As reported in January’s New Media Age, Virgin Atlantic are preparing for the soft launch of their new travel portal “Vtravelled”. According to the article, the community site will aim to recruit 2 million founding members between the soft launch date (end of Feb) and the rollout in June – an ambitious target.
The site moves Virgin into territory already covered by their main long-haul airline rival – BA. “Metrotwin” is based around the idea of “use[ing] what you know about one city to explore the other one.” So Borough Market in London is twinned with Union Square Greenmarket in New York. It’s an interesting idea, complimented by the excellent look and feel of the site and interesting content – a point well observed by Alex Bainbridge in his blog.
Virgin’s community site takes a different approach. According to the NMA article, the site will focus on:
• providing an “inspirational” site that will help “spark ideas for new trips”
• image and map content
• hosting “personal travel content” in the form of “trip pods” that allow users to share their travel plans, photos, notes and chat
Ultimately, Virgin want customers to “think of the site when making a travel decision”.
As Alex points out in his blog, with this approach, much of the content appears to be focussed on an individual’s travel plans. This differs from sites such as TripAdvisor and Metrotwin where much of the content is focussed on a place and therefore often of interest to other users.
There is also a crossover of functionality with the large social-network players (Facebook, MySpace etc.). Can Vtravelled persuade users to leave Facebook and other social networks to post photos and chat to their friends?
I believe that the success of the site will come down to the implementation. If the look and feel and feature-set are attractive enough to the target audience (users who wish to share travel plans or plan trips), then users may embrace these tools and make the jump.
Arguably Virgin have the clout to make this happen. Other recent Virgin advertising activities (agreeably not in “digital) seem to have been a success. I joined Virgin Active after the “lose the bits you hate” tube poster campaign and the more recent Virgin Atlantic TV ads are extremely impressive.
Whether Virgin can meet their ambitious targets remains to be seen. I for one am looking forward to following the success of the site, not least because of what it will say about consumers appetite for niche social-network communities. From my experience implementing social networks for our clients I do believe that niche networks are the future. I think users are willing to sign up to sites that they identify with, me included. Recently I’ve signed up for the BA website and a Cravendale branded ‘make the tea‘ site! But at Neoco we know that, however grand the scope of a new social network, it’s expert implementation that will keep members engaged over time.
Tags Alex Bainbridge BA community Cravendale Facebook hosting london Make The Tea maps Metrotwin New Media Age New York NMA social networks trave;l Trip Advisor trip pods Virgin Virgin Active virgin atlantic Vtravelled