Tourist information office advice
If you go into a tourist information office, you are generally looking for advice on what to do, where to go etc. It would be a bad tourist information office that just told you to look at all the leaflets and brochures that are scattered around the room.
Tourism authority websites
And yet this is what many websites run by tourism authorities do. There are some good ones out there, but most fall into the same trap. Put simply, they provide too much information, and not enough guidance.
Brand over common sense
Take my own local tourism authority’s website, for example. First of all, Yorkshire South’s site falls into the classic trap of using brand over common sense. Nobody says they’re travelling to Yorkshire South; nobody searches for Yorkshire South when coming to the area. Yet nowhere on the homepage does it mention any destinations within the area or even say where Yorkshire South is.
Lists without filters or guidance
Then we get to the major problem – one that is common to many tourist board websites. Go to the ‘attractions’ part of the site, and all you get is a list of 126 attractions. There’s no order to them, no way of filtering out things that may not be of interest to you and no guidance on what is most worth seeing.
Poor descriptions
The two-line descriptions are clearly the first couple of sentences from a longer piece of bumf provided by the attraction itself. Many of the attractions listed are random churches and they’re mixed in with generic things such as cinemas and wildly general listings for large areas such as ‘The Peak District National Park’.
What is a website’s job?
Now is the Yorkshire South site doing its job? Well, if that job is providing all the information available to prospective visitors, then yes. However, if the job is to entice visitors to the area, then help them decide what to do and see, it is a miserable failure.
Human response
Any sane human being looking at that site will see a list of 126 unsorted, unfiltered and uneditorialised things spring up and say: “Sod this for a bucket of frogs.” Only the truly nerdy are going to bother sifting through it. Those contemplating coming to the area may just go elsewhere; those definitely coming will look elsewhere for their information.
Tropical North Queensland
Another example comes from an area I visited recently. The Tropical North Queensland site takes far too long to load up due to the ill-advised photo slideshow at the top. Then when you click on Things To Do And See, it just brings up another link to click on – why not go straight through rather than creating unnecessary work?
Useless restaurant phone numbers
At the bottom of the page (under ‘Hungry?’) are a number of restaurant selections. None have the area/ state dialling code in front – which is useless to anyone who is outside the state or using a mobile phone.
Great Barrier Reef
I could nitpick on hundreds of these things, but the major problem again comes down to too much information and zero discernment. The Things To Do And See section is at least broken down into categories, but click on the Great Barrier Reef section and what comes up? A list of 61 unsorted things that have a vague relation to the Great Barrier Reef. Is Johnny Tourist going to sift through that to pick which reef trip he does? Of course not.
Lack of filters
Again, the descriptions come from the top of releases by the companies involved. There’s no saying which is best, or even which is most suitable for certain sectors of the market. What this section needs is either specific recommendations or a series of tickable and untickable filters that narrow down the options. The more the merrier – filter by price, by cruise/ flight, by length of trip, by whether it’s suitable for families or non-swimmers, whether it’s a large boat or small, whether snorkelling equipment is provided, whether it departs from Cairns or Port Douglas. Etcetera, etcetera.
Recommendations or clutter-clearing tools
This is the sort of thing that tourist board websites are seriously lacking. It’s all very well providing information on every single thing to do and see in an area, but it just creates a maze for the visitor.
If I’m reading, I am looking for things that are good for ME to do. I either need to be pointed in the right direction by discerning, editorialised recommendations or have the tools made available that enable me to clear the clutter and narrow down on what’s relevant. I’m not going to look through each one of the 61 Great Barrier Reef options individually in order to make a decision.
Opinion as well as information
Until tourism authority websites start catering for the needs of their visitors, rather than pandering to the desires of the tourism operators who all want an even slice of the pie, there will always be a role for travel agents and travel journalists. Travellers need opinion as well as information; they need to be able to sort what is good and what is suitable from what they regard as the chaff.
A good tourist board site?
A good tourist board site has filters, it has suggested itineraries, and it specifically writes product descriptions tailored to the web. Alas, these are few and far between.
Tags: Australia, Cairns, Great Barrier Reef, online travel, tourist board, tourist information, travel agents, Travel Writing, Tropical North Queensland, websites, Yorkshire South
Excellent post – that Yorkshire South thing is a right mess, isn’t it? I bet the consultancy firm who came up with the name and that frankly DIRE logo made a mint, however.
I don’t want to start a tide of nominations, but – for a national tourist board – I think http://www.myswitzerland.com is pretty much spot on. You know where you are, you can navigate to what you want, the design is present but not obtrusive – and, more to the point, it instantly gives you a flavour of the destination, in both pictures and the mood of the text. And the quantity of stuff they’ve got there, from webcams to tailored walking trail profiles, is amazing.
Zurich city tourist office is pretty good too http://www.zuerich.com (pity about the URL – they’ve had long-standing trouble with the Zurich insurance company, who bought up every zurich domain years ago and refuse to let go…)
Your penultimate paragraph hits it spot on. That’s why guidebook writers and other professional travel journalists matter – to use judgement and discernment to dip into the morass of information splurged out by the industry and cherry-pick noteworthy items to focus on, for the benefit of ordinary travellers. Impartial tourist-board waffle and UGC simply don’t match up.
Hi
in response to the above, which I think is really spot on – we’d love to hear your reactions to our new travel guide site. We obviously don’t have the political problem of having to present an entire region to visitors, but nevertheless persuading a consortium of member venues to let us take a ‘edited/selective’ approach when communciating with out-of-region visitors, rather than ‘this is everything’ can still be a big deal .
Alex
Alex
forgot the website address in the content: http://www.creativetourist.com
Totally agree with all these points. Also, before Matthew beat me to it, I was going to highly commend the Swiss Tourist Board website. There’s a reason I write about Switzerland so much, and that’s one of them.
Two more great tourist board websites are Visit Scotland (www.visitscotland.com) and Holland.com (http://www.holland.com/uk/).
Personally, I rarely write about some countries because I can’t get the info I need from their website, press office or tourist office (it seems to run right through the system). These include Spain (www.spain.info) and Italy (http://www.italiantourism.com/),
Coming from ‘Yorkshire South’ myself, I have to agree with the rubbish re-brand of the county… I wonder if my home town of Swinton features on the list of attractions. Perhaps it’s under ‘crack dens worth visiting’.
Another nomination for worst tourist board site would be Visitgreece.gr – a shambles of a site for a country that is so reliant on tourism.
Their offices in London are not so clever either. I remember asking their PR for new things to do in Greece last year the rest of the conversation went as follows:
-’there is nothing new to report in Greece this year’
-’what no hotels, tours, flights?’
- ‘no I can confirm, there is nothing new in Greece this year’
Thanks for comments, all.
@alex – I’m off to Germany today, but will take a look at your site when I get back.
@matthew – I always wondered about why Zurich went for such a bizarre URL. And you’re spot on with your last sentence – UGC and impartial tourist board waffle are not enough.
@jill – Agree on Spain and Italy. The regionality thing doesn’t help there. Some regions are excellent, others woeful. But the central tourist boards seem to leave things to the regions with minimal co-ordinating effort. Some of the Australian states have good sites, but I usually skip them and just ask for the information I want direct from the media contact – I can’t be arsed to search through the guff most of the time.
@james – That Greece story is superb. As for Swinton, I believe it’s listed under zoos.
Was too busy grappling with maddening Castilla y Leon website this morning to reply earlier, trying to quickly (hah!) check a basic, bit of info on Valladolid, the capital of the region. Had to click about 5000 times and do ever more esoteric searches to get anywhere near, as the site is organised by theme, not place, and even a precise search threw up every bloody thing in every village in the province. Even resorted to the dire spain.info, which I hardly ever look at. Agree with Jill that is worse than useless and looks really boring too. And when I finally tracked down what I was looking for, neither had updated their entries with the new info I wanted anyway.
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I only write about SE Asia, where all the tourist websites are a complete mess, except for Singapore and Hong Kong. You’d think Thailand and Malaysia would get their act together, but their websites are disorganized and use shocking English in many cases. Both the Philippines and Indonesia are basket cases. And aside from Singapore and Hong Kong, the printed tourist information is very, very bad, despite the enormous amounts of money fed to the tourism organizations in both of these countries. It’s a pig’s delight, full of graft and corruption, which has absolutely no interest in helping out tourists.
Oh dear, did I ever say the Indonesian Tourist Board once invited me all the way to Bali for a WTO conference. There was no one to greet me at the airport, I had no idea where I was to stay and I had to tramp around hotels at night – after a London flight! – to find my booking. The final straw on the day of the conference, security men on the door, told me I could not come in as I was wearing trousers.Despite the ordeal, I remain very keen on Indonesia but as with other countries, I go in hope, but expect not a lot. (I`ve been waiting for a reply from the Pakistan Tourism Development Corporation for three years.)
I think some tourist boards, like some bloggers, make the mistake of getting caught up in flash and cool bells and features at the expensive of information and ease of navigation.
I need to find what I’m looking for in 2-3 clicks or I’m going elsewhere.
Agree about Spain – except that there was a fantastically efficient lady in Tenerife last year, although she wasn’t anything to do with the website.
One of the biggest problems in trying to find out things from tourism websites is the lack of coordination between neighbouring regions. So if you’re looking out attractions near Wincanton, Somerset (as I was yesterday) you can either try Somerset, or Dorset, or Wiltshire.
The most sensible thing to do is to find a site for a local accommodation business and click “What to do nearby.” The owners, i.e. proper people with some common sense, will usually have listed what you can see and do in the area. (Thank you Empire Farm, near Wincanton. I shall definitely come and buy some of your organic food as recompense for your excellent “What to do near WIncanton” section.)
A map would help Yorkshire South! Likewise in my own area http://www.shakespeare-country.co.uk/ – it seems to be assumed that we all sort of know it’s the Cotswolds but overseas…?
Perhaps someone should pickup one of those Ward Lock Red Guides from a time past – they always had a map to orientate you
They were/are little mines of info on an area
Nice to see I’m not the only one who thinks many tourism boards miss a great opportunity to market their communities. That’s why I created my own version of how I think one should look for my hometown of San Diego, California. I’ve focused just on the attractions for now, organizing them into ‘themes’ and ‘locations’ to help people find attractions that most suit their interests. I’d be grateful to get any suggestions on improving it. Here’s a recent post: http://thebestplacesinsandiego.....san-diego/
Great post, David!
Abu Dhabi Tourism Authority’s Visit Abu Dhabi site http://www.visitabudhabi.ae/ is another bad one – heavy on text and short on practicals. Loads of info on traditional poetry for example but no info on where to hear it recited. Having written guidebooks to the place, I’ve got the info, so if I can find this info, I can’t see why they can’t.
I think the Australian sites are pretty bad, as you point out. They all look great, but most are like corporate sites written for their stakeholders, rather than customer-focused sites written for tourists.