Over the past year, the global travel industry has been hit hard by the COVID-19 pandemic, with widespread travel restrictions and a decrease in consumer demand leading to a significant drop in tourism. This has also had a major impact on the world of travel blogging, with many bloggers finding it difficult to continue their travels and document their experiences for their followers.
Before the pandemic, travel blogging was a popular and lucrative activity for many people. Bloggers would travel to different destinations, document their experiences through writing, photography, and video, and share their content on social media and their own websites. Some bloggers even turned their passion for travel into a full-time career, working with travel brands and creating sponsored content.
However, with the onset of the pandemic and the resulting travel restrictions, many bloggers found themselves unable to continue their travels as they had before. Many were forced to cancel their plans...
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Bad Wifi, internet connection while traveling... this issue has been a problem in the travel industry for decades!
I'd love to hear from the community:
1. How do you tackle this issue?
2. How do you ensure your content remains exclusive to your clients?
I assume this question is about international travel.
I think most travelers will utilise eSIMs as more devices support it and the UX (buying, installing) is getting so simple, anyone can use them.
Customers might also simply stay with their telco. imo the days of shock $1000 roaming bills are over and most telcos now offer cheap(ish) per-day plans for like $3 a day.
As for your second question, is this in regards to digital products such as downloadable guides? I donโt think you can truly prevent someone from copying content, but Iโd say most customers (unless they are a sneaky competitor) are not going to distribute content they have purchased. I think others in the community might have more insight into this.
Internet/WiFiโjust tether to sim card.
Protecting stuffโwe sell PDFs and for a while I chased Scribd to get stuff that members uploaded there removed, but in the end was a waste of time and I donโt bother anymore. When we used to generate PDFs on the fly used to emboss the username on the PDF, ostensibly for this reason, but again, donโt do that anymore. Egregious copyright infringements I chase through DMCAs, but again, thereโs a cost benefit analysis at play, and I chase less than I used toโthough it became much less of a problem once most of the site was paywalled.
As someone else mentioned, tethering to a cellular data network via a SIM card on a hotspot or phone is always a great secondary Internet source. The fact of the matter is, if you can't provide fast and stable Internet, you're simply not going to attract or retain any digital nomads, or remote working, guests. Whether or not your business can survive without that group is a separate question and depends on environment, competition, etc.
For those travel businesses (booking platforms and property managers) who do have good internet, I believe it's imperative to showcase that in the advertisement in order to attract these remote workers looking for medium/long-term stays. To do this, you need to be providing periodic speed tests with historical data including on dropouts. This instills maximum trust with the prospective guest. The Wired Nomad, my product, has been developing this small, plug-and-play device that can then be integrated into our search engine & aggregator for those wishing to view truly verified Internet/Wi-Fi information.
I usually get a local SIM card, most of the times itโs cheaper as super easier to find that use my Canadian expensive line.