To kick things off, it launched a photo contest mid-January where it received more than 700 entries – 400 of which came over three days, said David Doucette, executive director of Internet Marketing for the hotel group.

While the traffic is still small relative to its main website, Fairmont.com, Doucette believes the site will gain momentum and achieve 100,000 unique visits a month in six months from now. “We are halfway there.”

Doucette, who will be speaking at the WIT Conference 2010, said the site “is an opportunity to enhance engagement with our customers. Our mandate is to create memories.

“‘Everyone’s An Original’ is an extension of our brand tagline which we use in our creatives featuring Fairmont President Club members.”

The site also allows hotels in the group to share information about their own initiatives. “We were getting a lot of requests from our hotels which wanted to create blogs for their chefs, for example and we thought that rather than have each hotel do its own thing, we should have a common platform,” said Doucette. 

Through an API for Flickr, the site allows users to pull in photos and so far, 25,000 images have been pulled in. It also houses videos from tourism boards via YouTube but Doucette said it is starting to see video activity from its own guests.

“We are planning to add more categories – we now have 8-9 categories of different themes and we aim to add more.”

The site however does not allow users to post reviews. “There’s an internal debate going on – whether this will be useful, how credible will it be and whether people will think it’s doctored or should we have a link to TripAdvisor or a third party review site?”

Said Doucette, “Our focus is on story telling.”

Registrations and site profiles have been created and activated for guests from 29 countries; however, account creation is limited to one profile for eight countries.

The breakdown by markets is as follows:

• USA/Canada – 82.4%

• Europe – 7.1%

• Asia-Pacific (including Australia) – 4.7%

• Middle East & Africa – 3.3%

• Mexico, Caribbean & South America – 2.5%

“Traffic numbers are fairly similar to above; the USA/Canada is just over 75% and that 7% differential is spread almost equally across the four other regions that have been noted,” said Doucette.

Featured image credit (Businessman with social media concepts) : iStock