Published: 04 Oct 2007

In emerging markets like India, the concept might be in nascent stages, but some interesting developments have started to take place.

For example, India's largest travel community HolidayIQ has close to 100,000 registered members.

HolidayIQ started in 2004. It has over three years of UGC collected.

"Over the last three years, we estimate that about 3.5 million visitors have used HolidayIQ.com (or its predecessor site, India Resorts Survey)," said site's Founder and CEO Hari Nair.

According to Nair, HolidayIQ already has the strongest base of content on Indian vacations.

The content base includes listing of over 7000 accommodation options covering luxury hotels, various types of resorts, budget city hotels, home-stays, guest-houses, B&Bs etc.

"For the first time in India, users can get the actual telephone numbers and website URLs of these hotels & resorts, allowing them to contact these properties directly. In addition, a large number of these hotels also have guest feedback provided by HolidayIQ members who have stayed at these hotels," Nair told EyeforTravel.com's Ritesh Gupta.

Over the last few months, HolidayIQ has added extremely high quality 'expert' content using in-house team of experienced travel editors for almost 300 holiday destinations. Among various pieces of expert content is an innovative and unique section that provides users a set of Theme Holiday options across India, many of these options being highlighted for the very first time for Indian holiday-goers.

Considering the explosion of video, social networking and user-generated content, on how HolidayIQ is positioned to make the best of the feature-rich online experiences, Nair said HolidayIQ's ambition is to provide Indian holiday-goers with the very best holiday information presented in a manner that is easy and intuitive to use.

"So, our approach to content is relatively measured and is very focused on quality. We have a very strong process of communicating with and getting feedback from Indian holiday-goers on a continuous basis and this is the basis of our decisions on what content we add to the site. This is the reason why we have a unique combination of user content and expert content. The availability of a new technology or the emergence of new types of sites are not necessarily the key drivers of our content decisions, although they do play an important part," he said.

"As more and more content starts to circulate on the net, we expect the rigorous process we have to make all our content 'credible & usable' to become one of our defining differences. As you know, a lot of user content on the web today is not really 'usable'. We work very hard to eliminate this problem for our users," Nair added.

The company is examining the prospect of making a thrust into videos and rich content across its site.

"Once again, the focus of these efforts will be to ensure that the rich content available to travellers will highly usable and therefore highly credible," he said.

Nair acknowledges that Web 2.0 travel sites have the potential to garner an amazing amount of intelligence about the travel customer.

"Analysing the various action by users on the HolidayIQ site, we have been able to gather a significant amount of insight into customer preferences and requirements," he said.

Significantly, in the time to come, Nair expects to monetise aggregate intelligence by providing hotel chains, travel intermediaries, airlines and a host of other travel players highly customised data and insight on the travel customer, which they can use for key strategic decisions.

Nair's colleague and Holiday IQ's Product Head Arun Menon is scheduled to speak during UGC and rich media session of EyeforTravel's Travel Distribution India 2007 Conference (to be held at Taj Land's End in Mumbai on October 16 and 17).

More information is available at: www.eyefortravel.com/tdindia/agenda.asp