Virgin Atlantic identified an opportunity to create a social site for travel lovers, vtravelled.com, to inspire and help them plan their next trip and share their ideas with like-minded travel lovers.
Social media travel sites traditionally centre on managing and communicating travel plans or building databases of ratings and reviews. The Virgin Atlantic vtravelled team felt that there was an opportunity to expand this, creating a platform for users to find destination inspiration and source information from travellers with a similar travel outlook.
We created a site to inspire travel lovers – from those dreaming about a once in a lifetime trip to those who want to make their annual summer break as memorable as possible. With editorial contributions from experienced and knowledgeable travel writers vtravelled members can access valuable, insightful and interesting travel tips.
The vtravelled strategy was to strengthen the value of user-generated content to other community members, enabling them to find information meaningful to them through relevancy.
To help manage the information and content users find, vtravelled members have access to the Trip Pod planning tool allowing groups and individuals to organise their future dream trip. Vtravellers can ‘scrapbook’ content that they find valuable around the site or on external sites, collaborate with friends joining them on their trip and sort all information into a day-by-day itinerary if required.
We built the community site out of our own social media platform offering a comprehensive range of features to be tailored according to the needs of each holiday. A partnership with Google takes the use of maps as the main interface to a new level, and a hosting partnership with Amazon ensures scalability and robust performance.
We are now planning the next round of enhancements based on feedback from vtravellers while bringing vtravelled closer to other existing Virgin Atlantic communities.