June 1, 2007

Demystifying Tagging For Travel Sellers

How To Make Folksonomy Work For Your Web Site

by Sarah Rotman Epps

with Henry H. Harteveldt, Brian Tesch

Executive Summary (This is a document excerpt)

As travelers embrace Social Computing technologies, travel sellers are responding by launching initiatives like blogs, user reviews, and community sites. Few, however, have ventured into the world of user-generated taxonomy, also known as "folksonomy" or tagging. There are some legitimate reasons why tagging remains rare on travel Web sites, but it's time for travel sellers to give the technology some serious consideration. Travel Web sites suffer from ailments that tagging can help treat: They speak in industry jargon, not consumers' own tongue; they have abysmal keyword search; and they struggle to provide alternative categorization systems for content. Tagging, while far from a perfect solution, can address these problems and introduce new, creative ways to organize content on travel Web sites — especially on content-heavy sites for hotels, resorts, cruise lines, and destination marketing organizations, as well as media sites and portals.

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