Wordbee Translator is one of the most popular translation management systems in the travel and tourism industry. So, we thought we’d take a moment to consider some of the biggest challenges faced by the travel and tourism industry.

The challenges we’ll discuss include:

• High volume of marketing content
• Lots of languages: where to begin?
• Desire to keep costs low

High volume of marketing content

The travel and tourism industry produces A LOT of content. If you are in destination marketing, new destinations appear every year. If you are a hotel chain, maybe your offers are focused on promoting new regional interests, promotions, or offers you might have at your hotels.

Whatever your specific interest, new content absolutely must be produced all the time, because content is the king of travel and tourism.

The issue with having a high volume of content is that it creates additional management and technical requirements for that content. It’s common now for even relatively small hotel chains to have a dedicated localization manager. If any of this rings a bell and you’re not currently using a translation management system like Wordbee, it might be worth your while to request a free trial.

All of this is complicated even further by a typical requirement, which is having lots of languages.

Having lots of languages

Travel and tourism is unique in that your customers, especially if your business is based in Europe, are likely to speak a foreign language. It’s quite common for enterprises in travel in tourism to need to support 15 or more languages. Air France, for example, is a customer of Wordbee, and you can imagine how many languages they have to support, but even smaller firms like GoEuro need to support double-digit languages.

This magnifies your requirements, and one of the first questions you’ll come across is, “Should I invest in a translation management system and build a team of translators and providers?”

The short answer in the long-term is almost certainly yes. This route has several benefits, including cutting costs and having strong delivery potential. If you work with external translators, you’ll save money, and if you’re careful, you can get great results.

Working with language service providers creates a hands-free environment for localization, which is great. If that’s what you value, then go for it! But it will cost more, which leads us to our next point…

Desire to keep costs low

Travel and tourism content often (though not always) expires after a season or offer has finished. Combined with the sheer volume of content that the industry produces, there is naturally a desire to keep costs low.

As is usually the case, keeping costs low usually means using technology. Wordbee has been making travel and tourism companies more efficient for ten years, so feel free to contact us for a consulting session. We know our stuff!