Terms

"It was vital that we had a means for our community to connect with one another," Katalina begins. "Some people will say 'my community' to refer to their Instagram followers; perhaps it's an exchange between the creator and their followers, but it's not conversations between one user and an additional. We wanted to make it easier for members speaking to one another as that's a form of community-building at its core, it's what makes people feel connected with the other."

Not only travel fans were joining to the ECT community. Industry experts were also joining and actively sharing their knowledge with other members, creating an open and well-informed platform. Katalina and members of the ECT group wanted to formalize these experts' contributions to acknowledge their appreciation for the free information that was to be shared.

"We wanted to get these experts, who know the values we hold dear and are the El Caminos of these countries, more engaged with our organization," Katalina starts. "We made badges for them and also gave them profiles with a blue circle around their photo with a check mark in yellow in order to prove they are destination experts. When you post a question concerning Greece and Christina responds, you know the person is an expert who spent a decade or more in the country."

Members of the community had questions to answer, as well as genuine, certified travel professionals were engaging. The community online was fulfilling it's purpose well -- possibly even better than been anticipated. Then, the miracle happened: lockdowns were lifted. It was clear that the online ECT community had begun now transitioning back to an offline realm, and it was now time for the organization to shift from survival mode to creating to the future. "During the pandemic we tested ourselves against fire, and proved resilient," Katalina explains.

The pandemic , and the resulting worldwide slowdown allowed to the ECT team to think more on how they could best serve its community of women travelers. "We believed we were creating something truly special, but we never had the time or space to really think about the brand we were building. We realized how special it was as a travel business generally," she continues. "As the world began to become more open it became apparent that there was more that we could accomplish by involving our members in the real world. It was possible to serve our community in a way that reflected what they were looking for from us, when they began to go out in the world again."

Big ambition

How is El Camino Travel going to provide its members with everything they require now the world is about to go back to normal? "The major goal is to be the pre-eminent one-stop shop for women travelers to plan, dream for, plan, make reservations, and document their journey," Katalina asserts.

ECT began with about 100 people in the month of August The number has increased to about 700. The ECT team has expanded to six and a half full-time employees. In the US, millennial women have the highest growth rate in the travel sector, however Katalina believes that none of the major operators are providing services to this group. "For many of the largest businesses, nobody is in the boardroom saying"hey, women have lots of money, but they're still feeling very unsafe while traveling. What can we do to improve their experience?" she says.

Katalina shares that during a survey conducted recently of 5000 female travelers The top thing that travel businesses are requesting from most (85 percentage) of respondents, is just to be safe when travelling. "These ladies aren't asking to have bodyguards on their property," Katalina says "They just want to feel that they've got the information, resources and the connections for making informed choices. That's what makes them feel confident and secure. We're solving this right now with our small-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."

Ultimately, Katalina wants El Camino Travel to become the top source for women who travel. "TripAdvisor and Google are focused on the quantity of information versus quality: there's a high volume of low-quality information available, and we'd like to do the completely different," she continues. "It's about knowing there's a community behind me that I can lean on, in a way that I can't lean on anyone else in my journey exploring this world."

Travel concierge

What exactly is it that makes being able to rely on the community come to fruition? Katalina says that the moment someone post a query in the ECT forum The community manager steps in "with the white glove concierge assistance" and shares all the details of threads that could already be in existence. Then, as many as five other community members will respond. "Rather than getting the usual 200 replies you'd get through an unpaid Facebook group There will be more relevant recommendations that are a reflection of our style of traveling," she adds. "People are paying for El Camino due to the belief that"I'm a certain way to be as a traveler; they are more knowledgeable than anybody else'. This is how we bring these folks together."

It begs the question what is the best way to ensure the high quality of service, ECT have a possible upper limit on members? "We receive inquiries all the time: 'How you going to keep the quality up and maintain the quality?'" Katalina responds, by saying "Tech will be a factor in this definitely. The team has already started tracking data and checking the possibilities." She says the team is looking into solutions so that people aren't bombarded with low data. The team is already moderating the forum and selects certain questions to answer, and stops the responses after the number of responses is a set amount.

"At this moment, the advantage of joining is that you get an extremely well-curated guide to travel each month, composed by our destination experts So maybe we'll roll out more curated content, as people are able to are awestruck by our services," she continues. "We would like to be sure we're able to handle 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."

It is noted that many members of ECT community members want to communicate with one another in particular when they travel and many are remote working together at the moment. "You'll see messages like, 'Hey, who's currently in Mexico in the coming months? I'm working remotely in Oaxaca and I'm looking forward to seeing you!'" she explains. "We're looking into tech to make it easy for people to meet when they're traveling to locations that are similar to the same time."

In addition to advances in technology, the main strategy of ECT is to take on the post-lockdown world and get selling travel trips once more. The company began selling group travel tours in June 2021. the main focus of the company is to sell these trips and offering memberships -- and combining the two with discounts to members.

Sharing is not selling.

We conclude that, counterintuitively, the approach of not marketing travelinstead, simply discussing it on the ECT forum has ultimately helped certain of the ECT's experts in travel in gaining the business. "The forum lets people display their expertise and thought leadership; many of the El Camino Travel community have been able to gain clients by the answers to their questions," Kataliana explains.

Katalina quickly realized they was a great concept and sought ways to grow and formalize the experts' list for destination. "We have asked our team, 'Who do you believe should be considered experts?' And they suggested people to us," she continues. "I was going to interview them and explain the forum to them, I would get them excited. This is a brand new channel of distribution for them, free of all of the algorithmic limitations from Facebook and Instagram which gives them a front-row seat to the ideal customer."

The experts recognized clear benefits. "When you meet with potential travelers, you must demonstrate your knowledge and demonstrate what makes someone want to book a trip with you. The forum allows them to present their knowledge in an natural and authentic manner that doesn't feel salesy," she says.

"Travel professionals love talking about travel; we love sharing details. It gives us the chance to just be really helpful," Katalina muses. It's clear that simply being helping is an effective way to sell travel: Since the travel industry is beginning to rebound in recent years, the ECT team has been able to take things a step further beyond simply speaking about traveling. "Since our lockdown ended, we've started planning trips together with our expert destination specialists. The trips we've taken were to Morocco as well as to Guatemala, in Greece in Greece, and Georgia. It's been pretty cool!" she smiles.