A few months ago, I wrote a post on the potential of online video in the vacation rental industry, commenting on the impact online video services could have for vacation rental managers.

Since then I have discovered numerous niche travel websites where users share their travel videos with other travelers and watch informational guide videos to learn more about travel destinations.

Geobeats.com offers travelers high quality, informative travel videos, providing users with helpful information about specific travel destinations (mostly international) before they have to shell out the $$ to actually visit. Below is a screen shot and link to a video about the Beer Gardens in Berlin, Germany.

Emerging Video Services

Sites such as travelervideos.com and travelistic.com allow users to upload videos of their travels for other users to watch. Most of these services are ripe with ideas, but thin in actual content. For instance, travelervideos.com and travelistic.com have only acquired 5,859 and 5,348 videos, respectively.

Of course, we’d be remise if we didn’t mention YouTube, which, along with water skiing squirrels, also has a solid inventory of travel related videos. YouTube is the solution of choice for many, as it allows users to place videos directly on their own sites through YouTube’s extension widget. However, general travel videos tend to get lost in the cloud of YouTube’s +2.5B video inventory. For example, the first three results in a search for “Miami Beach” on YouTube result in: (1) a video by Marilyn Mason; (2) three girls in a bikini walking on a beach; and (3) Brittney Spears sunbathing. Not exactly the video content property managers can use to drive more consumers to their destination.

Another interesting service is Triporia.com which offers similar services to the sites discussed above. In addition to offering a social video sharing service, Triporia also encourages businesses to create their own promotional videos.

Why promotional videos about a Property Management company could be useful:

• Help emphasize professional management services offered (i.e. 24 hour emergency contact, on location recommendations, etc.)
• Increase consumer confidence and convert more consumers from looking to booking vacation homes
• Videos showing actual homes will give insight into what to expect from the vacation homes themselves

Triporia.com currently has less than 500 videos and very limited traffic, so its too early to endorse the service as a “must have” in the vacation rental industry. However, the idea of using this type of service as a promotional tool could prove to be an effective utility in building your brand, attracting more guests and ultimately driving more bookings.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 6th, 2008 at 11:41 am and is filed under Food for Thought, New Service Radar. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.