Europe-Travelers.eu is an Open Travel Guide dedicated to European destinations. It is published under Creative Commons License and produced by Mediatrotters. Its objective is to explore new ways of sharing content and services in between travelers and professionals.

Europe Travelers regularly experiments the implementation of latest Web technologies applied to the fields of Tourism and e-Tourism. Its objective is to share acquired knowledge and competences with practitioners.

One year after the official launch, time has came to share first outputs for the benefit of Tourism and e-Tourism professionals. The entire Europe Travelers project has been carried out with almost no budget. It is therefore interesting for practitioners to discover how it is possible to implement low cost but innovate and efficient e-tourism services.

Since October 2006, date of the Europe Travelers’ official launch, over 30 000 uniq visitors came to discover the Open Travel Guide to Europe.

Over one hundred contributions have been received, mainly from tourism and e-tourism professionals to introduce their own tourism services - in countries such as Croatia, Greece, Spain, Portugal, England, France, Ireland and Italy. According to the Content Manager, "contributions are about to reach 10% of the content published online, it is still under our expectations but the percentage if getting higher each month."

In terms of repartition of visitors per services, the most successful sections were the following: The Tourism press review, Tourism Trends in Europe, the Travel Resources Directory and the Tourism professionals Directory. Video and Picture galleries as well as a small travel shop build up using Amazon tools have also been successful.

Open Access

The Open Travel Guide is an "Open Access" experience. Unlike the Open Access movement in Science and Education, the Web site is delivered using alternative licensing model such as the Creative Commons license. Open license is an excellent publication model, particularly adapted to the Tourism industry. Wikitravel, or World 66, already generates high traffic using such a publication model. Therefore all tourism institutions and offices, willing to share content for the great benefit of travelers should use this kind of license. Private sector as well is getting more and more interested in the Open Access movement impressed by the success of portals such as Wikipedia.

Web Traffic with a small budget

Those results have been reached out with no Marketing and Communication budget. Free tools available over the Internet have been used such as press release services, referencing tool, RSS subscribers, newsletters emails and more. The technology is entirely build using Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) and collaborative technologies. Google has indexed over 500 pages published by Europe Travelers and has came back from the fifth page of results to the first page using expressions such as "Europe Travelers", "Tourism trends in Europe", "Tourism professionals in Europe" and more.

The experience therefore shows it is possible for small and medium e-tourism initiatives to gain a place at the heart of the huge market of e-tourism in Europe. A result that makes the pilote project being already a success.

Affiliation programmes

Europe Travelers has experimented e-tourism advertising services such as Google Adsens programme. Money earned with the programme is now equal to our hosting services annual budget. Still according to the Manager, "Europe Travelers has experienced other online advertising services such as Expedia, Amazon and Commission Junction less successfully." May be because in an Open Access environment it is difficult to include too much ads with images. Google Adsens is easier to integrate, less visible and with a higher earning rate when having a low number of uniq visitors as the Open Travel Guide to Europe.

RSS feeds and Google Map

Moving forward Europe Travelers has experienced innovative services such as the implementation of a Free Google Map to share videos and pictures, as well as the publication of a set of RSS feeds related to Travel and Tourism in Europe. Both services brought additional visitors and therefore are to be considered as solutions to generate more Web traffic.

Multilinguism

The objective was also to face multilingual issues. The Web site is published both in French and English. 68% of visitors are using the English version, also much more content and travel resources are added under this section. This result is interesting, one year after its official launch, Europe Travelers could not estimate having 32% of its visitors using the French version. This result shows "e-tourism" is deeply concerned by multilingual issues, professionals should all jump into the multilingual era and publish at least in two different languages.

Thanks to the evaluation of those results and most successful sections of the Open Travel Guide, a brand new version will be launched during winter 2007 / 2008. This will include a new home page with less content and a new design, focusing on Social Networking features such as tags, contributions, comments. A new section will be launched including discussion boards. Europe Travelers will focus on its initial goal to become an "Open Directory" fully dedicated to Travel and Tourism in Europe. The home page will include a search engine and a full list of sub-sections in order to reach easily the resources.

Conclusion

Finally, even with a low number of visitors and only two persons working part time on the project, Europe Travelers shows interesting results. Open Access models, multilinguism, affiliation programmes, interactive maps and Web 2.0 services have demonstrated their full potential to serve tourism and e-tourism professionals.

Mediatrotters, a small multimedia company based in the south of France, being the owner of Europe Travelers, would be pleased to share those results as well as acquired competences with Tourism professionals willing to implement this kind of innovative web services.