I just read what I wrote, and I don't know if it makes sense unless you already know what I'm talking about before I explain it. Here I go again... 1- Have a link from the header (or footer) of the page that says trip reports. 2- Thank link will forward you to an outside page with a listing of hotels 3- Once you click on a hotel, it will open up a page with a list of links to all the trip reports for that hotel in the forums. Example: BBG: Trip Report November 8-13 by Hoosiers, posted 12-08-03 http://www.cancuncare.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=2100 BBG: Trip Report blah, blah, blah... by http://www.canc... Everytime someone posts a trip report, the only extra work to a moderator is to update one page with a title and link. Now that I may be explaining clearly, my head is wandering, I'm already thinking of marketing and promotions to make it Cancun's predominant website for trip reports, such as Debbie's for the DR. Link to travel sites to be used as testimonials, random prizes to help collect trip reports, discounts or prizes for to promote quality of information in the reports... Ow, wish I was this creative at my job... wait, I am, it's the ambition I'm missing!
I know what your saying & I've seen some other sites be very creative with this, but seems like none of the Cancun sites take the trip reports that seriously. So lots of excellent reports just get lost in the shuffle forever. I often think of Di's wedding trip reports. They would make for the perfect guide to how to plan a wedding in Cancun. But there is no link to her trip report anyplace. I also recall Hey Moms trip reports...they were right on par with Hugh Manatee's trip reports. Great stuff, burried into perpetuity. The other downside is that when someone needs info on a particular resort, they are told to "do a search" for some reports. They may or may not find the good stuff, but who would ever know what they did or didn't find. Those folks often disapear, never to be seen posting at the site again. As it stands, there really is no incentive to do a trip report and it seems that most don't do them anyway. So one could make the argument that there really aren't enough trip reports to even warrant a separate forum or anything to catalog them for easy access. I would imagine that if more people were actually taking the time to do trip reports, my suggestion would make more sense....dunno?
Hmmm...Im waivering again Tony said Totally agree Tony, thats my ethos too. I notice that one of the other Cancun forums has lost a weeks worth of posts twice in the last month -no word of an explanation and no sign of them being restored. The users seem to be accepting it like thats part of the deal. Mikey, the separate forum would be like Cancun Pics where we could move existing trip reports and alter the post titles to name the hotel and dates and then users could search just within the one forum to find the reports they are interested in. Dan, I actually think your suggestion is a really good idea and is something that would be easy enough to set up, although it would be quite time consuming to set up with a different webpage for each hotel and also I'd need to update the webpage each time a new trip report was made. It was also get good serach engine rankings as it would be specific and would bring people to the site. However, the mods wouldnt be able to do this it would just be me as I'd have to write the webpages since they would bne html based rather than via the extra buttons that the mods have, it would need server access too. I'd really like to implement this but I'm not sure I have the spare hours in the day. Although, in saying that, once its up then it wouldnt take long to maintain. I think I need to consider this more. I also like the idea of prizes and incentives, some T shirts and stuff we could give away as prizes or sell. I have already looked into this. One issue is time - the other is the prices I have found seem to me to be quite expensive (for a Tshirt, for a coffee mug etc) - add to that shipping from the UK (95% of our users are on a different continent to me) it would probably mean I'd be stuck with 500 T shirts that no one wanted! BTW I have never seen Debbie's site re the Dominican Republic. I'll take a look and see if I can learn some tricks. Michelle, I wouldnt be too harsh on the number of trip reports, I dont think we are doing too bad and as for Hugh's report I think (not sure) we have the exclusive on that one. I agree that valuable trip reports can get lost forever here and thats something I want to resolve. Just look at how succesful tripadvisor.com is. Thanks all for the input, it's nice to have more than one head thinking about this. We'll see how we develop!
