When was the last time you booked a flight at a ticket counter? Surely a long time ago, and most millennials never have. Digital has changed most of our habits, and none more so than when it comes to traveling.
Digitalization brings clear advantages in marketing and sales for the travel industry, with mobile applications becoming increasingly important as the smartphone market evolved over the last decade. Businesses are keen to propose sale promotions in real time to the customer, which in turn has changed our attitudes to booking. Booking a trip has never been this easy: according to statistics more than 30% of all leisure travelers booked their journey on a smartphone, and this rises to over 50% for business travelers.
360° cameras are becoming more and more popular and evolving into a major social media trend. 360° is an outstanding means to discover and explore surroundings and is obviously an ideal way of inspiring a choice of destination. ZN is experimenting with 360° video content, for example recording our ZN Friday Live stream in 360° on Facebook.
Digital traveling is also an integral part of the journey itself. Nowadays, we are continuously connected, no matter where we are. While traveling we want to share our experiences, giving our social network a taste of the exciting things we are doing. Social media channels are our constant companions: depending on the content we want to share, we pick either Facebook, Snapchat or, now the most popular, Instagram.
When writing a text, take care to make it easy to read! Less is definitely more. According to statistics, a post on Facebook with less than 40 characters earns 85% more engagement than longer posts. Use Emojis: they are fun and make the text shorter.
Sometimes you may want to reach a broader audience, by making your content more viral. Use content-related hashtags, especially on Instagram. Your first instinct may be to use the most popular hashtags such as #traveling, #instatravel and many more. But think about the number of people using them, which makes the chance of your content being seen by other users very poor: there are hundreds of posts every minute, so your post will rapidly disappear in the lower ranks. Try instead to create a story using more specific hashtags. Where are you? What are you doing? When have you been traveling? Why are you sharing your experience? Go local by using hashtags that are location related, e.g. regions and city areas. But you can always try your luck in going global by using trending hashtags.
You can even take your hashtag game further and create one of your own. On ZN’s Instagram we recently introduced #HyperCyclist. One of our team members has taken up a great challenge: she is on a cycling tour from Spain to Germany and getting #OneStepAhead every day. Follow her journey on our Instagram!
Last month, the campaign #DiscoverEU kicked off. Its main concept is to give away free Interrail tickets to young Europeans turning 18 so they can discover the European Union. But is also about people sharing their experiences using a special hashtag: #DiscoverEU to tell the different stories of the journeys they are taking or have taken. ZN supports and welcomes all young travelers in Brussels and wants to help them create the best experience possible. Check out our journey!
Check out the following tips on traveling digitally:
