Social media experts are forever extolling the SEO, brand visibility, traffic driving and conversion benefits of user-generated content for travel websites.
Real metrics are hard to come by but we're beginning to get a picture.
Last month, Digital Visitor posted on the power of unique content such as reviews on travel websites.
And, here's some additional number crunching from Off Exploring which, by way of highlighting its white label blog service, has studied the impact of blog sharing on social media as well as what an mobile app can do.
This first slide demonstrates the average combined effect of social media sharing and SEO benefits in terms of how many people, over a month, view an active blogger's posts via social sharing, the number of resulting click backs to the website and the number of page views.
The company says that about one in three blogs is shared via the ShareThis button which drives eight click backs and 23 page views.
Off Exploring also says that between 30% and 50% of its users share their blogs on Facebook each month with different results from different age segments.
Age plays a significant role with 18 to 24 year olds generating more than double the page views and clicks to the website - 260 views and nine clicks - compared to the 25 to 34 year olds with 120 page views and three click backs.
The company then went on to look at the impact of its mobile application introduced in May 2010 with the graph below showing a healthy increase in registered users.
Prior to the introduction of the app, website sign-ups had been tailing off but the period between January and October 2011 has seen a threefold increase in sign-ups compared with January to October 2009.
The final graph shows an increase in blog activity since the app was released with people not only signing up but using the app to post blogs with between 60% and 70% of all blogs now posted via the iPhone service.
The company is now planning to add a 'send a postcard' function to the app, making it more appealing to the short-term traveller, and also believes it can be used to provide additional value to travellers via sales of last-minute ancillary items.