Donate to Massive Good

Posts tagged as:

hotel

2009 Unsuspecting Travel Hero and Travel Zero Awards

January 3, 2010

Four Seasons’ Santa Barbara Resort, The Biltmore received the 2009 Unsuspecting Travel Hero Award for proactively responding to a guest who had an issue with the music playing on the radio after the hotel’s turn down service made up the room. A relatively small issue that was cleverly identified and elegantly addressed in a highly personalized manner. Recognized for its multi-faceted, yet consistently customer hostile advance seat assignment policy, AirTran Airways received the 2009 Unsuspecting Travel Zero Award. The AirTran policies fundamentally insult a traveler’s intelligence while simultaneously wasting their time – truly a remarkable accomplishment.

Read the full article →

Bathing in the Hotel Merchant Tax Quagmire

December 22, 2009

The hotel merchant tax issue is creating havoc for online travel agencies. At the present time, more than 200 municipalities, counties and states have lawsuits pending in an attempt to claim additional tax revenues based on the markups applied by Online Travel Agencies (OTAs.) In some cases, the suits are groundless as the current hotel occupancy tax laws are based on the revenue received by the hotel. However, some cities are changing their tax laws to base the taxes on the retail price paid by traveler. Unfortunately, there is widespread confusion – this article attempts to provide clarity on the key issues and a recommendation for resolving the hotel merchant tax problem.

Read the full article →

Travel Industry Site Traffic Rebound – Not a Hotel Slam Dunk

December 15, 2009

Compete produced an analysis that indicates traffic to hotel brand and Online Travel Agency hotel specific web pages have increased faster than airline and car rental sectors, indicating a faster path to recovery. Unfortunately, the increase in site traffic has not translated to improved hotel performance as hotels continue to deeply discounting their product to shift market share from competitors. As the hotels fight to support occupancy and average rate, share of leisure travel bookings is shifting away from hotel brand sites to the OTAs.

With the steepest drop in US hotel net operating income on record and non-performing Commercial Backed Mortgage Securities hotel loans hovering close to 15%, the US hotel industry appears to be preparing for a difficult stretch that will continue to provide travelers with excellent hotel values, but test the patience and wallets of hotel owners.

Read the full article →

My Twitter Digest for the Past Week 2009-12-14

December 14, 2009

Highlights include a packed week of travel and digital media conferences. Search Engine Strategies Chicago leaves no topic uncovered – ranging from the future of search to the impact of mobile, personalization and social media and how pay per click and organic search will be changed forever – Wish I could have attended all the concurrent sessions; HEDNA meets in Las Vegas and thankfully Henry Hartesveldt provides some Twitter updates; USTOA meets in Banff and talks about crowdsourcing crisis management best practices; LeWeb talks everything digital in Europe – and generously posts videos. Finally Jeremiah Owyang concludes that real time is not fast enough and apps are now becoming future oriented, plus Farelogix launches its SPRK booking platform.

Read the full article →

My Twitter Digest for the Past Week 2009-12-07

December 7, 2009

Summary of RobertKCole’s Twitter postings for the period ending midday November 30. Highlights include: Philip Wolf recapping his thoughts on the PhoCusWright conference; ReadWriteWeb Produces several Top 10 Lists; US Government gets High Speed Rail rolling and leverages social media; The US hotel industry has a very bad performance week in Occupancy, ADR & RevPAR; DARPA celebrates the anniversary of the Internet and studies the crowdsourcing for finding 10 red weather balloons; Las Vegas City Center developemnt opens as Dubai development stalls.

Read the full article →

My Twitter Digest for the Past Week 2009-11-30

November 30, 2009

Summary of RobertKCole’s Twitter postings for the period ending midday November 30. Highlights include: A storied week for women on the web – A vindictive individual decides to trash Stacy Small (aka @EliteTravelGal on Twitter) by adding seven bogus comments under three different fictional names to my blog post on the Future of Travel Agents; Women travel bloggers announce annual Passports with Purpose goal is to build a school in Cambodia; And PinkFriday.org raises lots of money selling donated goods with 100% of proceeds going to Susan G. Komen breast cancer research; Plus, Four Seasons proves it clearlyunderstands how social media can improve a destination experience.

Read the full article →

My Twitter Digest for the Past Week 2009-11-23

November 23, 2009

Summary of RobertKCole’s Twitter postings for the period ending midday November 23. Highlights include: The PhoCusWright conference and Travel Innovation Summit – Live tweeting from the Blogger town hall and Lodging recovery workshops; Facebook on its way to 1 billion users; indications the recession may have a lasting impression on consumers and travel.

Read the full article →

My Twitter Digest for the Past Week 2009-11-16

November 16, 2009

Summary of RobertKCole’s Twitter postings for the period ending midday November 16. Highlights include: Retweets from a good hotel panel at the Pubcon Search Marketing Conference and Travel Blog Camp at World Travel Market; some angel investor insights; InterContinental and Design Hotels websites that provide some great examples of hotels inspiring travel using video; , and some Twitter Lists, Twubs and other techniques to follow the PhoCusWright conference.

Read the full article →

US Hotel Performance – Time for a Baseline Reset?

November 12, 2009

US hotel industry performance has not yet shown signs of recovery. Declines in all key industry metrics – occupancy percentage, average daily rate (ADR) and revenue per available room (RevPAR) continue to decline in 2009 when compared to comparable periods in 2008. Smith Travel Research (STR), PriceWaterhouseCoopers(PWC) and PKF International (PKF) all forecast that ADR and RevPAR will continue to decline in 2010. Reviewing peak period weekly performance statistics, it appears that the US hotel industry needs to prepare for “A New Normal” with lower corporate and group business and value oriented leisure travelers when supply and demand reach equilibrium.

Read the full article →

My Twitter Digest for the Past Week 2009-11-09

November 9, 2009

Summary of RobertKCole’s Twitter postings for the period ending midday November 9. Highlights include: good news from the USTA that the travel industry will add 90,000 jobs in 2010; hotels & hotel groups doing a good job on twitter; the Oasis of the Seas uses social media in creative relevant ways; Some live tweeting from David Atkins HSMAI webinar on social media, and a tweet burst for Stephen Joyce on the mess that surrounds hotel room tax.

Read the full article →

← Previous Entries