Terms

"It was crucial that we had a means for our community to connect with one another," Katalina begins. "Some people will say 'my community', and that's referring to their Instagram follower base; it could be an exchange between the creator and their audience However, it's not really a conversation between one community member with an additional. We wanted to make it easier for members talking to each other since that's community building fundamentally, it's what makes people feel connected with the other."

Not only travel fans were joining this ECT community. Industry experts were also joining and were actively sharing information with people around them, creating a friendly and knowledgeable platform. Katalina and members of the ECT group wanted to officially acknowledge these experts' contributions to acknowledge their appreciation for the free information that was being shared.

"We wanted to get those experts, who understand our beliefs and who are basically the El Caminos of these nations, to be more active within our group," Katalina starts. "We created badges for them and gave them profile photos that have a blue circle surrounding their picture as well as a checkmark in yellow for verification that proves that they're experts in destination. When you submit a query about Greece and Christina responds, you know the person is an expert who was a long time within the country."

The community members were asking questions, as well as genuine, certified travel professionals were engaging. The community online was fulfilling the purpose it was intended to serve perhaps even better than had been anticipated. Then, the miracle happened: lockdowns were lifted. Online ECT community had begun now returning to the offline realm, and it was the right time for the business to shift into a state of survival and begin creating for the future. "During the pandemic , we had to undergo fire testing, and were able to stand up," Katalina explains.

The pandemic and its resulting worldwide slowdown allowed for the ECT team to think further about how to best serve its community of women traveling. "We believed we were doing something special and we had the time or space to think bigger about our brand that we were creating. We realized just how unique this is as a travel business generally," she continues. "As the world started to become more open, we realized there was much more we could do with membership in real life. It was possible to serve our community in a way that reflected the things they wanted from us, as they started to venture out into the world."

Big ambition

How is El Camino Travel going to offer its clients everything they require now the world is about to go getting back to normal? "The main goal is to be the pre-eminent single-stop destination for women to think, plan to book, travel, and then share their travel experiences," Katalina asserts.

ECT was founded with 100 members as of the end of August in 2020 It is now about 700. The ECT team has grown to six and a quarter full-time employees. The US women of the millennial generation have the highest growth rate in the travel sector, however Katalina believes that none of the major operators are providing services to this group. "For many of the largest companies, no one's at the top of the executive table saying, 'Hey, women spend an enormous amount of money yet they still feel really unsafe on the road. How can we better serve them?'" she says.

Katalina recalls that, from a recent study of 5000 female travelers The top thing they want from their travel company by the majority (85 percentage) of respondents, is simply to feel safe while traveling. "These women don't ask for bodyguards" says Katalina "They just want to feel that they have the intel with the right resources, connections and resources to make informed decisions. This is what helps them feel empowered and feel safe. We're solving this momentarily with our smaller-group excursions, which allow guests to immerse themselves fully and to not sacrifice the overall quality of their trip experiences due to their gender."

Ultimately, Katalina wants El Camino Travel to become the most trusted resource for women who travel. "TripAdvisor as well as Google focus on quantity over quality. There's an abundance of poor quality data available and we want to be completely different," she continues. "It's about having an entire community of people behind me to lean upon, but in a manner that I can't lean upon any other group, when I go out to discover the world."

Travel concierge

Just how does being able to rely on the community manifest itself? Katalina says that when someone posts a query within the ECT forum and the community manager is able to jump into the discussion "with this concierge service" and shares all the links to threads that might be already in existence, and as many as five other forum members respond. "Rather than getting the usual 200 replies you'd get through the Facebook group for free, there'll be better recommendations that are a reflection of our style of traveling," she adds. "People are paying for El Camino due to the belief that, 'That's who I am as a traveler; they get me better than anyone other'. This is how we bring these folks together."

The question is how to keep the high quality of service, ECT have a possible upper limit on number of members? "We are asked every time: 'How you going to ensure that you keep the quality up and maintain the quality?'" Katalina responds, by saying "Tech is going to be a factor in this certainly. The team has already started tracking data and checking our alternatives." The team is looking into solutions so that people don't become inundated with bad data. The team is already moderating the forum, and chooses which questions that they will answer. They also stops the responses after the number of responses is a set amount.

"At present, one advantage of joining is the fact that you receive an extremely well-curated guide to travel each month, put together by our destination experts We may also put out more curated content, because people really trust our services," she continues. "We would like to be sure that we can handle more people and that we remain able to offer the information and connections that they're searching for without feeling like what happens as groups grow."

It is noted that many of the ECT group members would like to connect with each other in particular when they travel and a lot of them are remote working together in the present. "You'll receive messages such as"Hey, is anyone located in Mexico for the next few months? I'm remote working in Oaxaca and I'm looking forward to seeing you!'" she explains. "We're researching technology to make it easy for people to find each other while they're in locations that are similar to the same time."

As well as the latest advances in technology, the main idea to ECT is to seize the post-lockdown culture and start selling trips again. It began offering group-travel excursions in June 2021. today, a major focus of the company is to sell these trips and offering memberships -- as well as bundling them together with discounts to members.

Sharing, not selling

It is our conclusion that, contrary to what we would expect it is the method of not selling travel -- but simply talking about it in the ECT forum -- is ultimately helping some of ECT's travel experts to gain business. "The forum lets people show their thought-leadership and knowledge and a lot of members of the El Camino Travel community have been able to gain clients by the responses they provide to inquiries," Kataliana explains.

Katalina soon realized their were on to a good idea and began looking for ways to increase and improve the expert list of destination experts. "We have asked our teammembers, "Who do we believe should be considered the expert?' And they began recommending individuals," she continues. "I interviewed them and explain the forum to them, I would get them excited. It's a fresh distribution method that they can use, without all of the algorithmic limitations that are used by Facebook and Instagram, and gives them a front-row seat to the ideal customer."

The experts recognized clear benefits. "When you talk to potential travel clients, you have demonstrate your knowledge in demonstrating why would someone book a trip with you. The forum allows them to do that in a very natural and authentic manner which doesn't come off as salesy," she says.

"Travel professionals love talking about travel; we love sharing information. This gives us another opportunity to be helpful," Katalina muses. It's clear that simply being useful is an excellent method to promote travel. as the industry has begun to rebound in recent years, the ECT team has been able to go a stage further than just discussing travel. "Since the lockdown was lifted the ECT team has begun to plan trips together with our expert destination specialists. We did trips to Morocco as well as to Guatemala, in Greece as well as Georgia. It's been pretty cool!" she smiles.