How best can web 2.0 be used by travel professionals?

[ecacofonix]

From a consumer point of view, Web 2.0 has been quite exciting - we can now share feedback and photos and videos much more easily...how best can Web 2.0 be used by the travel industry professionals?

Web 2.0 is to some extent a lot of hype, but there are interesting features that the concept has. One key characteristic that is seen in Web 2.0 is the participation of users in generating content – be it text, images or video. For mainly textual content, we have sites such as Wikipedia (encyclopedia), Digg (user generated news), Del.icio.us (social bookmarking) etc. For videos we have YouTube, for pictures we have Flickr…and so on…

How best can this phenomenon be used by a small travel agencies and other small & medium travel industry business?

Some of the responses I had received at a couple of other message boards and my friends in the tech industry are:

1. Start a blog and make it interactive…promote your business using the blog
2. Do regular postings to citizen journalism sites such as Digg and Reddit
3. Social bookmark all my web pages like crazy
4. Post viral videos on YouTube
5. Contribute to Wikipedia and include your link in that page
6. Use message boards to initiate useful topics and also participate actively in the relevant message board discussions…

While these are no doubt interesting and I’m using some of these, are there other methods members can think of by which Web 2.0 technologies and concepts can be used by a small travel agency or tour operator business to succeed and flourish?

I hope I have posted this query at the right section of this message board!

I welcome comments from the board members