post different urls through the day, people retweeting may not use the URL you want — for example using a URL for a question that has already lapsed — and this is problematic. We switched landing page URLs midway through the competition and it was a big mistake.

In closing
It was fun and I’d do it again. Already some of the new members have been active since on the site and the winners were chuffed with their prizes — makes it all worthwhile!

Other experiences
Travelblogexchange has a dedicated discussion on the topic of running travel competitions.

Yup, where on earth did those five years go?

This Sunday, July 12, 2009, we officially turn five years old — and we’re celebrating!

On Sunday, we’ll be running competitions on Travelfish.org throughout the day, giving away prizes both big and small. Giveaways will start around 9am Bali time (that’s GMT+8).

We’ll also be giving away stuff via Twitter — so if you’re a Twitter user, be sure to follow us and also track hashtag #travelfish5

The total value of all the prizes being awarded is more than US$2,000 US$2,500. While we’re not giving details just yet about what the prizes are, keep an eye on the birthday thread on the Travelfish forum for more information.

Thanks for all your support over the years and hope to see you on Sunday!

Stuart and Sam

Travelfish turns five this year and like most small businesses, when we look back we can see that we’ve made some very good decisions along with some very bad ones. I’ll leave the “looking back over a half-decade of work” post till July, but I do want to discuss one less than good call I made.

I just didn’t get social media.

A couple of years ago (waaaay back in 2007) we had a Singaporean researcher who was all over Twitter — “You’ve got to get on it, Stuart!” she said. I took a look and was struck solely by what a complete waste of time it seemed to be. It reminded me of one of those “Young entrepreneur gigs” at the Australian Embassy in Bangkok — full of, well young entrepreneurs, trying to sell themselves to each other and listening to no one.

Around the same time, the Facebook wave washed through my Asian network of colleagues, hacks and drinking buddies. I joined up and promptly wasted a few weeks of my life on TravelPod IQ Challenge. Then I read a story about Facebook being a terrific promotional tool, so I joined dozens of groups, built half an application and started a Travelfish Group — and left it at that.

There are others: StumbleUpon, FriendFeed, LinkedIn, Plurk and a plethora of social bookmarking/promotional/networking services that I won’t bother to name — all have benefits no doubt, but hey I’ve got a business to run!

But now, I’m starting to get it.

Yes, social media can be a promotional tool, but the promotional angle is a bit like the mayonnaise (or gravy depending on your vice) that comes with a plate of fries. You’ve got to eat the fries and the mayo together to experience the real deal.

Twitter
Take Twitter — the service I’m most active on (you can find me here). When I first joined, the majority of my posts were self-promos: “Hey, read this on Travelfish!”. I “friended” all and sundry — even Barack. There was this vast ocean of people I could forcefeed my links to, so who better than the president of the USA?

Now I’m much more selective on who I “friend” — in particular I avoid people who use Twitter just as I once did.

Now when someone “friends” me I check them out. I read their profile, check out their website, look at their followed/following split and, most importantly, take a look at what they’ve had to say over the past few days.

Does this person have an interesting view? Are they in the travel industry? Would I like to have a beer with them?

Now I tweet far less about Travelfish. I’ll have the occasional moan or plug a post, but I now spend more time reading than tweeting. My Dad was right — sit back, listen and you’ll learn a lot.

As Tim Hughes of The Boot suggested in a recent podcast, the net enables you to punch above your weight (he was actually talking about blogging in general, but the principle is the same). I can sit in the same room as major travel website players — some of whom I greatly admire — and while I keep my fists to myself, I listen to, and learn from, what others have to say.

Needless to say, it’s also a fantastic resource for keeping an eye on what your competition is up to — after all we’re all friends on Twitter.

Bang for your buck, I’ve learned more through Twitter than I ever dreamed to.

Facebook
Back when I used to publish real, dead-tree guidebooks, our distributor in Australia called me up one day and said “Hey, you gotta get out there and do something — the books just aren’t going to sell themselves off the shelves.”

Absolutely.

So, what was I thinking when I started the Travelfish Facebook Group?

Probably not very much.

I started it up, gave it a bit of a plug on the Travelfish forum, told my friends to join, and left it at that. A few people joined, it got up to around 50 members, but I was so busy with the main Travelfish site that I couldn’t see the value in working on the group — how was it going to make me money?

But it’s not about the money — it’s about the relationship.

We haven’t advertised Travelfish in a traditional manner in a long time — it’s an entirely word-of-mouth operation. I’m a firm believer (even if it took $20,000 in Adwords spending to convince me) in there being no better recommendation than one that comes from a friend.

So what was I thinking trying to sell to my friends when what I should have been doing was having a yarn, cementing the relationship and making more friends?

This was crystallised for me the other day when a long-time Travelfish member got in touch and said “Hey, why don’t you have a Travelfish Facebook group?” I meekly responded that we did — we just don’t promote it on the site. She came back with a bevy of suggestions — fresh, really useful advice.

In less than 48 hours she more than doubled the size of the group — and we haven’t even done half of what she suggested yet.

Admittedly the group is still a fairly small size, but at least it is growing again, and assuming these new friendships flourish, hopefully they’ll tell their friends and we’ll get to be friends with them too. Already I’m having conversations with some of these new group members — helping out with advice for their trips and what not, and more often than not, pointing them to Travelfish, where they’ll find even more information.

On friends in general
For the first couple of years, we didn’t have a forum on Travelfish. We had a steadily growing member base, but the return rate was low. People needed to join to generate one of our free PDF travel guides or to contact a guesthouse or hotel, they did so, finished their business and left.

When we added the forum, we saw a marked change in site usage. Return rates increased, member growth rate increased, pageviews and time on site all increased. That’s to be expected when you add a forum.

While in the scheme of themes the Travelfish forum is small fry, it’s a good community that has largely managed to avoid some of the vitriol common on some of the larger travel boards. While in itself the messageboard isn’t much of a money spinner, it is a friendly place and it is the perfect vehicle for me to create and firm up relationships with Travelfish members — and, them with each other.

Happy members tell their friends.

The same goes for social services like Twitter and Facebook groups — they’re both mediums to first create and then nurture friendships. Sure I may be able to turn some of these new friends on to Travelfish, but now I know — making that happen is the mayo and forming and developing the relationship in the first place is the fries.

Lucky I love both.

Love to hear what you think — either use the comments below, or you’ll find me on the following:

Twitter: http://twitter.com/travelfish
Facebook group: http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=2390743505

Every day brings more news about the catastrophic changes that are headed Earth’s way. What’s the use of heading off for a beach holiday if all the beaches are underwater courtesy of rising sea levels? Unfortunately there’s some inevitable environmental impact in opting for a holiday in Asia, but luckily for you, here at Travelfish, we’ve put together a list of 34 ways you can try to reduce the environmental damage you’ll cause to by tramping across Southeast Asia. Read on, and please leave your own suggestions at the end of the story.

So what should it cost you to get out of your home country for a holiday in Asia? We discuss the costs in this, the first part of a five part story about managing your money while travelling in Asia.

In summary, we came up with:
Return airfares to the region: $500-$1500
Travel insurance: $150
Vaccinations: $200-$300 (varies tremendously)
Backpack: $100
Sandals: $50
Passport $100-200
A couple of visas: $100
Yup — over $500 in expenses and you’ve not even picked up an air-ticket yet!

Read the full feature to see the breakdown and collect some advice on how to keep your costs at a minimum.

Every day, here at Travelfish, we’re giving away Travelfish Guides. All you need to do is tell us where a photo was taken — it’s really that simple. Competition is running daily Monday to Friday, see here for full details and to have your guess at today’s pic!

One of the ways we earn a living out of Travelfish is through online advertising. We’ve got direct advertisers like AirAsia, but we also run Google Adsense intermingled with these adverts. All manner of adverts can appear in the Adsense adverts, but they’re generally fairly topical.

This morning I saw something I hadn’t seen before — an advert on the front page of Travelfish for Lonely Planet (see screenshot below).

The ad read:

“Airport backpackers
Book this hotel and other places recommended by Lonely Planet
www.lonelyplanet.com/hotels”

Seems fair enough — lots of our readers would be interested in airport hotels in Bangkok and what not.

Only problem is, the link actually went to http://hotels.lonelyplanet.com/accommodation/-P134638.html — to an airport hotel just outside Johannesburg — yeah, you know the one — in South Africa.

Also it wasn’t a hotel, rather a hostel, but I won’t quibble on minor details like that.

Upon further examination of the LP page, I could book a single room at this hotel, sorry, I mean hostel, for a mere US$43.62 a night. The reservation was handled through HostelWorld, with LP being an affiliate.

How this works is, Hostel World take 10% upfront, add a $2 surcharge and bill the customer — combined that’s their rake-off. This rake off is then shared with the affiliate — in this case Lonely Planet. So let’s do the math.

The standard split for affiliates with HostelWorld is 80/20 — but you can negotiate higher commissions — so let’s assume LP is operating at a special deal of say 50/50.

Room cost for a night: US$43.62
10% deposit: $4.36
50% of deposit $2.18 (the $2 surcharge isn’t normally split with the affiliate)

So, if someone books this guesthouse, sorry, I mean hotel, through Lonely Planet, LP earns around $2.18. Sure the guest might book multiple nights, which would increase the earnings, but it’s an airport hotel — why on earth would you stay at an airport hotel any longer than you had to?

Anyway, in the scheme of things, $2 isn’t too bad — here at Travelfish we earn loads of reservation commissions that are under a dollar — they all ad up.

HOWEVER

LP is promoting this particular place through Google Adwords. What this means is they pay the mighty Googleborg a rate, either per click, or per thousand impressions to have this advert displayed.

Let’s look at the pay per click scenario:

Let’s say they’re paying $0.15 per click — that means they’d need to average a sale every 15 clicks to stay above water (15 clicks will cost them $2.25) — a conversion rate of almost 7% — strikes me as pretty unlikely — especially once LP’s clunky booking interface is taken into account. Perhaps they’re paying less — let’s say $0.10 per click, they’d still need a sale every 22 clicks — not much better.

And don’t forget this is for a reservation at an airport hotel, sorry, I mean hostel, in Johannesburg — 7,500km from Bangkok airport on a travel website that specialises in Cambodia, Laos, Thailand and Vietnam, (the poor placement is primarily Google’s fault, though LP could better target their ads…) so that’s probably going to have some influence on their conversion rate.

So what’s really going on? My totally uneducated, Friday afternoon guess is that Lonely Planet is just buying traffic, which leaves the question, what on earth is the world’s leading travel publisher — owner of the brand of brands — doing buying traffic?

Tip to the online advertising crew at Lonely Planet — try mentioning South Africa in the ad next time, or better still, download our media kit.

And with that, I’m off to spend some of those 50-cent commissions on a few cold drinks at the beach. Have a good weekend!

Leading travel publication, TransitionsAbroad has declared Travelfish Website of the month for August 2008. It’s always great, and very encouraging to receive praise, but even moreso from a publication of the calibre of TA. The full review reads as follows:

“Travelfish.org is a beautifully designed and minimalist website where the content is truly as good as the form. Travelfish is one of the only website-only publishers that pay independent, anonymous researchers to go and visit destinations in Asia which include Cambodia, Laos, Singapore, Thailand, Thai Islands, and Vietnam. Travelfish covers destinations that nobody else does. The coverage of Vietnam, for example, includes entire provinces that you’ll read about nowhere else, on- or off-line. That makes it an ideal information source for independent travelers looking to truly get off-the-beaten track.

Readers are able to make contributions to the site through Travelfish’s hosted forums and blogs, but the editors have limited unedited content in order to focus on the real strength of the website—independent, unbiased reviews, and opinions by travelers who know what they’re talking about.

There is much free content on the site in the form of guides, features stories, suggested itineraries, FAQs, and other resources. In addition, specialized Travelfish guides in PDF format can be (purchased for a very small payment) which cover selected islands, cities, and sites intelligently.

In addition, within the PDF guides every single one of the accommodations listings (and there are over 3,500) has been visited, in person, by one of the researchers at Travelfish. As a result, they represent the largest single repository of accommodations advice for the countries covered.

In the view of Transitions Abroad, Travelfish.org represents the state-of-the-art in the dissemination of reliable travel destination information.”

Transitions Abroad website of the month, August 2008

Thanks!

Travelfish, the online Southeast Asian travel specialists, launched on Monday their updated 15-page downloadable guide to Laos’ riverside capital of Vientiane, the latest in their series of titles navigating independent travellers around the region.

Laos is Southeast Asia’s latest hotspot, named by the New York Times as its top pick for a 2008 country destination. Vientiane, one of the world’s most laid-back capitals, is the gateway for many travellers to Laos and offers a taste of the somnolent Buddhist — and communist — nation in one easy-to-digest bite. Sample spicy Lao food, stay at one of Laos’ increasing number of stylish hotels, and see the sights, ranging from traditional glittering temples to a bizarre sculpture garden perched on the banks of the Mekong River.

The downloadable PDF guide to the city once razed by the Thais is an invaluable research tool for intrepid travellers, boasting more than 100 detailed listings for accommodation, restaurants, bars and sights. It’s far more up-to-date than old-style guides like Lonely Planet and Rough Guides, and much lighter to carry with you.

With more than 34,000 words of tightly-packed travel advice with attitude, the guide will arm everyone from backpackers to luxury tourists with insider information to help them make the most of their journey.

The compact guide also includes information and listings on Phou Khao Khouay National Park.

For just US$4.95, with a seven-day moneyback guarantee, the guide is an essential addition to any Vientiane-bound traveller’s bag.

With the debut of the Vientiane updated guide, Travelfish.org has also launched its first country pack of guides. The Laos combination pack is comprised of guides to Vientiane, Luang Prabang, Champasak and Remote Southern Laos. Together the guides retail for $15.80 but buy all four guides for just $11.85 — 25% off.

Travelfish is an Australian-owned company aiming to arm Southeast Asian travellers with up-to-date information that is more accurate than traditional guidebooks.

Note: Bloggers — please contact Stuart or Sam directly to request a free review copy.

Contact stuartmcdonald@travelfish.org or sambrown@travelfish.org for further information.