As the fallout surrounding Tripadvisor’s ‘dirtiest hotels’ list starts to settle, hoteliers are looking for ways to improve their customer reviews more than ever. Daniel Edward Craig (not to be confused with secret agent 007 Daniel Craig) has been trying to get to the bottom of how to get your hotel to the top of the fabled Tripadvisor top hotels list!

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Is this Google’s entry into the social media foray? Google has just announced the launch of a new array of social networking-oriented features to its free Gmail email service. Called Google Buzz, the new features give users the ability to share photos, updates, websites, and news with friends and family. In addition to helping network with existing connections, the service can also offer suggestions for people users might be interested in following. The features are integrated directly into Gmail and require no installation or separate configuration.

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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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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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A passenger on a flight notices his reading lamp is broken, so, using his mobile device, he complains on Twitter. Within minutes, the airline’s ground staff has dispatched a flight attendant to fix the problem and has alerted maintenance at the destination airport. Corporate communications has passed the Tweet onto the customer service department, which [...]

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Google Analytics is a fantastic tool as it is – and it’s always improving, but there are a lot of people out there that have created tools to make it even better.
In an effort to make everyone aware of these fantastic and easy-to-use tools, I’ve compiled a list of the ones we use everyday. If [...]

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I asked my followers on Twitter to share some of their most commented upon posts to see if I noticed any trends on types of posts that drew readers out of lurking mode to react with a comment.
Here are 13 types of posts that were most common in people’s responses with a few links to [...]

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Contrary to what some marketers assume, people generally don’t open commercial e-mail at work during their lunch hours, according to a new study by U.K.-based e-mail service provider Pure360.
In a study of 660,000 messages sent by 34 companies, Pure360 reports that just 9% of e-mails were opened between noon and 2 p.m., and 62% of [...]

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If you’ve decided to incorporate social media, remember that YouTube videos, blog posts and status updates are just a part of your entire marketing arsenal.
But don’t feel pressured to jump in quickly and create a profile on every site. First, decide if it’s right for your company. “Are you a social organization?” says Simon Salt, [...]

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