While guests still check the Internet first for best deals, an increasing number calls the hotel directly, stressed by spending countless hours online researching. Here are some great sales training tips for your next reservations meeting, on how to convert these calls into bookings.
by Doug Kennedy
For veteran hoteliers who are experiencing our industry’s fourth economic [...]

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You can get more than just links from social media. You can also get really great content. And one of the best places to find free content is on Flickr.
There are tons of ways to use Flickr. If you can take a great photo, you can use Flickr to build inbound links and get your [...]

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Spending on travel and tourism declined last year for the first time since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the Commerce Department said Thursday, as Americans canceled vacations, a strong dollar kept foreigners away and businesses slashed travel budgets.
As a result, the trillion-dollar industry — a major employer in the U.S. — is reeling, and [...]

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Ryanair’s latest fee is criticised as being ‘completely against consumer interest’ just as a slew of negative statistics are released on domestic aviation worldwide
The Office of Fair Trading (OFT) is to examine a complaint from the air passenger watchdog about Ryanair check-in charges, as airlines fight to raise revenues and slash costs amid deteriorating traffic [...]

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Savvy travel-marketing people already know that popular social-networking sites like Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, LinkedIn and others are a valuable extension of any major marketing program.
As the social-networking phenomenon grows and evolves, travel agencies, home-based agents, suppliers and destination marketers who sit on the sidelines may risk missing significant opportunities to engage existing customers, recruit [...]

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Internet bookings will surge. Demand for online virtual meetings will gather pace. Domestic travel will stay stable or grow. Long haul travel will fall sharply. And the most pain will be felt in the business travel and MICE sectors, according to the latest ITB World Travel Trends Report.
Internet bookings will surge. Demand for online virtual [...]

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Expedia’s TripAdvisor last week launched Flight Search, a meta still in beta that is already turning heads and clearly gunning for the biggest boat in the moat.
But by 2002 the party mood had cooled considerably. Farechase faded, Qixo quieted, and SideStep managed to morph into a nice little survivor, serving up a modest marketing service [...]

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Ryanair has become involved in an online fakery dispute over a Twitter ‘account’, claimed to be from the airline, which was abusing bloggers and passengers.
The apparently official account @RyanAirOnline was used to make fun of passengers, saying that they “smell like urine” and describing them as “mostly stupid”.
Ryanair initially confirmed that their marketing team had [...]

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While trying to keep up-to-date on the latest interactive tools, some marketers have lost track of how powerful incentive and loyalty programs can be. They have an outdated view of them as generic or unsophisticated, with the “free iPod with purchase” program as a perfect example of a primitive reward program.
An effective interactive marketing campaign [...]

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