Websites Stream Images for Trips
Luxury Travel Vacation Planning is a Snap With Hotel Video Guides
Jan 17, 2008
Vacation travel planning has changed dramatically with the advent of Web 2.0 technology on the web. This technology allows for interactive travel review websites, more details about prospective destinations and their hotels, and links to vacation activities and dining suggestions. Travel blogs are viewed by half of all people who read blogs (PhoCusWright, 2007), and live camera feeds and video shots from destinations around the world are viewed by more and more travel planners.
Now, hotels post photos and short videos of their interiors on websites - however, these serve as ads, not as objective views. It's no surprise, then, that a few video enhanced websites have been developed to assist luxury travel planners decide where to stay for vacations.
Luxury Travel Vacation Planning with Webcams and Video:
- The most popular snow conditions website in the world is OnTheSnow. Luxury Travel talked with its managing director, who explained that the best luxury family ski vacations are easily planned with up-to-date ground condition reports at every ski resort in North America, with webcams at many major ski vacation destinations. Luxury hotel reviews are part of OnTheSnow, with the interactive nature of Web 2.0 interfaces enabling users to contribute their own opinions of hotels and ski resorts. This website really takes the guesswork out of ski trip destination planning.
- Billed as the "leading hotel video guide for booking the best deals online," TVtrip covers 46 destinations and almost 4,000 hotels, with (as of this writing) 3,500 videos and 366,000 reviews. Luxury hotels in major vacations cities as Berlin, Chicago, Dublin, Florence, London, Madrid, New York, Paris and Rome are thoroughly reviewed, and more are added every week. Luxury Travel spoke with the owner of TVtrip; he described how all footage in each location is filmed by professional cameramen. It's built to be as unbiased and transparent as possible, to be credible with luxury vacation planners. The videos really get inside hotel rooms and suites; it's like a hotel search engine with advanced video player capabilities.
- Trivop offers the same service as TVtrip, as another consumer choice for video guides for hotels, it's not quite as easy to navigate. Also like TVtrip, Trivop manages a worldwide network - so that travel vacation planning can occur at the level of looking at hotels' rooms, lobbies, business centers, and more. Some of the video footage of hotel rooms and suites looks amateurish.
These are three online options for luxury travel vacation planning. From a sample exploration of both TVtrip and Trivop, the video streaming on the former seems to be standardized at a more professional level, with higher quality videos. Trivop was the first hotel video guide website, however, and both are still relatively new. Perhaps, given time and a learning curve, Trivop will become as easy to use (and add the same cutting-edge technology) as its competitor.
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