How much should you translate? For which locales should you adapt your content? Which languages should you prioritize? These localization decisions appear with increasing frequency on a marketing manager’s radar as a company goes global.
The sharing economy—where individuals exchange, rent or share goods and services with their peers—has gone global. Airbnb, for example, operates in almost every country in the world. In this episode of Globally Speaking, we discussed the sharing economy with Dan Hill, Director of Product and Growth at Airbnb. Here are the main takeaways.
Travel portal Expedia recently released a tool to help its clients make sense of User-Generated Content (UGC). After all, what’s a hotel manager to do when 80 hotel guests say the free breakfast is “fine,” nine say it’s “awful,” one says it’s “awesome,” and 14 say it’s “something else”? Expedia’s tool is sensible for sentiment analysis, but here’s the catch: It can only process English-language reviews, at least for now. We don’t know for sure if Expedia will introduce a multilingual version of this tool further down the road, but if it doesn’t—or until it does—here’s what its users will miss.
Whether traveling for business or pleasure, shoppers must feel confident in the plans they book from afar: they won’t buy what they can’t fully envision, let alone find online. So how can travel and hospitality companies optimize the purchase journey for savvy online travel planners who bring diverse cultural expectations to the experience?
A recent article in WorldCrunch offers the amusing and enjoyable idea that playing golf can improve your language skills. The gist is that if you play golf in Madrid, you are going to learn Castillian Spanish faster.