Qantas launch ‘mobile first’ youth travel site in partnership with Sound Alliance
Qantas has partnered with Sound Alliance to launch a ‘mobile first’ youth travel site aimed at inspiring 18 to 35 year olds to travel the world.
AWOL will cover daily travel news, and provide readers with features and destination guides that combine photography, video and in-depth travel journalism in an effort to showcase unique places in Australia and around the world as well as pushing destinations Qantas flies to.
The website, managed by Sound Alliance’s Native Studio division, aims to publish more than 1,500 pieces of original content each year on music, travel and experiences.
Sound Alliance CEO Neil Ackand said: “We know from our research that young Australians love to travel and are always on the go. The stories and content that we create will be delivered directly through the Facebook news feed to their mobile phones.
Let’s hope it does better than Qantas’ last abysmal attempt at digital innovation — hooroo (anyone seen or heard of them lately?). AWOL have taken a page straight out of the Buzzfeed listicle-led content playbook too attract the notoriously fickle yoof market. Maybe it’ll work for them/qantas – but why have they launched with such a basic content offering? There’s hardly anything there! Oh, and your facebook page doesn’t work.
HMM..Yeah i get the intent of AWOL, but does the world and Aussie Gen Y’ers really need another travel site…they can get all they need from Lonely Planet and a host of other travel review sites/inspiration. reality is most of their travel decisions are made via word of mouth from friends uploading instagram/facebook pics
Well said, ‘interesting’ – spot on.
Seems like Melbourne has gone AWOL:
Melbourne: Sorry, nothing to display
http://awol.com.au/destinations/melbourne
@ anonymous: as long as you only want to go to Tokyo or LA (the only two destinations available from the “Choose your destination option” in the nav, you’ll be fine. Why would Qantas/Sound Alliance go to market with something that is clearly (less than) half-built.
But it’s an ongoing publication not a static site. 1500 pieces of content a year and it’s day one.
understood @ travelled, but even so I probably would have launched with more than a dozen stories which is all they seem to have right now. It’s a fairly underwhelming experience as it stands — I’d hazard a guess that anyone who stumbles on it now (and who doesn’t know of the 1500-a-year plan) probably wouldn’t come back based on this experience. As we all know, once someone has a poor perception of a product, it’s very hard to turn that around…..
Judging it’s day-one content might work well as a snarky comment – but if they are planning to drive eyeballs to content via social sharing, the depth of the content isn’t as important as the quality and share-ability of the pieces themselves.
Sound Alliance showed with Junkee they can do that – it’ll be interesting to see if they can pull it off again while also trying to serve multiple masters (qantas and the greater audience)
Indeed, @hmmmm. Time, traffic and ultimately qantas’ share of the youth market/# of bookings will tell.
Quality over quantity. People want to engage with beautiful, unique story telling not top 10 lists that are click bait. #buzzfeed
They should invest in some SEO too … doesn’t exactly jump out at you when you put AWOL into Google. And LA and Tokyo are still the only destinations …