Blogs

The header at Hotelmarketing  was pretty blunt: social media travel sites are screaming for attention-but users and suppliers are not impressed.

According to the latest PhoCusWright data, social media in general generates so little traffic to travel websites it makes anyone wonder if there really is a need for "dedicated social media sites for travel."

In an earlier post at New Media Travel,  we argued that travel marketers were in fact wasting their time on Facebook and Twitter.

Now this rec

Note to Airlines: Skip the Passengers, Just Fly the Bags

Absurd as it may seem, it's very possible the airlines are making more money on the persistent and aggressive fees they're charging than on ticket sales.

A report from the Department of Transportation reveals that in 2010, the airlines raked in a whopping 5.7 billion dollars in checked bag and changed flight charges.

And we the flying public keep paying and the airlines keep gouging.

Hotelmarketing.com went so far as to suggest that airline ec

Or what every frequently-flying woman, and bride going on her honeymoon, needs to know about staying healthy and fit in the air.

If travel had a diva....someone who embodied the talent of looking great while facing the challenges, exhaustion, fun and frustration of Travel, it'd have to be Debbi Kickham.

Known to us in the travel world as Debbi Karpowicz, her most recent book The Globetrotters Get-Gorgeous Guide is pure Debbi: sassy, irreverent, helpful, fun to read and full of personality.

Th

Report: E-mails Are 40% More Effective Than Twitter or Facebook, Combined

So, after all the excitement about Facebook and Twitter as communities and marketing panaceas, good, “old fashioned” e-mails prove to be 40 times more effective than Facebook and Twitter combined.



That is, if your goal is to acquire customers, and not just share the latest family news or travel experience.



Apparently, says Hotelmarketing,  the reason is simple: 91 percent of all US consumers still use e-mail daily. And “t

Anatomy of a Twitter Suspension

So it begins innocently enough.

I Try to send a Tweet from an active, important  account I manage. The Tweet doesn’t send.

Error Message: “There was an error sending…please select the Social Network and try again.”

So  I try,  and try again.

Then it slowly dawns on me:  There’s more here than meets the eye.
I sign into the account, and there it is: “Your Account Has Been Suspended.”

Caution light flashes: The suspension occurred the day after I published a mildly critic

Reviews do matter. A report by SAS noted that positive reviews (less so TripAdvisor-based rank and brand), followed by lower price were the most important influencers of choice.

And lower price or higher ratings don't overcome the impact of negative reviews.

But even in America, it's possible that more isn't better.

Writing reviews is almost a national pastime.  Writing reviews on everything and saying pretty much what we want and being rewarded by some sort of badge or other "atta boy" reco

It's a strange contradiction. We're told visuals drive bookings, traveler interest.

We hear that travelers looking to book will be compelled to do so by rich images that tell the kind of story we want to buy into.

But the visuals we typically see are sterile and empty.

VFM Leonardo, a leader in online visual story telling, reports on the top ten visuals shoppers want to see on a website before they actually book a hotel room or a destination.

The smart money tells us that travelers don't b

Someone in my home feed on Twitter only posted the number of followers he/she gained. And the number of followers he/she lost. Every day

"Today I lost 5 Followers and gained 3."
"Today I lost 1 Follower and gained 0."
And so it went.

The steady drumbeat of the daily report fascinated me: I wanted to know why these followers came on board or jumped ship.
I wanted to know why they followed and unfollowed this rather humorous, clever person.

Then of course I started seriously to wonder the same ab

Too much visual information and not enough solid, reliable , trustworthy facts?

Not enough education and awareness building by luxury travel marketers?

Misidentification of the luxury traveler?

You'd think that the "rich and famous" would naturally be drawn to top hotel brands, names synonymous with luxury like the Ritz-Carlton and Four Seasons.

But Luxury Daily in an article by Joe McCarthy, says it ain't necessarily so.

Apparently very few of the top 10% of the wealthy "have experience wi

“Female Eggs For Sale” may not be a sign you’ll see any time soon, but for all intents and purposes that’s what the global market for harvesting and selling women’s eggs is all about.

The in vitro fertilization market is a billion dollar industry that touches almost every country in the world. It touches the wealthy neighborhoods of London and reaches  into the Americas, Asia and the IVF capital of the world, Cyprus, which has more fertility clinics than any other country in the world, and attr

So it was an easy chat with a friend who knew I had something to do with the travel biz. He knew I traveled. He knew I produced content (videos, Audio PostCards, travel news reports, trends) for our own site, New Media Travel,  Technorati Travel and Tripatini, among others.

But he was fixated on the actual travel. The grand act of "going places," as he called it. But this was the surprise: he thought it (travel) was a waste of time, money and energy.

The usual responses to my hitting the road

If it's true that 1-minute of video is worth 1.8 million words, then hotels and travel destinations may have found the "holy grail" that converts the grazing online process of looking at hotels, to actually booking them.

And there isn't a hotel or destination in the world that isn't seeking the business alchemy that converts lookers into actual customers.

Generally, the hotel's website is held responsible for making this magic happen.

Of course service that exceeds the client's demands, locat

Marti Mayne  one-ups Katniss, Peeta and company by turning The Hunger Games  into No Hunger Games.

Their bed and breakfast packages give food to the local food pantries and other “no-hunger” causes in the towns and regions where the "No-Hunger Games" B and B’s are located.
The Capital gang and the denizens of its Districts should rejoice.

In the hugely popular movie, the characters fight for survival.
Instead of the “survival of the fittest” in Suzanne Collins’ trilogy and movie, Mayne and her

One of the dreads of air travel is sitting next to someone who is either crazy or can drive you crazy with annoying habits, non-stop chatter or just plain old boorishness, resulting in impulses to jump out of the plane or slowly throttle your seatmate.

So, Hotel Marketing.com  states the obvious when it says air travel has gone from “glam to glum.”  But as in so many cases, social media is being touted as the panacea for air travel doldrums. It seems some travel-media web sites are engaging in wh

Drivers: Beware of Short Skirts and Bikini Tops

It’s summer.  So when  Insurance News, tells us that men get into more car accidents in the summer than any other time of year, you have to pay attention.
They get into more car crashes generally, but much more so in the summer, says Sheila’s Wheels, a British-based insurance company for women.

Why?
Because men are ogling women when they should be driving.
Summer brings out the short skirts, the low cut blouses and sexy bikini tops, and that apparent