European travel giant TUI is launching www.travel.me, a portal which aggregates content from 600 social media accounts across the group.
The move is being positioned as part of its oneBrand strategy - a concept launched in 2015 to run all of its main tour operating businesses under the TUI brand and which is slated for completion this year.
The travel.me portal is designed by Berlin-based Blumberry. The system accesses all the Twitter, Instagram, Facebook and YouTube posts from all the group brands' official channels and reposts them onto travel.me, although there is some curation involved before content goes live.
The site also recycles content from the brands' blog pages where appropriate.
Blumberry's Gerald Selch described travel.me as an "editorially managed content hub".
The site exists in German and English although other languages will be added over time. Other plans include allowing travellers to post content directly onto the site and for the site to show live feeds from special events.
One of the reasons TUI decided on a one brand approach is not only to reinforce consistency of the product and holiday experience but also for economies of scale in its marketing. For example, it is currently running a pan-European ad campaign across eight different source markets.
Whether travel.me feeds into this drive for economies of scale will be revealed over time, but it makes sense, in theory, for TUI to have the option of promoting a bespoke content portal - through natural or paid search - separately from the individual web sites.
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