Putting a face to your hotel using social media networks definitely has its advantages. It allows your customers to converse with a face rather than an anonymous employee while at the same time giving your hotel a voice. Allowing your customers to connect with your hotel on this level will create a much deeper, more meaningful relationship. So if you decide to go down this route and have your hotel represented by a ‘face’, it’s important that that ‘face’ represents exactly what you want your hotel to represent.

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Google have just activated a new improvement to their real-time search function. Starting from today, users will not only be able to search all the real-time content out there (from Facebook, MySpace, Twitter and Buzz) but will be able to sort the tweets by the time at which they were posted. This handy new feature will allow users to see what people were talking about at a specific moment in time as far back as the first tweet on March 21st 2006.

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Twitter will begin rolling out paid advertising on it’s social networking platform later today. The ads will appear as ‘promoted tweets’ and will initially only appear in twitter search results. Initially the ads will be charged per thousand impressions but the company plans to create a charging method based on what they call ‘resonance’ which will look at the interaction and importance of the ad and price it accordingly.

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It’s week number 3 in our Top UK Hotels on Twitter. All hotels are performing consistently well and maintaining their positions in the top 30, with only 2 hotels moving up the table and a single new entrant at number 30.

Has your hotel made the list?

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Apple recently announced the creation of iAds, a form of mobile advertising for it’s (also newly announced) iPhone operating system 4.0. The iAds are designed to target mobile phone users where they spend most of their time – on the downloadable apps. There are, however, some limitations to this as the 4.0 operating system (due for release this summer) will not support early iPhone and iPod touch models. Instead the OS 4.0 will only support the iPhone 3G and 3GS, the iPod Touch 2nd and 3rd generations and also the newly released iPad.

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It’s time for this week’s Top Irish Hotels on Facebook. There has been a lot of movement in the past week with 5 hotels progressing up the table (by as much as 8 places!) and another 2 new additions.

Has your hotel made the list?

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Experience of many years has taught me to be wary of reports by consultants whose findings are identical to the agendas of their clients. So it was with some caution last November, that I leafed through the document from economist Peter Bacon which argued for the closure of 15,000 guestrooms in Irish hotels. It had been commissioned by the Irish Hotels Federation which had been arguing for exactly the same outcome for the best part of a year.

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Yesterday we posted an article on how Dublin has dropped its hotel rates making it one of the cheapest holiday destinations in Europe. More figures released by travigo.co.uk have backed up this claim but also uncovered that overall European hotel prices have risen by 12%, with the majority of the price hikes coming from southern European holiday destinations.

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In the not so distant past, Dublin had a bit of a reputation for being one of the most expensive cities in the world. Now, it seems, there is a glimmer of hope on the horizon. While the price of products remains relatively high, it is the hotel and tourism industries that are leading the charge towards more competitive prices. Figures collected by Hotels.com show that hotel prices in the capital have dropped 23% in the past year, showing that hotels are more than willing to drop their rates to boost tourism as we near the end of the global downturn.

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