Terms

"It was really important that we had a means 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 an exchange between one participant and another. We wanted to make it easier for members communicating with each other, as that's a form of community-building fundamentally, it's the way people feel connected to the other."

It wasn't just travel enthusiasts who were becoming part of the ECT community. Industry experts were also joining and actively providing information to others, creating a welcoming and well-informed platform. Katalina and the ECT group wanted to formalize their contributions and express their gratitude to all of the helpful information to be shared.

"We wanted to get the experts who are aware of our values and are basically the El Caminos from these countries, more engaged within our group," Katalina starts. "We put together badges and also gave them profiles with a blue circle around their picture with a check mark in yellow, as verification to show they're destination experts. When you submit a query about Greece and Christina replies, you can be sure that this is an expert who had a minimum of ten years in Greece."

The community members were asking questions, and genuine, qualified, travel professionals were engaging. This online community served the purpose it was intended to serve possibly even better than been expected. It was then that the magic happened: lockdowns were lifted. The online ECT community had begun now transitioning back to an offline world. It was time for the company to transition from survival mode back to building to the future. "During the pandemic , we had to undergo fire testing, and proved resilient," Katalina explains.

The spread of the pandemic and worldwide slowdown allowed for the ECT staff to think bigger about the best way to serve its community of women travellers. "We felt we were creating something truly special and we had the time or space to consider the brand we were building. We realized how special this is for a travel-related company as a whole," she continues. "As the world started to open up and we realized that there was a lot more we could be doing with membership in real life. The community could be served in a way that reflected what they needed from us as they began to go out in the world again."

Big ambition

How can El Camino Travel going to give its customers the things they require, given that travel is almost returning to regular? "The big vision is to become the most renowned single-stop destination for women to think, plan, book, experience and share their travel," Katalina asserts.

ECT started off with around 100 people in the month of August The number has increased to about 700. The ECT team has expanded to six and a quarter full-time employees. In the US the millennial females have the highest growth rate in the travel sector, however Katalina is of the opinion that none of the big operators are catering to this market. "For certain of the larger companies, no one's sitting in the boardroom telling them"hey, women have so much money but they're still feeling very unsafe while traveling. What can we do to improve their experience?" she says.

Katalina shares that from a recent study of women who travel, the number one thing wanted from travel companies by most (85%) of respondents, is simply to feel safe while traveling. "These women don't ask to have bodyguards on their property," says Katalina "They only want to be confident that they've got the information with the right resources, connections and resources to make informed decisions. This is what helps them feel confident and secure. We're solving this momentarily with our smaller-group excursions, which allow guests to immerse themselves fully and not have to sacrifice the experience of traveling experience because of their gender."

Ultimately, Katalina wants El Camino Travel to become the most trusted resource for women who travel. "TripAdvisor as well as Google are focused on the quantity of information over quality. There's an abundance of poor quality data available and we want to be totally different from that," she continues. "It's about having a community behind me which I can rely on in a way that I can't lean upon any other group in my journey exploring the world."

Travel concierge

How does the ability to draw on a community manifest itself? Katalina says that whenever someone asks a question on the ECT forum, the community manager jumps into the discussion "with the white glove concierge assistance" and shares all the details of threads that could already exist, and then up to five other community members will respond. "Rather than getting the usual 200 replies you would get in an unpaid Facebook group you'll get better suggestions that are a reflection of our style of traveling" she says. "People have been paying for El Camino due to the belief that"I'm a certain way to be as a traveler. They get me better than anyone other'. The goal is to bring people together."

The question is what is the best way to ensure the level of quality, ECT perhaps have an upper limit for number of members? "We get asked all the time: 'How you going to keep the quality up?'" Katalina responds, by saying "Tech will play a role in that definitely. We've started collecting data and looking into our possibilities." She says the team is currently looking at solutions so that people don't become inundated with bad data. The team already moderates the forum and picks a few questions that they will answer. They also ceases responses once a certain number.

"At this moment, the advantage of joining is that you get a highly curated travel guide every month. It's put together by our expert destination guides, so maybe we'll put out more of our curated content because people really believe in our services," she continues. "We are determined to ensure that we are able to accommodate increasing numbers of people, and remain able to offer the information as well as the connections people are looking for, without like ever feeling like what happens as groups grow."

It is noted that many of the ECT members wish to get in touch with one another in particular when they travel and lots of them have remote workgroups in the present. "You'll see messages like, 'Hey, who's in Mexico in the coming months? I'm on the road working remotely from Oaxaca!'" she explains. "We're researching technology to allow people to meet when they're traveling to locations that are similar to the same dates."

Alongside the advancements in tech, the big plan of ECT is to take on the post-lockdown world and get selling tours again. The company began selling group travel trips again in June of 2021. nowadays a huge portion of its business is selling those trips, providing memberships and combining the two by offering discounts to members.

Sharing and not selling

In conclusion, however, and contrary to our expectations this approach that does not sell travelinstead, simply discussing it on the ECT forum -- has ultimately helped certain of the ECT's experts in travel to gain clients. "The forum allows people to display their expertise and thought leadership as well as a large portion of those in the El Camino Travel community have actually acquired clients through the answers to their questions," Kataliana explains.

Katalina quickly realized they were on to a good thing and looked for ways to expand and establish the expert list of destination experts. "We talked to our present team, 'Who do you think should be an expert?' they started recommending people," she continues. "I was going to interview them and tell them about the forum and inspire them to join. It's a fresh distribution method for them, free of all the algorithms that are used by Facebook and Instagram which gives the opportunity to be in front of their ideal client."

Naturally these experts saw clear advantages. "When you talk to potential travelers, you must showcase your experience and demonstrate what makes someone want to take a trip to you. This forum lets them show their expertise in an natural, genuine way that doesn't feel salesy," she says.

"Travel experts are passionate about discussing travel. We love to share information. It gives us the chance to just be really helpful," Katalina muses. Being helping is an effective strategy to market travel. as the industry has begun to rebound, the ECT team has had the opportunity to take things a step further than just discussing travel. "Since lockdown lifted and we've begun planning our next trip with our destination experts. The trips we've taken were to Morocco as well as to Guatemala and through Greece in Greece, and Georgia. It's been quite cool!" she smiles.