Is it possible to sell vacation packages and hotels from my own website in a professional manner just like from a real travel company. Having visitors browsing through hotels and vacation packages with pictures on my own site would be amazing, but is it possible ? Anyone in this business that can give some pointers and ideas ?
Hi I was actually looking at IAN for an hour ago, coming from hotels.com. Yes it seems to be something close to what im looking for. I just finds it odd that not any of cj.com advertisers have something really good to offer for travel portals etc. Thanks for the tip though. Anyone else at this board that have something good going on your own travel portal ?
I think it would be very difficult to make money on a site like you are describing. There is TONS of competition out there (have you checked out YTB, for instance????) and all of your product is reduced to a commodity which simply sells for the lowest price. I have a travel blog. And I get a lot of organic traffic. Maybe consider something like that where you actually have an opportunity to post original content and then branch off of that. http://www.travelsnippetsandmore.com/
I already have a travel site under 100K alexa, that must mean something. With some more pages and stuff it could work well I think. Also I just don't think "everyone" goes with the most cheap solution. I myself looks for established and trusted sites when I want to do business. No I havnt checked out YTB but have made some searches about it and it looks pretty negative. The thing you are talking about will not last in the longrun. That's what me and my partners are looking for, longterm things and trust, which mostly lasts in the long run.
My comment about YTB, I realize, was not clear. Yes, I agree with you. I too feel YTB is not the way to go but I was just using it as an example of what the competition could be like. Congrats about your travel site being under 100K alexa! I personally do not go with cheap but instead work with a well trusted TA. What I'm saying is that I think it would be hard to project 'established and trusted' just through a web site that had nothing more than a booking engine.
Hey, I agree with you that it's not the future of having just a booking engine, there will be tons of "spider food", amazing design and a forum. So pretty big if we ever develop such project. The only thing in this that I thought would be hard in such project is the booking engine on our end. But there are some solutions atleast. Thanks for showing your interest, appreciates it.
Particularly for hotels I can recommend you booking.com with which aff. program I have been working some 3 years. Also they offer very nice implementation methods of their hotel-search, for example with your own template, so that people can make their reservation via same interface and site design.