by David Spark
October 22, 2001

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You’re about to plunk down $2,000 for a pleasure cruise to the Caribbean. But before you do, you want to view one last item to confirm that this is the right vacation. What do you ask to see: a guidebook description, a postcard, or a video? You pick video, and the travel industry knows it. For the past 30 years, travel videos have sold vacations. Working its way into the final step of the decision process, video has often been the travel agent’s key to closing a deal. Travel videos are experiential by nature and as a result, a video can convince the client to make a big-ticket decision, turning a fence sitter into a believer.

Now, the long-standing content-commerce relationship between video and the travel industry has made its way online. And travel agents are eager for more video. Web users who use streaming technology are almost two times more likely to make a travel-related purchase than those who don’t, according to Edison Media Research.

To serve this growing niche, several companies have stepped in to supply video content for travel and vacation sites, and some are finding streaming media the most appropriate method of delivery.

One of these is Visual Data Corp. The company formerly distributed videos of hotels to travel agents via laser disc. The agents would in turn use these discs as sales tools. The cost of production and distribution was high. So, four years ago, Visual Data dropped the physical delivery system in exchange for streaming media. At the company’s Web site, HotelView, the goal is to amass a huge video library and get the content streaming as close to a travel agent’s booking mechanism as possible.

For Visual Data, the model is to deliver the travel-related video content to sales agents without vertically integrating the booking process. To add booking would invite competition against a revenue stream, says David Chestler, general manager of Visual Data. Content providers would be foolhardy to add booking because the trend in online content management is toward decentralization, Chestler says.