You don’t have to look hard to find negative reviews of the company, in fact you only have to Google or search for its brand name ‘Goldtrail Holidays’ and this is what potential customers will see.

5 of the top 10 results in Google UK could be seen as negative. That’s 50% of their first page SERPs, bare in mind that under a very few ever bother to follow onto the next page of the SERPs I should think this massively affects them.

This coupled with the unfortunate fact that a high authority site like BBC Watchdog exposed their shoddy antics really doesn’t help their brand’s reputation online, having a greater resonance in the echoe chamber of the blogosphere and a lot of links and eyeballs pointing to the negative article means it’s gonna rank high pretty quickly.

With the majority of reviews on the ever popular travel review site Trip Advisior also being negative it doesn’t look too good.

You can go with the old saying that any PR is good PR but in this case i’m not convinced.

They’re not listening…

Some companies taken to the age of networks and the Web 2.0 era of the internet, empowering the consumers to have a voice and be heard, in a positive way. Take how Dell have used ‘Ideas Storm’ for instance. They use it as a channel to engage with their customers as taking negative feedback online and using this new found knowledge for better product development.

Goldtrail, and i’m sure there are many others in the travel industry, simply seem not to care or are that uneducated in the power of the web that they’re missing out. There online presence is weak, I can barely find any up to date content on their website (with a copyright that went out of date on it in 2005) never mind anywhere else where they may have been talked about in their online network. They seem to be missing  a trick in not listening to people online and ultimately probably missing out on a shed load more sales as a result.

Relying on 3rd party operators?

Perhaps Goldtrail’s brand reputation bares little importance to them as opposed to others. Like myself, I didn’t actually realise we were even travelling with them. We booked our holiday through Kwik Travel and were none the wiser (very lazy and naive I know!).

However, they do have acquisition on their site, this coupled with those travellers that are slightly more switched on than we were could account for a large lump of potential customers.

If I were Goldtrail’s exec i’d be having word with my marketing department!