Thomson Holidays gives customers Google Earth

Friday, 02 Feb, 2006 0

Thomson has introduced a Google Earth facility on its thomsonholidays.co.uk website enabling consumers to call up the three-dimensional destination explorer and gain more information on resorts.

The operator has added a ‘Thomson Layer’, to the technology, allowing consumers to click on branded buttons on the globe and zoom in on specific resort details.

Thomson has so far added details and images for about 50 destinations to the service but there are plans to add more.

The operator has also added buttons for some of the most popular tourist attractions and landmarks.

TUI UK head of new media Graham Donoghue said: “Google Earth is a brilliant product but not that many people know about it and it’s free.”

According to Donoghue, thomsonholidays.co.uk is now among the highest referrers of consumers to Google Earth.

The technology also links consumers directly from Google Earth into the relevant information on the Thomson website.

Donoghue said Google Earth was another example of how the search arena is converging.

“Customers want to search across blogs, text, images and videos and bring information altogether almost like a power search.”

Thomson plans to take advantage of the trend by adapting its destination, resort and accommodation videos for use on video iPods, PSPs and 3G phones.

“We’re already doing some testing. This is all about getting closer to the customer and bringing online more and more to life.”

Donoghue claimed continued success of videos on the thomsonholidays website with an average of 350,000 clips being viewed a week since the beginning of January.

Cruise videos are the most popular followed by Egypt and then long-haul destinations.

Donoghue said: “The properties that have video are seeing in huge increase in conversion rates. In some cases it’s double the amount we would expect to see.”

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Linda Fox

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