Terms

"It was really important to have a way for us to be able to communicate with each other," Katalina begins. "Some individuals will refer to their community' and mean their Instagram following; maybe it's an exchange between the creator and their followers However, it's not really conversations between one user with an additional. We wanted to make it easier for members speaking to one another since that's community building fundamentally, it's what makes people feel connected with each other."

It wasn't just travel enthusiasts who were becoming part of this ECT community. Experts from the industry were joining and actively sharing their knowledge with people around them, creating a friendly and knowledgeable community. Katalina as well as members of the ECT group wanted to make formal the contributions of these experts to express their gratitude to all the free information that was being shared.

"We tried to bring those experts, who understand our values and are basically the El Caminos of those countries, more involved in our community," Katalina starts. "We made badges for them and gave them profile photos featuring a blue circle on their photo and a yellow check mark for verification that proves they're destination experts. If you ask a question regarding Greece and Christina responds, you'll know she is an expert that has had a minimum of ten years in the country."

Members of the community were asking questions, and real, experienced professional travel agents were engaging. The community online was fulfilling its purpose perfectly -- possibly even better than been anticipated. And then, it occurred: the lockdowns were removed. Online ECT community was moving back to the the offline world. It was now time for the organization to shift into a state of survival and begin creating to the future. "During the outbreak, we were fire-tested, and we did well," Katalina explains.

The pandemic , and the resulting global slowing allowed the ECT staff to think bigger about the best way to serve its community of women travelers. "We felt we were creating something truly special however, we didn't have the time or space to consider the brand we were building. We realized how special this is for a travel-related company generally," she continues. "As the world started to become more open and we realized that there was more that we could accomplish through memberships in real-life. The community could be served by expressing the things they wanted from us, when they began to explore to the outside world."

Big ambition

What is El Camino Travel going to provide its members with the things they require, given that travel is just about getting back to normal? "The main goal is to be the leading all-in-one destination for women who want to plan, dream for, plan, make reservations, and document their journey," Katalina asserts.

ECT began with about 100 members as of the end of August in 2020 The number has increased to around 700, and the ECT team has grown to six and a quarter full time employees. In the US the millennial females represent the fastest-growing group within the travel sector, however Katalina feels that no one of the major operators are catering to this market. "For some of the bigger companies, no one's in the boardroom saying"hey, women have an enormous amount of money yet they're not feeling safe when they travel. What can we do to better serve them?'" She adds.

Katalina recounts that, from a recent study of women who travel, the number one thing wanted from travel companies by most (85 percentage) of those who participated was just to be safe when traveling. "These ladies aren't asking for bodyguards," Katalina affirms "They only want to be confident that they have the intel as well as the resources to make informed decisions. This is what helps them feel confident and secure. This is what we're addressing momentarily with our smaller-group travel experiences, as they enable travelers to completely immerse themselves in their travel experience and not have to sacrifice the experience of traveling experience because of their gender."

In the end, Katalina hopes El Camino Travel to become the top source for women travelers. "TripAdvisor as well as Google concentrate on volume rather than quality. We've seen many poor-quality data available and we'd like to be the totally different from that," she continues. "It's about knowing that there's an entire community of people behind me that I can lean on in a way which I am not able to lean upon any other group, when I go out to discover the world."

Travel concierge

How does the ability to lean on a community show up? Katalina says that the moment someone post a query on the ECT forum and the community manager is able to jump into the discussion "with this concierge assistance" and will share all details of threads that could already be in existence. Then, up to five other community members will respond. "Rather than the 200 or so responses that you get from an unpaid Facebook group you'll get better suggestions that are a reflection of our style of travel," she adds. "People pay for El Camino because they think"I'm a certain way to be as a traveler; they have me covered better than everyone else'. We're bringing these people together."

It begs the question: in order to maintain the quality, does ECT has maybe an upper limit on members? "We get asked all the time, 'How are you going to ensure that you keep the quality up?'" Katalina responds, saying "Tech is going to play a role in that certainly. We've already begun collecting data and looking into our possibilities." The team is looking into solutions so that people aren't bombarded with low quality information. The team currently moderates the forum and selects certain questions that they will answer. They also stops the responses after the number of responses is a set amount.

"At present, one benefit of membership is that you get an extremely well-curated guide to travel every month. It's put together by our expert destination guides We may also put out more curated content, as people are able to believe in our services," she continues. "We are determined to ensure that we are able to accommodate increasing numbers of people, and can still provide the content and connections that they're searching for without experiencing the same issues that occur when the number of people join."

She notes that a lot of the ECT members wish to communicate with one another particularly when traveling and a lot of them have remote workgroups currently. "You'll see messages like"Hey, is anyone currently in Mexico for the next few months? I'm working remotely in Oaxaca!'" she explains. "We're looking into tech to make it easy for people to find each other while they're in locations that are similar to the same dates."

As well as the latest advances in tech, the big idea to ECT is to seize the post-lockdown culture and start selling tours again. The company began selling group travel tours in June of 2021. today, a major part of their business is selling those trips, selling membership -- and combining the two with discounts to members.

Sharing is not selling.

We conclude that, counterintuitively this approach of not marketing traveland instead discussing it on the ECT forum can have helped certain of the ECT's experts in travel to gain business. "The forum allows people to demonstrate thought leadership and expertise and a lot of members of the El Camino Travel community have been able to gain clients by their responses to questions," Kataliana explains.

Katalina quickly realized they were on to a good idea and began looking for ways to expand and establish the destination expert roster. "We asked our current teammembers, "Who do we believe should be considered an expert?' they suggested people to us," she continues. "I would interview them, inform them about the forum and get them excited. This is a brand new channel of distribution that is free of all of the algorithmic limitations of Facebook and Instagram as well as giving them a front-row seat to their ideal client."

Naturally these experts saw clear advantages. "When you speak to prospective customers for travel, you need showcase your experience in demonstrating what makes someone want to take a trip to you. Forums allow them to do that in a very natural, genuine way which doesn't come off as salesy," she says.

"Travel experts love to talk about travel. We love to share the information. We have another chance to help others," Katalina muses. The simple act of being helping is an effective way to sell travel: Since the travel industry is beginning to grow in recent years, we as the ECT team has had the opportunity to go a stage further beyond simply discussing travel. "Since our lockdown ended the ECT team has begun to plan trips with our destination experts. We've been to Morocco, to Guatemala, to Greece and Georgia. The trip was pretty awesome!" she smiles.