Travel News
Traxo, TripIt & Klout: What’s Your Travel Score?
Have you ever shopped for something online and then seen ads for similar products pop up on your screen? Turns out, it’s not a coincidence. Your internet searches can be tracked and advertisers are profiting from that information. Targeted marketing efforts are starting to invade the travel industry. Our Tech guru Phil Baker looks at the different uses for Traxo, a new online travel service, and examines other related technologies.
The Internet has become an advertiser’s dream, enabling companies to focus their advertising dollars on the most likely buyers by tracking sites visits and searches. Targeting customers is now being taken to the next level with companies developing services to help advertisers identify the most likely targets for their ads, while, at the same time, enticing users to participate with free prizes, useful services and recognition among their peers.
Traxo (Traxo.com) is a free site that identifies and rewards frequent travelers. The site also offers incentives and special deal from companies that cater to travelers.
Here’s how it works: Traxo asks for access to a person’s travel accounts, including reservations with airlines, rental car companies, hotels, etc. It then continually monitors those accounts and keeps track of travel plans. It combines all the reservations into specific trips and creates trip itineraries that can be automatically be added to a calendar, much like the popular TripIt service (tripit.com).
Going beyond TripIt, Traxo give users a rating based on traveling activities. The Traxo Travel Score varies from 1 to 100 and is calculated using four factors: the number of unique states and countries visited, miles traveled, days traveled and your loyalty status on airlines, hotels and rental car companies. It’s time-weighted to provide more priority to recent trips. It’s updated each time a person travels and ranks members. Traxo will give credit for a past 18 months of travels by accessing travel accounts, including Tripit.
Those that score 80 and higher are eligible for prizes that range from magazine subscriptions to Briggs & Riley luggage to free airline trips. I found the service easy to use and I did develop a sense of competitiveness, making sure all my past trips were included in my score. I got an 86 rating based on traveling about three times a month and being away from home about 25 percent of the time.
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Social Networking
While some may enroll for the perks, Traxo believes the social aspects attracts most of the users. Through social networking, users brag to about recent trips, compete with friends for points and socialize about travel. Sharing travel plans with the network, users ask each other for travel advice. A search for a destination also shows users who have made similar trips.
The sharing aspect is completely optional. One user told me she no longer has to keep track of all of the disparate travel plans she makes and has them sent to her mother, nanny and assistant automatically. She can select which trips she wants to share with each.
One thing to keep in mind with all services such as this is the possibility that this information may reach those beyond a person’s circle of friends. While Traxo told me they keep a user’s information private, the information is easy to link to Facebook and other sites. If Facebook privacy settings are not properly set, the information becomes available to a wider audience.
Facebook, in particular, has made activating privacy settings complicated and the company has shown little respect for privacy as a policy. Once you post your personal information anywhere on the Web, you need to think carefully of all of the possible consequences when you link sites together.
Traxo vs. Klout
Traxo is building on a broader trend, that has been pioneered by a San Francisco company, Klout. The company has developed an algorithm to create a “Klout score,” a measure of one’s overall influence, not as a traveler, but within the Internet community. Like Traxo, Klout scores an individual between 1 and 100.
Klout uses three dozen variables based on the person’s Facebook and Twitter postings (as well as other sites like LinkedIn, Flickr, Tumblr and Last.fm) and what happens to them to determine your reach and your influence on others. Having your comments forwarded by others gives you a higher score. The ability to create content that compels others to share it makes you more influential, at least on the Web.
The company markets the names of those “influencers” to appropriate businesses. Its message is “Your business needs influencers. They’re already talking about your industry and maybe even your products. Find and engage these influencers and they can become evangelists for your brand.” More than 2,000 businesses are using its services.
By Phil Baker for PeterGreenberg.com. Phil Baker has more than three decades of experience in consumer and computer technology product development and program management. Check out his blog at https://techspertsinc.com.
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