Gaia Travels uses it's Facebook page very rarely to promote their products and share related information. Twitter would require even more updates. Youtube videos proposed in earlier posts could be found on Facebook as well as local happenings in destinations.
If Gaia Travels wants to start offering last minute offers, Facebook would be the place for it but also SMS messages and emails. Facebook is a suitable forum for questions & answers also but the most important is social image, connecting with present and future clients.
Customer opinions about accomodation on Tripadvisor.com is important for those who want to know what others think. Gaia Travel should offer only the best. Also basic discussion forums should be kept under control and maybe offer correct information, links etc.
Google is one of the best known search engines in the world and actually in Finland there are over 30 000 searches every hour. That's why it would be important also for Gaia Travels to use Google services as a marketing and promotion site. When looking at the results of theGoogle Insights for Search about Gaia Travels it's good to know that there is some activity on their site and people are using Google to find out more. From the statictics you can see, though, that all the searches come from Finland even though they have office also in Italy. So there's a place for improvement. You can also see that there are more searches during the Spring and Summer when the holidays are ending.
Google is a great way to market your business and when typing the words "talo Italiassa (home in Italy", "loma Italiassa (vacation in Italy)", Gaia Travels is quite high placed among the results which is a really good thing of course. But when typing the words "lennot Italiaan (flights to Italy) Gaia Travels doesn't exist in the results and that's where they should also be highlighting themselves. But though some words gave the wanted results of being on the first page of the results, there was no highlighting in the ads. So it might be that person who has never heard about Gaia Travels before can easily skip the site especially because the name of the company doesn't sound like a Finnish one. So making even more ad words which will show up better would definately raise the interest about the Gaia Travels website.
One thing also is to use the Google Maps. Because Gaia Travels has so many beatiful villas and cottages all over Italy it would be nice to the potential customers to undestand where they exactly are located. So linking all the villas to Google Maps it would make it easier for the customers to decide where to live during their holiday in Italy. They could easily see which big cities or other places of interest can be found nearby and if there are some other services such as supermarkets in the area. So it's all about making the decision-making easier. Many travelers use also Google Earth and especially the Street View function to see how the city or village looks like in reality.
Gaia travels works closely with Sikke Sumari and they (Gaia Travels) linked this article to their Facebook pages (unfortunately only in Finnish) in which Sumari mentiones that she has rented cottages from Gaia Travels and actually filmed her tv show in one of them.
In my opinion they could use Sumari´s reputation and contacts better and use her programme or name as way to get reputation. In Sumari´s own webpage they could have more space, in the current situation Sumari only briefly mentinones Italy and that there are good cottages but nothing about Gaia Travels (at least I could´t find any mention). Gaia Travels banners are missing from hotel search engine sites such as hotels.com and booking.com offering a choice for hotel accomodation.
Also on Gaia Travels webpage Sumari could be more visible as now there is only a side banner. They could have also some connections to Italy-Finland club and advertise their packages and cottages through that.
A considerable idea is to offer e-card sending service promoting the company at the same time. Also other "funny" things.
Prezi.com is a plce to create slide shows and good place for marketing in small scale. For general knowledge this might be the place to have a information package if some student wants to tell about Gaia Travels in form of a presentation at school or someone is planning a trip for a bunch of friend or work collegues and wants to tell how good company it is.
Nowadays many people use Internet on their mobile phones because it's easy and reachable everywhere. Mobiles have bigger screens than before to read your emails without being too heavy or big to carry with you. People check their emails, get directions and just looks for information. But it's also suggested that in few years people may not have "normal" computers at all because they have everything they need in their mobile phone. That's why it would be important also for Gaia Travels to improve and create their mobile services. In the future people may book flights and hotels trough their mobile phones everywhere. Here is also some figures about mobile users:
I made a test in the Go Mo Meter which shows how mobile friendly your Web sites are. http://www.gaia-travels.com/index.html scored 1 out of 5 on the mobile-friendliness scale which isn't that good. Here are the results why and also suggestions how to improve them:
YOUR SITE LOADED IN 5.6 SECONDS.
That’s slower than what mobile users expect. In fact, close to 50% will wait just five seconds or less before giving up on a site. Remember, mobile consumers are often in a hurry, and become frustrated when they can’t complete a task quickly.
HANDLING IMAGES Your site’s images are appearing properly. Images and other content appear to be loading properly on your site. This is a good sign; it means you are using supported technology and your images have been properly sized. This is very important because a fast-loading site makes a good impression and in the travel business pictures and images are what you sell.
FOCUSING ON TEXT Your site’s text is not visible without pinching or zooming. It is important to make your mobile site’s text easy to read. What they should do is to use an appropriate font size and lay out text so that users don’t have to zoom or scroll. If scrolling can’t be avoided, keep it to a single direction best of which is vertical.
DESIGN FOR THUMBS Your links and buttons are not thumb-friendly. Tiny buttons and links can be difficult to click. To make it easier Gaia Travels should use wide buttons and give them breathing room so users don’t hit the wrong one by mistake.
LET CUSTOMERS KNOW WHERE TO FIND YOU. Your location and phone number are not visible. Since the travels agency business relies on a direct relationship with clients, it is very important to make contact info easy to find. Location address and phone number could be on homepage visible which could be all it takes to get more customers to call or come in.
Because Gaia Travels has an office they could also use a phone’s internal GPS to provide personalized maps and directions to the office.That way it's really easy for the new potential clients to find it and stop by.
AND MAKE IT EASY FOR YOUR CLIENTS TO CALL. Your phone number cannot be clicked to initiate a call.
Since the customers already have their phone in hand—why not take advantage? Prominently they could display phone number and use Click-to-Call functionality ( such a Fring in the youtube videoclip), a simple way to take advantage of the natural capabilities of mobile phones that allows users to dial with a single tap.
Here is also a small clip about the Fring app and few other:
QR Code offering additional information for all rent objects or destinations would reflect modern side of the company.
Augmented Reality applications offer already something for Italy destinations. This is an incredible idea to answer traveler's questions concerning for example historical monuments while wandering around a city. So it's worth promoting in the near future! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Augmented_reality
Howsociable.com is website where you can as
stated on that site “measure the magnitude of your brand”. When you write Gaia
travels and click search it gives result of 1.1 in range from 1 to 10. The result is
“an indication of level of activity around a brand during given week” for free
it calculates the activity on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and LinkedIn.
Result 1.1 from 20.2-27.2.2012 tells that
Gaia Travels is unfortunately a brand that nobody really talks about. Gaia
travels could increase this by having their own YouTube and Twitter account. In
my opinion LinkedIn would be also very good way to get contacts to different
hotels and cottage renters in Italy.
I would think that now most of Gaia Travels
customers are couples of age of over 40 but by being active in social media could attract new
(maybe younger) customers.
The easiest way to inform present and future clients would be a simple email letter subscription. This letter could include happenings in destinations, positive news, new villas to be rented and everything that happens in the firm and so on... There are so many Italy fans among the 40 + years old that this would be very suitable for those who do not use Facebook, Twitter or other new social media.
Wikipedia.fi does not have any information about Gaia Travels. If the company is unknown to a possible client, that might be the place to look for "reliable" basic information and maybe the second search result on Google search after Gaia Travels own webpage.
Gaia Travels should definately provide services also in other languages like Swedish, English and Italian. Also I as a possible client would like to know more about the regions in which the villas etc are located in. Why to go there, historic events & sights etc
The Gaia Travels webpage is clear and easy to use. The first thing that came to my mind when visiting the website is how can I book a villa for example for my family. There's two ways to do that. Option one is to call them but the difficulty is that you have no idea how much time it takes, so for people who are at job, it might be difficult. The other option is to send them e-mail but there are still many people who doesn't have an e-mail address. Of course you can always visit the agency but if you're living in Lapland, for example, how many will bother to go to the office?
Like Finnmatkat.fi is offering nowadays besides ordinary phone service a "no hurry" phoneline in which the customer tells suitable time for phone appointment and then the employee calls at that time this might be good thing for Gaia Travels also. Personal phone service with no rush. This is what a customer wants. Other option is chatting (for younger people at least) on their website with the salesperson for getting information.
So what they should do is to have the opportunity to online booking. You could look at the villas and trips at home and do the booking whenever it's suits you. That way you would not need to worry about how time consuming it is or if you want to change something and look for more. That way Gaia Travels would get even more customers, I'm sure, because who wouldn't want to rent a villa in Italy? Price examples might attract new clients.
One thing to make the online booking easier would be video clips about the villas and post them on youtube.com for example. When renting a villa online there's no one to tell about the options, you are checking them by yourself. And picture tells you more than a thousand words and video clip even more. Here is an example about a clip:
That way it's also free promotion for the company as you see nearly the whole time the company's contact information below. And seeing a video makes you really want to rent that place! Youtube.com videos don't consume Gaia Travels' bandwidth or require more storage space on the web.
