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Posts tagged as:

travel

What a Skull Fracture Can Teach Us About Social Media

March 6, 2010

The travel industry can create intensely personal and life changing experiences, but travel companies are still working to communicate with travelers in a more personalized and relevant manner. Social networking literally changes the rules of engagement. During times of crisis, social networks gain importance to support for personal relationships while brand relationships may be disregarded. Social media and social networking are constants – engagement is now variable. Travel organizations must now consider the value of a consumer’s social network and level of engagement into their lifetime customer value. With increased interactivity, brand relationships are becoming more like personal relationships. Emotional connections may take time to develop, require significant resources to maintain and turn ugly if mutual trust is violated.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Smarter Travel Agents and Travel Agencies Rise from the Ashes

November 21, 2009

The travel agency community has sustained significant losses due to consolidation and the economic downturn. A new breed of smarter and more innovative travel agencies have emerged that understand customer needs, provide specialized travel product knowledge, and creating travel plans best fit those needs. These are the traditional traits of quality travel agencies. The difference is that these new agents have embraced technology and used it to expand their reach, engage their customers and grow their revenues.

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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.

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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.

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How Google Can Help Simplify Online Travel Planning

November 5, 2009

The planning phase of the seven-step travel process is a hot area for travel startups that are developing innovative solutions to address a complex problem. Google, with 70+% share of US search traffic and many existing travel planning tools is perfectly positioned to improve and simplify the travel planning process. In the future, end-to-end planning of complex travel arrangements will result from enhanced profiles supporting trip-centric traveler personas and geo-aware itinerary sequencing tools. The introduction of hard and soft filtering will provide support for emerging Web 3.0 technologies capable of providing more relevant travel product recommendations.

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