18 Dec How Flickr Helped Confirm my Honeymoon
For those of you who don’t know, I’m getting married this June on Flag Day (that’s June 14 for those who don’t keep up with random holidays).
So in the pursuit of getting all of my to-do’s crossed off, I’ve recently been on a hunt for a honeymoon location with the following criteria:
- Out West
- A cabin
- As close to mountains and lakes as possible
- Far away from human civilization but close enough to things to get a hamburger and some fries.
As you can imagine, this isn’t your typical honeymoon criteria. It’s not to an all-inclusive resort, I’m not looking for a champagne glass hot-tub (although those are pretty sweet), and I don’t want to stay in a cheesy honeymoon suite in a hotel.
I guess I had always imagined that when the time came to look for a honeymoon location, I would simply type in “honeymoon out west” and there would appear every related search at my fingertips. Instead, I’ve experienced HOURS of painstaking searches on the internet in which I find myself hunched over my computer at 12:00 at night thinking, “why is this so hard?”.
However, by luck I eventually found this cabin in Tetonia Idaho, which from the website photos appears to be a dream. But before I was willing to confirm the first thing that I wanted to know was “What is this going to be like?”, and “What’s nearby”, and “What activities can we do?” and so forth.
That’s when I visited Flickr, which had pictures geotagged with “Tetonia Idaho”. While I was there, I actually could see pictures taken from other honeymooners and some of the activities they did while they were there. After seeing the beautiful mountains, the plane ride they took over the range, and some of the sunsets – I was immediately hooked. My fiancee and I sent the deposit the very next day.
While there are many lessons for the travel industry in this story, and many applications for social media (which I will cover this week), this for me, has revealed the true value of user-generated content. While a traditional website sparked my interest, it was the social media that closed the deal.
