It’s our favourite time of the week – when we highlight another great online marketing idea in the travel industry.  This week’s idea?  24Nola, a 24 Hour Guide to a 24 Hour City.

What is it?

24NOLA is essentially a mini-application that allows travellers to build their own 24-hour itinerary for events and attractions in New Orleans.  It’s built/sponsored by the city’s official tourism board, Forever New Orleans.

What’s Good about It?

It plays off the destination’s personality.  There’s no secret that NOLA is a party town, so why hide it?  Embrace it.  This tool gives you things to see and do every hour of the day.

It’s simple.  No fancy logins, pages and pages of instructions, or anything like that.  It’s just what you need to know and how to do it.  Hence why the homepage can explain the entire process in 3 steps.  Great online marketing isn’t complicated to the user.

Includes booking engine.  They’ve included a hotel booking engine onto the site.  It’s far from seamless, but they’ve given it a pretty good try.  I’d expand this to include tours, at least, if not airfare specials.

A Great Way to Organise Content.  I love that their experiences are organised by things like ‘hear’, ‘taste’, ’see’, etc…  It’s a little different but fun and super clear what each option contains.

What could be better?

Enough of the auto start videos! I think everyone knows by now that I cannot stand auto-start videos.  People know that a triangle means play, so let them use it.  Besides, the video is kind of small so it’s kind of hard to see what’s going on.

Email support.  I would much rather be able to download a PDF of my 24-hour itinerary or be able to email me a copy.  Even better is a nicely formatted Word document so I can update it later if something changes.

Standard menu navigation.  The menu navigation needs to remain consistent throughout, so users can keep their bearings as they move throughout the site.  Sometimes the menu changes, adding or removing layers but not in a consistent way.  This can cause confusion.

Links that Lead off-site aren’t marked as such. It’s pretty easy to end up off-site onto the official CVB site (understandable, but jarring user experience) but often I found myself on the Yahoo widgets site?  Very confusing.

More content. I found myself often wanting to click the title of an event/attraction and find out more