Orbitz Worldwide is launching a travel blog
written by outside travel experts and employees. The company says
it is going beyond traditional reviews to offer insights into
destinations for leisure and business travelers.
Aaron Cooper,
Orbitz's online marketing vice president, said the new service was
billed as an added service to consumers, though at some point the
company could look at supporting the blog with
advertising.
"There are a few ways
to categorize this," Cooper said. "One, it's very beneficial for
travelers to find quality information. What we see in general
across travel is that some of the most valuable information that
users generate is in reviews. What we are doing is taking reviews
to a higher level. So this is helpful advice that is not a review
of a city or a property, but of a travel concept or a travel
challenge."
The site officially
launched last week. It had been running in a test format for
several weeks with Orbitz employees posting reviews. These
employees do not write regularly as a part of their job but have
knowledge of a destination and travel activities, Cooper
said.
The posts often link
to other Orbitz pages for more information about the location
described in the blog or to book travel.
"One of the first
posts had to do with finding child care while on vacation to Disney
World," Cooper said. "It's interesting now that if you do a search
on Google and type 'finding child care at Disney World,' we are
coming up as the No. 1 post."
The contributor of
child care information is a director of telesales for Orbitz, said
Cooper.
Other posts may be
more traditional, such as restaurant information, attractions off
the beaten path or tours that a business traveler might be able to
fit into a busy schedule.
Cooper said Orbitz
wouldn't accept a post from just anyone.
"It has to be blessed
by one of our travel experts," he said. "We do have outside
professional travel experts who are contributing to the blog, as
well, and some employees who are in an area of expertise such as
former airline employees, former air traffic controllers and travel
agents."
The blog categorizes
posts to make it easier for consumers to find areas of specific
interest and offers RSS feeds to subscribers.
Cooper said that the
company had not done much promotion or analysis before the launch
to determine how it would link blog information to other pages on
Orbitz, "but we can expect that relevant content from the blog will
be pulled out of our other sites."
Cooper said the
company would start detailed analysis of traffic to the site, which
is at blog.orbitz.com.
To
contact reporter Dan Luzadder, send e-mail to [email protected].