Terms
"It was vital that we had a means that our community could connect with each other," Katalina begins. "Some people will say 'my community' and mean their Instagram follower base; it could be a two-way conversation between the person who created the content and the people they are interacting with However, it's not really a conversation between one community member with one. It was our intention to facilitate people speaking to one another as that's a form of community-building in the core. It's how people feel connected to the other."
Not only travel fans were being part of to the ECT community. Experts from the industry were joining and actively providing information to others, creating a welcoming and knowledgeable platform. Katalina as well as members of the ECT group wanted to make formal the contributions of these experts to express their gratitude to all of the helpful information to be shared.
"We tried to bring the experts who are aware of our beliefs and who are basically the El Caminos of these countries, more engaged in our community," Katalina starts. "We created badges for them and provided them with profile pictures featuring a blue circle on their picture as well as a checkmark in yellow for verification that proves they're destination experts. When you post a question about Greece and Christina responds, you know this is an expert who had a minimum of ten years within the country."
Members of the community were asking questions, as well as genuine, certified travel professionals were engaging. The online community was serving it's purpose well -- maybe even more than what had been anticipated. And then, it occurred: the lockdowns were removed. Online ECT community was moving back to the the offline world. It was time for the company to shift from survival mode to creating for the future. "During the pandemic , we tested ourselves against fire, and were able to stand up," Katalina explains.
The spread of the pandemic and world slowdown enabled the ECT group to consider thinking bigger about how to best serve its community of women travellers. "We believed that we had done something unique and we had the time or resources to really think about the company we had built. We realized how valuable this is as a travel business as a whole," she continues. "As the world started to become more open, we realized there was much more we could do by involving our members in the real world. We could serve the community by expressing the things they wanted from us, as they began to go out to the outside world."
Big ambition
How can El Camino Travel going to offer its clients the things they require, given the world is about to go back to normal? "The main goal is to be the leading single-stop destination for women to plan, dream, book, experience and share their travel," Katalina asserts.
ECT began with about 100 members in August 2020 It is now approximately 700. In addition, the ECT team has expanded to six and a half full-time employees. In the US the millennial females have the highest growth rate in the travel industry, but Katalina feels that no one of the big operators are catering to this market. "For some of the bigger firms, there's no one at the top of the executive table saying"hey, women have lots of money, but they're not feeling safe while traveling. What can we do to improve their experience?" She adds.
Katalina shares that from a recent study of 5000 female travelers most frequently wanted from travel companies by the majority (85%) of the respondents is simply to feel safe while traveling. "These ladies aren't asking for bodyguards" says Katalina "They only want to be confident that they've got information with the right resources, connections and resources for making informed choices. This is what helps them feel empowered and feel safe. The solution is in the present with our small-group excursions, which allow guests to immerse themselves fully without having to compromise the overall quality of their trip experience because of their gender."
Ultimately, Katalina wants El Camino Travel to become the most trusted resource for women travelers. "TripAdvisor as well as Google concentrate on volume versus quality: there's a high volume of low-quality data available and we'd like to do the complete opposite of that," she continues. "It's about knowing that there's an online community to lean upon, but in a manner that I can't lean upon any other group in my journey exploring the world."
Travel concierge
How does the ability to draw on a community manifest itself? Katalina informs me that when someone posts a query in the ECT forum The community manager steps into the discussion "with the white glove concierge services" and will share all hyperlinks to threads that may be already in existence, and at least five forum members respond. "Rather than the 200 or so responses you would get in an unpaid Facebook group There will be more relevant recommendations that are a reflection of our style of traveling," Katalina says. "People have been paying for El Camino because they think"I'm a certain way to be as a person who travels; they have me covered better than everyone other'. The goal is to bring people together."
The question is what is the best way to ensure the quality, does ECT have a possible upper limit on member numbers? "We get asked all the times, "How do you going to maintain your quality high and maintain the quality?'" Katalina responds, by saying "Tech will play a role in that certainly. We've started collecting data and looking into our possibilities." She adds the team is looking into solutions so that people do not get bombarded by low high-quality information. The team already moderates the forum, and chooses which questions to answer, and stops the responses after the number of responses is a set amount.
"At present, one feature of membership is the fact that you receive an expertly curated travel guide every month. It's composed by our destination experts, so maybe we'll put out more of our curated content since people are awestruck by us," she continues. "We would like to be sure that we are able to accommodate many more users and are able to provide them with the information as well as the connections people are looking for without being a victim of what happens when groups get bigger."
The author explains that the majority members of ECT group members would like to connect with each other in particular when they travel and a lot of them have remote workgroups at the moment. "You'll see messages like"Hey, is anyone currently in Mexico over the next couple of months? I'm remote working in Oaxaca!'" she explains. "We're looking into tech that will make it easier for people to find each other while they're in locations that are similar to the same dates."
In addition to advances in technology, the main plan of ECT is to embrace the post-lockdown landscape and begin selling travel trips once more. The company restarted selling group-travel tours in June of 2021. the main focus of the company is selling these trips, providing memberships and combining the two and offering members discounts.
Sharing, not selling
It is our conclusion that, contrary to what we would expect, the approach of not marketing travelinstead, simply discussing it on the ECT forum -- is ultimately helping many of the experts from ECT's travel department to get clients. "The forum lets people demonstrate thought leadership and expertise; many people in the El Camino Travel community have been able to gain clients by the answers to their questions," Kataliana explains.
Katalina quickly realized they were on to a good idea and began looking for ways to increase and improve the expert list of destination experts. "We talked to our present group, "Who do you believe should be considered an expert?' And they suggested people to us," she continues. "I would interview them, tell them about the forum to get them excited. It's a fresh distribution method for them, free of all the algorithms that are used by Facebook and Instagram which gives an opportunity to sit in on the ideal customer."
The experts recognized clear advantages. "When you meet with potential travel clients, you have demonstrate your knowledge and demonstrate why would someone decide to book a trip with you. The forum allows them to present their knowledge in an organic, authentic way that isn't slick," she says.
"Travel experts love to talk about travel; we love sharing details. This gives us another opportunity to be helpful," Katalina muses. It's clear that simply being useful is an excellent method to promote travel. Since the travel industry is beginning to grow and our ECT team has had the opportunity to take things a step further than simply speaking about traveling. "Since lockdown lifted the ECT team has begun to plan trips together with our expert destination specialists. We did trips to Morocco as well as to Guatemala and to Greece and Georgia. The trip was pretty awesome!" she smiles.