Terms

"It was vital that we had a means for our community to connect with each other," Katalina begins. "Some people will say 'my community' to refer to their Instagram followers; perhaps it's the two-way communication between the person who created the content and the people they are interacting with however it's not an exchange between one participant with an additional. We really wanted facilitate members communicating with each other, because that's community-building at its core, it's the way people feel connected to each other."

There was more than just travelers becoming part of the ECT community. Industry experts were also joining and actively providing information to other members, creating an open and knowledgeable platform. Katalina as well as the ECT team wanted to make formal the contributions of these experts to express their gratitude to all of the helpful information to be shared.

"We tried to bring the experts who are aware of the values we hold dear and are the El Caminos of those countries, more engaged within our group," Katalina starts. "We created badges for them and provided them with profile pictures that have a blue circle surrounding their picture with a check mark in yellow in order to prove they're destination experts. If you ask a question about Greece and Christina responds, you'll know she is an expert that has was a long time within the country."

Community members had questions to answer, and real, experienced travel experts were talking to each other. This online community served it's purpose well -- perhaps even better than had been expected. It was then that the magic was achieved: lockdowns were lifted. The online ECT community was returning to the offline world. It was time for the company to move from survival mode to developing to the future. "During the pandemic we tested ourselves against fire, and were able to stand up," Katalina explains.

The pandemic , and the resulting global slowing allowed to the ECT team to think further on how they could best help its female traveling. "We believed we were doing something special, but we never had enough time or the space to think bigger about our brand that we were creating. We realized how special this is as a travel company as a whole," she continues. "As the world started to expand it became apparent that there was a lot more we could do by involving our members in the real world. It was possible to serve our community in a way that reflected the things they wanted from us, as they started to venture out to the outside world."

Big ambition

How is El Camino Travel going to offer its clients what they need, now the world is about to go getting back to routine? "The major goal is to be the leading all-in-one destination for women who want to plan, dream to book, travel, and share their travel," Katalina asserts.

ECT began with about 100 members in August 2020 The number has increased to around 700, and the ECT team has grown to six and a half full time employees. In the US, millennial women have the highest growth rate in the travel sector, however Katalina is of the opinion that none of the major operators are catering to this market. "For some of the bigger firms, there's no one in the boardroom saying"Hey, women are spending lots of money, but they're still feeling very unsafe when they travel. What are we able to do to improve their experience?" she adds.

Katalina recounts that, from a recent study of female travelers The top thing they want from their travel company by the majority (85 percent) of the respondents is just to be safe when travelling. "These women don't ask for bodyguards" Katalina affirms "They only want to be confident that they've got the information with the right resources, connections and resources for making informed choices. This is what helps them feel secure and confident. This is what we're addressing momentarily with our smaller-group travel experiences, as they enable travelers to fully immerse themselves and not have to sacrifice the experience of traveling experience because of their gender."

The end goal is for Katalina to El Camino Travel to become the top source for female travelers. "TripAdvisor and Google focus on quantity rather than quality. We've seen an abundance of poor quality data available and we'd like to do the totally different from that," she continues. "It's about knowing there's an entire community of people behind me to lean upon, but in a manner that I don't have to rely on anyone else in my journey to explore all over the globe."

Travel concierge

How does the ability to draw on a community come to fruition? Katalina informs me that whenever someone asks a question within the ECT forum The community manager steps in "with this concierge assistance" and shares all the details of threads that could already be in existence. Then, at least five users of the community will reply. "Rather than the 200 responses you'd get through a free Facebook group you'll get better suggestions which reflect our way of traveling," she adds. "People pay for El Camino due to the belief that"I'm who I am as a person who travels; they are more knowledgeable than anybody else'. We're bringing these people together."

It begs the question: in order to maintain the high quality of service, ECT has maybe an upper limit for members? "We are asked every times, "How do you going to keep the quality up?'" Katalina responds, by saying "Tech will contribute to that, for sure. We've already begun tracking data and checking our options." The team is currently looking at solutions so that people aren't bombarded with low data. The team currently moderates the forum, and chooses which questions that they will answer. They also ceases responses once a certain number.

"At the moment, a benefit of membership is that you get an expertly curated travel guide each month. The guides are put together by our experts in destination We may also put out more of our curated content because people really believe in us," she continues. "We are determined to ensure that we are able to accommodate more people and that we can still provide the content and the connections they're looking for, but without feeling like what happens when the number of people join."

The author explains that the majority members of ECT group members would like to connect with each other, especially when they travel and many are remote working together at the moment. "You'll get messages saying, 'Hey, who's in Mexico in the coming months? I'm remote working in Oaxaca!'" she explains. "We're researching technology to allow people to meet whenever they're travelling to locations that are similar to the same times."

In addition to advances in technology, the primary strategy of ECT is to take on the post-lockdown world and get selling trips again. The company began selling group travel trips again in June 2021, and the main focus of the company is selling those trips, offering memberships -- and combining the two by offering discounts to members.

Sharing, not selling

In conclusion, however, and contrary to our expectations this approach that does not sell travel- but simply talking about it on the ECT forum can have helped certain of the ECT's experts in travel to gain clients. "The forum allows people to display their expertise and thought leadership and a lot of members people in the El Camino Travel community have been able to gain clients by the answers to their questions," Kataliana explains.

Katalina soon realized their were on to a good concept and sought ways to increase and improve the destination expert roster. "We asked our current teammembers, "Who do we think should be the expert?' And they began recommending individuals," she continues. "I was going to interview them and explain the forum to them to inspire them to join. This is a brand new channel of distribution for them, free of all the algorithms from Facebook and Instagram which gives them a front-row seat to their ideal audience."

Naturally these experts saw clear benefits. "When you speak to prospective travel clients, you have showcase your experience in demonstrating what makes someone want to take a trip to you. This forum lets them show their expertise in an organic, authentic way which doesn't come off as salesy," she says.

"Travel experts are passionate about discussing travel; we love sharing information. We have another chance to help others," Katalina muses. It's clear that simply being helping is an effective strategy to market travel. since the industry has started to grow and our ECT team has managed to go a stage further than just talking about traveling. "Since the lockdown was lifted the ECT team has begun to plan trips together with our expert destination specialists. We did trips to Morocco as well as to Guatemala, to Greece as well as Georgia. It's been quite cool!" she smiles.