Travelocity recently published a ‘Traveler Confidence Report’ which attempts to understand and predict the trends in travel intentions for 2010. The study shows a large rise in travel intentions compared to six months and one year ago.

These findings are sure to make many hoteliers breathe a sigh of relief.

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Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past couple of weeks, you may have noticed a very proud Apple Inc. showing off their brand new iPad. The iPad blurs the boundary between mobile phone and laptop and looks likely to become a handy travel companion.

Why should the hospitality industry care? Because it highlights the inevitability of the future of on-the-road hotel bookings.

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If you’re new to twitter, you may not know that there is a certain etiquette involved when conversing on the popular social networking platform. To some it may seem like common sense but for others, it may be worth investigating the dos and don’ts surrounding a particular platform.
Converse within these unwritten rules and you can’t go far wrong. Ignore them and you could end up damaging your online presence irreparably.

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Quite often hotels are so involved with reaching out to potential customers that they forget about their existing ones. It costs 5 to 8 times more to sell something to potential customers than it does to existing customers.
Why not use the information you know about your existing customers and use it to make your site more sticky and also provide them with more incentives to come back?

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In recent times we’ve seen many forms of digital media adopting location as a variable. It has become a very effective way to direct marketing material at an audience according to their geographical location. Usually these are in the forms of custom banner ads, website content and more recently, twitter trends.
Now it’s the e-mail’s turn to have the geo-marketing makeover.
The MailChimp newsletter client has developed a system to automatically collect location data from users using their IP address, eliminating the need for the consumer to enter a location manually.
What this means is that Hotel marketers will be able to use this data to target or customise their newsletter campaigns at a specific location.

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I think this could be music to hoteliers ears, if it gathers ground! I don’t think anyone minds a review as long as it is fair and truthful. You work long and hard to ensure the best possible experience for your guest and when false reviews are posted it can often have detrimental effects on [...]

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If you’ve never heard of Facebook, Twitter, Myspace or Youtube, establishing a presence for your hotel on these social networking platforms may seem a little daunting. Yet fear not, you are not alone! Mashable have come up with 5 top tips for when your hotel is starting its social networking life.

I think the most important point to take from the tips is to allocate time specifically for social networking. Things will start off slowly but the viral nature of the social networking world will soon start to pay its dividends. The more time you can afford to allocate to social media, the greater the impact of the presence. That’s not to say that if you spend all day on twitter you’ll gain thousands of followers overnight. There is a balance to be obtained here and this can only be achieved through the tried and tested method of trial and error.

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An article I recently read highlighted what I had been suspecting for quite some time. We’ve all sent emails regarding a specific topic only to recieve an automated email containing answers to absolutely nothing that you’ve requested information about. We’ve also pressed numerous buttons on the phone in an attempt to actually talk to someone other than a robot, only to be told to see their website for more information. It’s now emerging that users are turning to the social networking platforms to converse directly with bussinesses online. There are no forms to fill in, no extra buttons to press. Customers can simply find the company they wish to contact and send them a message right there and then.

Here’s hoping that social media platforms are becoming the knights in shining armour for a new era in more personal customer service and support.

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Brian Solis published a very interesting article today about search and the ‘real-time’ web.

In summary, Google recently integrated real-time search into their technology to pull in tweets, blog posts and news content as its being published, dramatically improving the time to crawl down to minutes.

In the eyes of Google, the adaptation of PageRank for Social Media essentially creates a human algorithm of sorts that may eventually serve as a foundation for assessing the authority of an individual in the social Web.

Are we seeing the start of something new, a PeopleRank?

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