The Travel Scene: Stephen Oddo, Walks of Italy

This month in our series The Travel Scene we profile Stephen Oddo, co-founder of the famous walking tour company, Walks of Italy and long-time supporter of online travel media.

A world traveller himself, Stephen has attended more than 20 different Travel Massive meet-ups globally including Berlin, London, Dublin, Toronto and his new home base of New York City. We caught up with Stephen between apartment-hunting in the Big Apple and packing for his upcoming trip back to The Boot.

What is it like to hop around to different Travel Massive meet-ups around the world?

Each Travel Massive community is different and each one offers a unique look into their local travel scene in that city. Everyone comes with a different background like social media, blogging, or people that represent travel companies but there is a uniting factor – people at Travel Massive all share in the same passion and motivation for travel.

Being based in New York City, what is the online travel industry like in the Big Apple?

There’s a strong tech presence here with lots of start-ups, App developers and digital marketing centres. A lot of the big name travel brands are headquartered here. Surprisingly, it’s hard to find small mom-and-pop travel agencies these days.

What is unique about New York City and Travel Massive meet-ups here is that you’ll see a huge contingent of traditional media journalists who come out to mix and mingle with the digital world of freelance writers and online media.

As a brand, what benefits have you seen attending Travel Massive meet-ups?

The best thing is access to the diverse community. In online travel, you tend to have a “social” relationship with people, on Twitter or Facebook for instance, but at the meet-ups you can really create something more personal.

Your tour company frequently collaborates with bloggers. How has working with bloggers helped your brand? 

The obvious benefit we’ve seen is direct clicks from a website or blog to our company booking page. However, the most value we find is the word-of-mouth chain that online media like bloggers help create. Bloggers are some of the most social people in the world and we constantly receive calls or emails from customers who say they heard about us from a blogger’s recommendation. 

In your opinion, what could be improved in the online travel industry?

The brand-blogger relationship.

I think more brands should take notice of bloggers, even bloggers with a smaller following because you never know what great things they can do! Sometimes brands focus more on the number of clicks they get from online content but it’s not always a fair criteria. Bloggers like to share their experiences with everyone they meet and travellers often make decisions based on word-of-mouth.

When working with bloggers, I think brands should also encourage bloggers to experience their product freely.  We don’t like to give too much direction or guidelines to bloggers who join our tours or review our products. We find this makes for more genuine, authentic content and word-of-mouth.

Finally, content and link backs should not be a brand’s primary goal. We don’t see the interaction with the blogger end at the trip. For us, the review is not the most valuable part. The most valuable part is the interaction with the blogger in the long-term, building a relationship overtime, and integrating these bloggers in other marketing initiatives as the brand develops.

Where do you see the online travel industry in 5 years?

Walking tours are rapidly growing and I think it will get the most attention in the next five years. Smaller ticket, micro-level tours allow people to customize their trips more than ever. Instead of purchasing big, fixed tour packages you can now customize your travel itinerary with a variety of smaller, shorter tours. It’s like a “choose your own adventure” concept!

What are your primary objectives for 2014?

Travellers have come to love our Walks of Italy tours and we’ll be releasing new products there soon! We’re also looking to expand to other cities. We just launched our brand new Walks of New York tours at last month’s New York Travel Massive meet-up. The goal is to bring our Italy-style of tours to this side of the pond. We’re hoping to have ten different tours here by the end of the year.

If you could book a ticket tomorrow, where would you go?

South East Asia especially Thailand and Cambodia. Bloggers always seem so excited about this region and talk positively about it.

***

The Travel Scene is a monthly series that profiles unique online travel brands and start-ups in the Travel Massive community around the world.