The rise of travel blogs

Hello everybody, 

Today I’m going to talk about a relatively new phenomenon: Travel blogs! Personally, I love to read and follow on the internet travel blogs. As I have stated in my previous blog post, the theory web 2.0 touches upon the changing role of the consumer and a travel blog is a perfect example to illustrate this.

Consumers used social media as a tool to plan travelling so it functioned namely in the research phase. Trust was of big importance for consumers to use social media as a guideline. However, the internet has grown to a participatory platform which enables people to have influence on the internet as well. People can collaborate and share information. The ability to share information by means of social media have made substantial changes in the role of the consumer.

This theory is totally proven by the website: travellab.nl, one of my favourite travel blogs.

Travellab, is a dutch blog written by Serena, Larissa and Tara. Their passion for travelling has made them set up the blog Travellab, on which they write weekly 2-3 articles. On social media is Travellab very active, they post nice pictures on Instagram, have a Facebook-page and post on Youtube as well.

Travellab receives monthly more than 230000 views and attracts roughly 53000 unique visitors.

These statistics are quite impressive, and this is also the interesting part for me as well as for the companies of course. Because, we have covered the sharing part of the consumers role, but how does Travellab collaborate with companies? Well, Travellab collaborates with companies by advertising. They promote for them by writing articles about these companies and receive money for this, because companies feel that they have to a certain extent influence on other consumers. Additionally, travellab can sometimes travel for free if they are promoting a certain country/city/hotel/air carrier. Awesome, isn’t it? So for them the role of consumer has certainly changed in a positive way!

And I enjoy reading them, so we have a win-win situation!

See you next time,

Melisse 

P.S. one fun fact, in the past, I have also written my own blog. This was on makeup, lifestyle and fashion, but I have deleted the blog, since I'm not active anymore.