NB: This is a guest article by Stuart Lodge, director at RoundTheWorldFlights.
Interesting developments in the world of the official travel advice on the internet issued by governments.
Following industry discussion just a month ago on Tnooz, it looks like the UK government’s Foreign Office is testing a new "Traffic Light" system for travel advice.
It works pretty well for a country that shouldn’t really be visited, such as Yemen. Highlighted in red: "Avoid all travel to whole country".
Also works well with countries such as Vietnam, with: "No restrictions in this travel advice".
However the tricky bit comes when the advice is between those extremes. For example, this is Iraq’s advice: "Avoid all but essential travel to part(s) of the country."
But here’s the rub - this is Thailand, which has two highlighted sections. It kind of looks more dangerous, at a glance, than Iraq…
As the FCO Travel Advice Team admitted on the original Tnooz article:
"Consistency across the whole travel advice piece is a challenge".
However, TravelFish founder Stuart McDonald makes this good point:
"Highlighting the two 'avoid all..' options is extremely misleading, especially considering the vast majority of the country is fine."
If nothing else, it does show how difficult a new, more efficient, and generally more informative travel advice system, is going to be to design.
This author has previously favoured the Lodge Scale™.
A star system – with email alerts/tweets when they change
At the moment the system used to advise travellers is a blunt weapon. Go, don’t go or go under advisement. I realise that this weapon is very much used as a political tool. But surely a more subtle, effective and pro-active system is a star system.
Perhaps where 0 = Stockholm and 10 = Timbuktu.
Think about the effect of ratcheting up the numbers. There could be tweets when the stars change plus auto email alerts (a system you have at the moment). I could imagine that a change in a country’s status might make front page news locally. You could call this the Lodge Scale™. After me.
However the FCO should be given credit for trying something different.
Maybe an increase in the size of boxes might help. Or an explanation as to what they mean. At the moment it does seem quite, well, confused. Can’t help thinking that a usability study or some A/B multi-variate testing is called for.
At the very least maybe the boxes should be a lot bigger, clean up the colours and only have one box highlighted at any one time.
What do you think?
NB: This is a guest article by Stuart Lodge, director at RoundTheWorldFlights.