Humanizing Asian Travel: A Conversation with Travel Wire Asia’s James Craven.

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Southeast Asia travel is personal. That's what we try to live up to in this outfit; we're neither aligned with the corporate voices (staid, sales-centric) nor with the amateur travel bloggers (personal, passionate, but somewhat less coherent). Guides like yours truly are somewhere in between: creating a personal perspective with which travelers can make decisions that involve travel providers like hotels, airlines, and travel bureaus.

It's the same insight, scaled up, that's driven Hybrid News Ltd. managing director James Craven and his news aggregator site Asian Correspondent: "the idea of a collective of bloggers, organized in a professional way, but still allowed to express themselves, still focused on their own countries and the stuff they generally know about," he explains.

What Asian Correspondent did for Asian current affairs, Craven hopes to accomplish with his new site Travel Wire Asia: "we're going to invest heavily in the international blog community in Asia to provide us with fantastic content from their own countries and their own travels," says Craven.  The ability to provide a unique human voice, Craven believes, can benefit both individual would-be travelers trawling the web for info, and the big travel conglomerate offering the travel services they need.

I had a conversation with James Craven to find out where the wind is blowing with regard to travel content and the DMZ between corporate and personal perspectives that his new site plans to bridge, among other things.

What has working with Asian Correspondent taught you about Asian online travel content?

There is a huge amount of dull content on the Internet when it comes to travel. There's some good stuff, but there's plenty of very dull rehashed material. I noticed the other day that Qantas has its own blog called "Travel Insider", but imagine how far the concept of "insider travel" can be taken by a huge commercial entity!

They want to create a channel for their customers to see their human side, to get advice and tips. And they call it "Insider", because obviously they're trying to say, "We can give you an inside perspective on what's happening, to the places that you'll travel with us." The concept is good marketing, but what actually comes out is very dry, non-human.

So we take the hybrid model of news, citizen journalism, that we've employed successfully [at AsianCorrespondent]- by literally ensuring that it's people's experiences that get published. Somebody who's been there and done it.

But who are you reaching in the first place? What do your readers look and sound like?

We've got on average about a million people a month coming through the Asian Correspondent site. We've got an 18-35 year old demographic, primarily - very much Asian. Some of our biggest readerships are in Thailand, Korea, Malaysia; Indonesia was very strong last month.

They're upwardly mobile. They're interested in education. They're interested in technology. And they're certainly interested in travel. It makes sense for us to develop websites that are more focused in terms of those important areas.

What would be the appeal of a site like Travel Wire Asia to, say, an airline seeking to reach that target market?

I think our readers are highly intelligent. The readers understand when they're reading stuff from a real person, or if it's marketing-speak. Effective marketing is when you're speaking to customers in the way they want to be spoken to. And I think that that's kind of what blogging is about.

If we can help good companies to bridge that gap, then I think we will be providing them with a unique service. So we offer the opportunity to travel providers, whether airlines, travel boards, or the actual agencies or ticket providers themselves, to help them to blog for our developing community of readers. We get bloggers to work with companies, to try and humanize some of their communication, to try to get more blog-centric with how they talk to their customers.

How do you know this can be done?

At Asian Correspondent, we have very positive experience with many universities in doing that, so we believe we can translate that same experience in the travel sector.

Apart from hiring a community of bloggers, what other lessons are you taking from Asian Correspondent to work in Travel Wire Asia?

I think that we learned a lot about how to build Asian Correspondent by speaking to readers everyday via comments, Skype, or different forms of communication. They were really involved in helping us define our site, and ultimately it's been a success.

We're getting a lot of feedback, negative or positive, from people who are starting to read Travel Wire Asia. We're four weeks old, and we're getting two or three thousand people a day coming to the site, with the help of readers across Asia, we can increase those numbers rapidly.

Your work at Hybrid News has this really tight focus on Asia. Why do you find the region so compelling?

I was born in Sydney, and I grew up on an island off the coast of Queensland called Moreton Island. I lived in Bangalore for a year when I started my publishing career. Lived in Beijing as well. Growing up and in my working life, I experienced different parts of Asia; that never leaves you.

Do you have any particular favorite travel destinations in Asia?

My favorite city in Asia would have to be I think Kuala Lumpur. KL is fantastic because there's a huge sense of optimism, despite the presence of different cultures, political tensions, different ideologies and different religions. There's just a sense of optimism. Also it's the food, the opportunity to be in so many interesting places so quickly.

Any travel tips you'd like to share?

Don't do drugs, that's number one. Number two, pack toothpaste. And number three, don't forget the old-school passport, tickets, money. My dad used to say to me, "As long as you've got passport, tickets, money, everything's OK." Sometimes you don't even need a ticket now, but you can't go too far without a passport and money!