Cheqqer.com digs down into social networking world
Friday, 13 Nov, 2009
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TUI used a seminar for travel technology-minded World Travel Market visitors as a platform to explain its reasoning behind the launch of Cheqqer.com, a new portal for user-generated content.
TUI director of web strategy and business development Sandra Leonhard said the operator had a history of engaging with social media that stretches back six years but now it wanted to move forward, not simply carrying user reviews but now moving into user recommendation.
This summer TUI launched Cheqqer.com in the Netherlands, importing 117,000 Dutch reviews from customers with an eye to adding reviews from across the TUI travel portfolio in the future. There is now 155,000 reviews on the site with a plan to have one million loaded by the first quarter of 2010.
Users are asked to rate the reviews on the site and reviews are not shown by date added but instead by how others rate the quality of the review. The user can also filter the reviews by demographic to best suit their individual requirements.
Said Leonhard: “We think community approval is very important. There is way too much content on the web. Now most TUI customers will check what other customers think about their holiday choices so its hugely important to offer good user-generated content.”
She added that UGC was also a driver behind improving the quality of TUI’s product. “In the old days there was some fear behind listing all reviews good and bad because what if a hotel was criticised? But the answer to that was simply that we had to improve on the product where it fell short. It’s a unique opportunity to listen to our customers.”
Leonhard wants the site to be more than just about people’s views of hotels and airlines.
She explained: “You don’t go on holiday to take a flight and sit in a room. You go to have a wonderful experience.
"We have 30 million customers and between them they will have hundreds of millions of experiences to share and recommend. That’s very valuable content.
"If a user can filter out what they don’t want and focus on those experiences they are interested in, that’s a great resource.”
by Dinah Hatch
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