In your search for the right tool(s), you should be looking to both monitor and measure your brand on social media. The two terms are used somewhat interchangeably, and although there is some overlap and similarity in business goals, monitoring and measurement are distinct processes. Let’s take a look at each one in a bit more detail.

Social Media Monitoring

Monitoring (or perhaps the more evocative definition is “listening”) is the process of continuous and immediate discovery of conversations with the purpose of learning, engaging, helping and collaborating. You can do this with anyone, whether it’s your customers, prospects, industry thought leaders, former customers, partners or others. There are also different cues to listen for and different ways to engage. Typically, monitoring has a stronger real-time implication than measurement, as one of the purposes is to track keywords as they appear, with the goal of quick reaction.

How it works: Typically, monitoring is performed on a keywords basis. Relevant keywords include your brand name, product name, etc. Based on your keywords, your monitoring system of choice goes out to the social networks you specify, grabs the relevant articles and messages, and hopefully arranges them for easier digestion and action.

Why it’s important: My favorite analogy for social media is that it’s like the “largest cocktail party in the world.” It’s a room filled with people driven by one desire to communicate, share, digest and relate, while carrying on many independent conversations. Some of these conversations can be about you, your competitors or your industry. Some of these conversations could be people looking for a product like yours. They will talk about all these topics regardless of whether you are listening or not. However, you wouldn’t know any of this if you weren’t listening.

Read More of the story at Mashable.Com

Many hoteliers believe they do not have the resources to dedicate to Web 2.0 and Social Media, or in other words, they are unable to meet the needs of today’s hyper-interactive traveler . With more than 400 million users on Facebook, an average of 50 million tweets sent a day, and consumers expecting interactive and engaging hotel websites, the bottom line is that your hotel cannot afford to ignore Web 2.0, Social Media, or the hyper-interactive traveler.

Why a Sound Web 2.0 & Social Media Strategy Is Critical to Your Hotel Business

Numerous articles have been published that discuss the magnitude of participation on social media channels. Nothing exemplifies this more than the fact that recently, Facebook traffic surpassed that of Google’s .

By encouraging interaction on your hotel website and on social media channels, joining in on the conversation, and making changes to your business based on feedback, you are showing your current and potential guests that you are listening to them. This is invaluable for building brand loyalty and encouraging positive reviews.

As stated in the Social Media Revolution video on YouTube, “We don’t have a choice on whether we do social media; the question is how well we do it.” If you are not interacting with your guests via your hotel website and on the social media channels, your competitors surely are (more than 700,000 local businesses have active pages on Facebook).

Connecting with your Website Visitors Using Web 2.0 & Social Media Strategies

An integral part of the de-commoditization strategy, there are multiple cost-efficient ways to connect with current and future guests via Web 2.0 initiatives and Social Media. You may even find that in addition to further connecting with your key customer segments by utilizing the initiatives below, you are able to engage additional market segments, thereby increasing your market share. All of these initiatives to be discussed also serve to provide visibility and increase your web presence: essential for SEO.

Hoteliers must align the interactivity of the hotel website with the hyper-interactive behavior of today’s travel consumer both on the hotel website and on the social web. Create multiple opportunities for your website visitors to communicate with your hotel. If you do decide to engage your hotel website visitors with any of the Web 2.0 tactics described below, make sure to allow those participants to share their experience via all their social networks (i.e. if a website visitor enters a sweepstakes, make it easy for them to share that they entered with their friends on Facebook and to tweet the contest).

Before you launch your own strategy, start by assessing what your competition is doing. How many of your competitors have a Facebook page, a Twitter account, a YouTube channel, a Flickr account? How many of them have Web 2.0 functionality on their websites? Do their websites accommodate and encourage feedback? Many hotels do not have a solid, unified strategy, allowing your hotel to stand out and capture an audience that your competition is leaving in the dark.

When it’s time to work on your own strategy, it is important to remember that it’s not just about having a Web 2.0 and Social Media presence. It’s how you execute that strategy that determines your success.

Using Web.20 Initiatives to Engage your Website Visitors

Most websites are not equipped to handle the hyper-interactive travel consumer of today and offer dead, stale visual and textual content. There is minimal interaction with the user; all he/she can do is sit back and read what is on the website, as if reading a novel in a library. Many hotel websites offer dead, stale textual and visual content. There are no interactive Web-2.0 features engaging the travel consumer and soliciting his/her participation and input.

This is contrary to the mere nature of today’s hyper-interactive Internet user, who is tweeting, texting, emailing, communicating with friends via Facebook, and commenting, often in real-time, on restaurants and hotels via review sites like Yelp and TripAdvisor.

How can you add engaging content to your website that will solicit the participation of your website visitors?

1.) Initiative: Blog on the Hotel Website

42% of consumers accessed travel information on a blog, and 40% of consumers actually posted a review themselves (PhoCusWright 2009). Update your blog at least twice a week, and sprinkle keywords in your posts. Blogs are extremely SEO-friendly and the search engines index blogs almost immediately after a post is made. A well-developed hotel blog strategy could provide visibility to unique aspects of your hotel product and destination, and a differentiated approach to reach key customer segments.

2.) Initiative: Customer Feedback on the Site

By offering a comprehensive customer feedback form where customers can leave comments and complaints, you are communicating to your guests that their feedback is valuable to you. Make sure to include questions about the usability of your website. If possible, offer an incentive for people to fill out your feedback form, such as a free amenity or upgrade during their next stay, to encourage participation.

In addition to the positive SEO benefits (many customer reviews include keywords i.e. “We were looking for a Boston hotel that fit our budget and found the perfect fit!”), testimonials accompanied by photos if possible, make your hotel come to life for your website visitors. Also make sure that you are monitoring and responding to customer reviews on the major review websites.

3) Initiative: Interactive Sweepstakes

Contests and promotions are great for getting people excited about your brand and for building buzz. Additionally, contests offer a way to build your opt-in email and mobile list. An interactive sweepstakes on the hotel website will encourage daily visits to your website and significantly grow your opt-in email list. By offering an incentive for people to enter on a daily basis, people will become more familiar with your hotel and website.

Case Study: CVB in Southern California

A CVB client wanted to increase their social media following as well as launch a campaign on their website that would generate buzz for the destination. HeBS recommended an interactive sweepstakes that would reach consumers at every online touch point, a way to connect with consumers via mobile, email, and social media.

HeBS built an interactive sweepstakes on the website and participants were entered in a drawing to win a $1,000 free vacation. A second, third, fourth, and fifth place prize of a free hotel room was also rewarded. Lastly, an additional prize of a $250 Gift Card was awarded to the person who referred the contest to the most friends to promote viral marketing.

Results:

- 1,200 Unique Registrants

- + 300 Facebook fans in 5 days

- + 250 Twitter Followers in 5 days

- Over 800 mobile numbers added to mobile marketing list

- Over 500 new emails added to the email opt-in list

- Over 30 comments on the Facebook fan page regarding the contest

- Winner of a Major Award for Outstanding Integrated Campaign

4) Initiative: Interactive Calendar of Events

An interactive calendar of events is a great way to keep your website visitors updated on all the latest events happening at and around the hotel. It’s also a recommended way to keep your website content fresh, with a constant flow of new information to encourage repeat website visits. If your hotel has a) popular events such as dining events, tastings, leisure activities, etc. at the property, and b) events close or near the property, such as museum exhibitions, theater performances, sporting events, concerts, and more, a calendar of events is a must. The goal is that it become the go-to for website visitors that want to be kept in the loop of all happenings at your hotel.

Web 2.0 functionalities on the website have multiple benefits in addition to engaging your customer segments. They help overshadow any negative presence in organic search, build a stronger brand relationship, and they bring your brand to life for members and customer segments tying these initiatives into your social media presence.

Using Social Media Initiatives to Build Loyalty and Increase Traffic to Your Website

Four in five travelers read reviews on social media and 95% of those indicated such reviews were influential on the decision making process. (PhoCusWright 2009). There is no doubt that Internet users are increasingly influenced by social media sites and peer reviews. By utilizing a comprehensive social media strategy, hoteliers can create social media “buzz” around the hotel, target receptive audiences, and ultimately stimulate hotel website visits, interactions and bookings.

HeBS’ 2010 Benchmark Survey on Hotel Internet Marketing Budget Planning and Best Practices showed that half of hoteliers surveyed (50% exactly) responded that in 2010 they are planning to create profiles for their hotels on the social networks.

Social marketing should become an important component of any hotel’s marketing mix and part of the comprehensive Direct Online Channel Strategy for any hotel company. Naturally, it is important to use the right ROI metrics to measure the success of social marketing efforts of the hotel.

Get the full article from HotelMarketing.com

For the 19^th week in a row the Fitzwilton Hotel, Waterford remains unbeaten at number 1 on the list.

Download the list as a PDF here

(List correct as of 12^h July 2010)

The list is by no means final so if you feel we’ve missed you out, please let us know by commenting below and your hotel/group could appear on next weeks list.

The list is based on the number of fans the Facebook page has and is open to all hotels in the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland.

This list only considers Facebook Pages as opposed to groups and personal profiles.

A Page or a Group, which is better? Well the answer to that depends on you and what works for your business.

Facebook Groups:

1. Set up for more personal interaction, they are highly active and require constant engagement.
2. Connected to the profile of the people who administer them.
3. When you post something as a group administrator, it appears to be coming from you and is attached to your personal profile.
4. Groups are great for organizing on a personal level and for smaller scale interaction around a cause.
5. If the group is under 5,000 members, group admins can send messages to the group members that will appear in their inboxes.
6. Permissions settings make it possible for group admins to restrict access to a group, so that new members have to be approved.
7. Groups can’t host applications.
8. You can advertise your group.

Facebook Pages:

1. Access to a Page, however, can only be restricted by certain ages and locations.
2. Page admins can send updates to fans through the Page, and these updates will appear in the “Updates” section of fans’ inboxes.
3. There is no limit on how many fans you may send an update to, or how many total fans a Page can have.
4. Pages can host applications, so a Page can essentially be more personalized and show more content.
5. Pages can benefit from social ads that publicize the fan connection between a Page and a specific user.
6. Pages are better for brands, businesses, bands, movies, or celebrities who want to interact with their fans or customers without having them connected to a personal account, and have a need to exceed Facebook’s 5,000 friend cap.

Neither Groups nor Pages have great moderation features. If someone posts spam on your Group or your Page, you have to remove it manually, and you can also remove specific members.

So it’s up to you who best suits your business right now and going forward.

Be sure to check back every Monday to see if your hotel has made the list!

With the quickly changing profusion of opportunities, many hoteliers are encouraged to invest precious money and time into completely unfamiliar venues. So, where must the marketing dollars go to get the highest ROI?

The appropriate and engaging use of visual imagery is one of the most important investments you can make in your hotel’s marketing budget; and there are a plethora of ways to utilize this imagery to engage, bond and guide your potential guest into making that important booking. As explained by Laurie Babin in the Journal of Advertising, “The potential of imagery is both potent and provocative, especially when one takes into account that the forms of mental impressions include all five senses: hearing, touch, taste, smell, and sight.” In other words, it is possible for a person to experience a sensory stimulus without the stimulus ever being present (the “potent” part). The more senses stimulated, the greater the chances of a guest conversion and the extra benefit of better storage in the guest’s long-term memory (the “provocative” part). With great imagery, your guests can feel as though they’ve touched the velvety-soft pillows, smelled the gardenias outside the window, and tasted the béarnaise sauce on the extra tender steaks. This is what they need to feel in order to bond with your hotel, and to bond instantaneously. Images that convey facts alone aren’t nearly as compelling.

People are visual beings. If you think it’s mainly women who choose hotels based on imagery, think again. (Caveat: medical summaries are approaching. If you are not interested in such a genre, please skim through lightly, understanding that the author – an eye doctor/hotelier – believes this to be some of the most compelling aspects of the article!).

As reported in the NeuroReport (Sabatinalle, Flaisch, et al), activity in the part of the brain called the extrastriate visual cortex (as measured by MRI imaging; hang in here…) is greater when either of the sexes view emotional relative to neutral pictures. The MRI indicates the speed of decisions when presented with emotional visual stimuli – it is a measurable response in the brain. Interestingly (but perhaps not surprisingly to many), men make their choices when looking at pictures much more rapidly than women.

What does this mean for your hotel? If we liken this to “speed dating” for your hotel, the point may be more obvious. If your target market is the male business traveler, keep in mind that in general, males take approximately 2.5 seconds to make a decision to continue reading (or not) when visual imagery is involved (according to a study by Xerox in conjunction with The Loyola College in Maryland, U.S.A). Therefore, images must not just convey facts—they must involve the extrastriate visual cortex by including subtle, yet emotive features. In other words, such emotional stimuli may mean that the traveler makes the choice to be a guest at your hotel, but may not fully understand the reason for his or her choice (the extrastriate cortex is not a conscious level of the brain). Much like “speed dating” or other short bonding experiences, one just “has a feeling that it is right”. But these “feelings” are scientifically based, and measurable.

As explained by EVP, Creative Services of WD Partners, Lee Peterson, “Business owners often focus on the rational benefits of their brand out of necessity… speed, convenience, accuracy…but rationale works best when blended with great care with the emotional benefits of a brand….comfort, relaxation, trust….from our experience, no brand will reach its full potential until both are well attended to.”

So, hoteliers are faced with the challenge of providing both the rational and emotional benefits of their brand, and to do so in as short of a time frame as possible.

Interestingly, for leisure travel, women are the predominate decision makers – taking an average of 29 days and performing 12 searches and visiting 22 different travel sites prior to making their vacation bookings. With this sort of detailed evaluation, you will want to be sure that your visual imagery matches or exceeds that of your competitive set. According to the TIA (Travel Industry Association), the vast majority of reservations are still made at the visual gallery or one click later.

As if hoteliers don’t have enough to worry about, a terrifying new trend is becoming obvious. Because downloading imagery takes time, hoteliers and webmasters must be aware of this new threat – the ever-shortening attention spans involved in downloading visual stimuli. Research from web performance giant Akamai produced in conjunction with PhoCusWright, indicates that in a study of nearly 2,800 U.S. travel buyers, 57% will wait THREE seconds for a hotel web-site to download before abandoning it for other sites. Even worse, Generation Y (ages 18 – 24) expects travel sites to load in TWO and a HALF seconds. With the ever-popular multi-tasking trend, many of these potential guests will pull up other site while a slower one is downloading, dumping the slower one for one that pops up faster.

Read more at hotelmarketing.com

The white paper, Best Practices for Maximizing Your Hotel’s Online Revenue & ROI, written by Kathleen Cullen, provides results from actual hoteliers who shared their experiences and areas of focus as it relates to Internet marketing and help for hoteliers to establish a comprehensive Internet marketing strategy. It takes an in depth look at Website design best practices, effective marketing strategies and the importance of understanding analytics. The white paper also reveals practical ways to avoid common pitfalls often seen in hotel Internet marketing.

“This white paper provides the results from actual hoteliers who shared their experiences, areas of focus as it relates to marketing, key metrics and best practices,” says Inspire Resources Founding Partner Kathleen Cullen. “The goal is to provide an educational resource whereby hotel professionals can review the white paper and use it as a tool to assess current strategies, understand the areas for improvement and create a plan to action.”

The paper is broke down in three categories: Websites, Marketing and Measurement. Each category includes the survey findings related to the respective topic, as well as recommended best practices and implications for each. Some of the most interesting highlights of this study include the following discoveries:

· 70% of properties see their greatest returns in online investments

· 40% of respondents do not have a social media strategy

Get the full article from HotelMarketingStrategies.com

Additional source: Vizergy

In the past, a customer’s bad experience may go as far as several friends. Now, a negative hotel review can be viewed by almost the entire world literally in only a matter of seconds.

Determine when not to respond: Sometimes the best online hotel marketing strategy for dealing with negative reviews is to simply ignore them. If you can answer yes to any of the following questions, it may be smarter not to respond to the review at all:

1. Are other users of the website already disagreeing with the initial review?
2. Has the user left many negative reviews on the site – are they a ‘born complainer’?
3. Is this the only negative review out of dozens of positive ones?

If you have answered yes to more than two of these questions, it may be best not to respond to the review. When there is a ‘troll’ on a blog who is posting inflammatory comments, it is sometimes best not to fan the flames and let the fire burn out quickly.

Deciding to respond: You or your online hotel marketing team must assess each case individually and decide whether to respond and what action to take. If you don’t respond, you not only run the risk of the review ‘growing legs’ and spreading across the internet, but you miss an opportunity to retain a customer and to possibly right a genuine wrong.

Good responses outweigh bad experiences: In most cases, you can actually improve your reputation online by handling a negative review well. It isn’t only the customer in question that will notice, either; potential and past customers will often respond better to a hotel that is consistent, mature and proactive in its handling of bad reviews through internet hotel marketing.

Respond in a calm manner: There are two things you need to do before you start typing anything in your response box. First, try to determine the facts of the situation. Secondly, make sure you’ve calmed down and are seeing both sides of the situation before you start your response. Don’t write anything that sounds angry, sarcastic or negative, even if it is ‘veiled’.

Apologise for the way the customer is feeling: If it isn’t appropriate, you don’t need to apologise for the situation that occurred or your staff’s action. However, saying something like “I’m sorry that you felt so unsatisfied with your experience” in no way admits guilt, but does help to start on a conciliatory note and help appease the hotel customer.

Correct the facts if appropriate: If a customer’s bad hotel review is based on incorrect facts, correct them politely. Check with the owner of the review website also – if a review is libellous or false you may be able to have it taken down. Even if the facts are false, don’t threaten either the reviewer or the review site – you’ll only damage your hotel’s reputation.

For full article see Hotel Internet Marketing

A similar visit by Queen Victoriain the 1890s sparked off a  visitor boom in Killarney which was seen as the birth of the Irish tourism industry.

The first visit by a British Monarch to this country since Independence is certain to generate widespread positive publicity with

opportunities to promote places on her itinerary.

The British market, which accounts for 60% of visitors tom Ireland has been in  decline for almost two years, but the strengthening of sterling against the euro in recent weeks may -provide a platform for recovery during then peak Summer season.

For full article see Hospitality E News by Frank Corr

1. Choose Your Audience

Who do you want to reach on Twitter? Be specific and limit your scope to the demographic you really need; trying to reach everyone isn’t a great strategy. If you’re a B2B company, for example, you’ll probably want to reach other businesses and the people that represent them.

Here is a quick example: Look up at least 10 of your customers on Twitter (a quick name search on Google can turned up their Twitter profiles). Once you’ve found some, look at who they’re following and who they talk to. These people could also become part of your audience. Look at how they describe themselves and what terms they talk about. Use those keywords and terms to find like-minded people.

The goal here is not to find everyone you’d like to interact with (that would probably be next to impossible), but to find people who might fit into your audience. Try to pay attention to who has influence in your audience. For example: who are people talking to, about or retweeting? Who do they seem to ask for advice? Once you have a decent group, move on to step two.

2. Understand How They Speak

It might sound like I’m giving you clichéd advice to “listen,” but clichés exist for a reason. You need to understand how your audience talks, what they like, and what they share. Below are some solid steps to get you started.

* Look up what people are saying about your company. Are they saying good things or bad things? Are they asking for advice about what product or company to choose? Are they giving feedback about their experiences after the fact?

* Do the same for your competitors. Note if your competitors are jumping in or influencing any of these conversations.

* Notice the way your audience talks. Are they generally formal or informal? This will be very different depending on the companies you are tracking and the people you attract. It’s always good to match the tone of your audience.

* Look at what your audience shares and retweets. What kinds of links and articles do they like? What kinds of terms and ideas get them excited or annoyed?

* Note any hashtags or other ways your audience connects. Look up those hashtags to see if they have any real traction (if they’re all spam or if people are really using them to connect).

3. How Much is a Twitter Lead Worth?

This is a bit more theoretical but it’s an important step that many companies forget. The reason you’re involved with Twitter isn’t just to say you’re there, it’s because you’re looking for a good return on investment. So what is it that you’re after? It might be as concrete as sign-ups and sales or as ephemeral as buzz and brand awareness.

Depending on your goal, try to figure out how much each person is “worth.” This almost certainly won’t be an exact number, but you should get a general idea. For example, if you’re doing B2B sales and a sale is worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, you’re going to have a very different strategy than a company with millions of users that makes its money from advertising.

4. Set A Goal and Track It

Setting a goal is just the start of your strategy, you also need to track it with metrics. Choosing metrics does not just mean tracking your follower count because the count isn’t always a totally accurate measure of how many people are paying attention to your account.

There are obviously different approaches depending on the size of your fan base. If you have a large audience, you might not be able to put a lot of time into each lead. Your overall goal will likely be about brand awareness and creating buzz for your company. You should consider metrics that capture overall influence such as retweets, blog posts and clicks.

If you have a targeted audience, each lead probably carries more value. You overall goal will likely be to generate new leads. You should consider metrics like sales, email sign-ups, @messages, direct messages and clicks.

Get the full article from Mashable

Key findings from The “Consumer Response to Travel Site Performance” study conducted by PhoCusWright and Akamai include:

- Three second rule – 57 percent of online shoppers will wait three seconds or less before abandoning the site

- Younger travelers are less patient – Generation Y and younger travelers are less patient than older travelers when it comes to page load times. 65 percent of 18-24 year olds expect a site to oad in two seconds or less

- Prevention is key – A third of travelers would be less likely to visit a site after experiencing technical problems like slowness or errors on the page. Business travelers are slightly more likely to have a negative reaction

- Loyalty is not forgiveness – Active loyalty program members are more likely than other travelers to indicate that they would not likely be influenced at all by technical glitches at 34 percent. However, the remaining 66 percent are actually more likely than others to have strong negative reactions.

- Travelers tend to be multi-taskers – 59 percent of consumers do something else when waiting for a travel website to load. Nearly one in five (19 percent) open another travel site in a new window when made to wait.

- Hidden fees may cost you – 43 percent of online shoppers have abandoned a booking because the final product price and/or fees were higher than they were willing to pay

The study also examines travelers’ reactions to technical issues. Findings reveal that many travelers are guided by their previous experiences with a particular website, and for just over a third of consumers (34 percent), a technical glitch will lower their likelihood to visit a site again. Business travelers and loyalty program members are less tolerant of technical problems, and are slightly more likely to have a negative reaction to them. Research shows that these groups of online shoppers are also the most valuable customers for online travel sites. Thus, the stakes for site performance and streamlined, transparent transactions are even higher for companies targeting these segments.

“Online travel is a fiercely competitive marketplace with many powerful brands all vying for the same consumer. Think about how irritating it is to stand in a line at a physical store – people hate to wait. When they are online, they don’t have to wait because there is another travel site just a few keystrokes away,” said Carroll Rheem, Director, Research, PhoCusWright. “Additionally, travelers have an inherent penchant for intensive shopping because travel is not an everyday purchase – it’s expensive and experiential. Therefore, travel companies that do not invest in speed and reliability essentially drive customers to their competitors.”

“Today’s shoppers demand a fast, engaging and secure online shopping environment when searching for an airline or hotel,” said Aaron Hynes, Managing Director of Technology, Continental Airlines. “This study confirms that there is a direct correlation between consumer satisfaction and site performance. By leveraging Akamai’s Dynamic Site Accelerator solutions, we have been able to deliver a compelling site experience that is fast and reliable, and will keep our travelers coming back to our site when booking for their travels. In fact, since partnering with Akamai, Continental has seen significant improvements in page performance by 40 percent, which has greatly contributed to an increase in our conversion rates and sales revenues. The improvement in page load times has also contributed to our recent success by winning the Gomez most improved award with the largest decrease in response time from the first half of the year to the second half.”

In addition, findings state that consumers not only have varying patience levels, they also react to waiting differently. As with page loading times, the study finds significant differences when looking at results by different age groups. Younger travelers are more likely to engage in other activities – with 56 percent of 18-24 year olds waiting for loading compared to 77 percent of seniors. These results suggest that a poorly or slow-performing travel site can drive valuable shoppers away.

“Whether our customers are accessing our homepage or searching and booking for a hotel room on our site, we must ensure their experience is the best,” said David Godsman, Vice President, Global Web, Starwood Hotels and Resorts. “Akamai is helping us to achieve our goal of optimum site performance for our end users. The numbers of monthly site visits and conversion rates have risen steadily since leveraging Akamai’s Dynamic Site Accelerator. As our site performance improves, our customers are spending less time waiting for the site to load, less time waiting for search results and can more quickly navigate the site and purchase their travel, increasing our look-to-book ratio. Also, by leveraging Akamai’s globally distributed network, we can spend less money and effort in infrastructure related tasks, enabling us to re-direct our resources to eCommerce development activities that improve our online experience.”

Get the full article from hotelmarketing.com

Travelport’s recent survey of 12 countries found that mainland Chinese (followed by Indians and Hong Kongers) are the most inclined to use social-networking sites to research business travel, and the third-most likely to do so for leisure travel. This strangely productive use of social-networking sites is apparently uncommon in America or Britain.

China has more internet users than any other country, with over 380m at the end of last year. Clearly a significant number use the web to plan and pay for travel. Another recent survey last year found that about 20% of Chinese tourists look for travel reviews on social-networking sites, while yet another suggested that as many as six out of ten read web-based travel forums. Thirty million Chinese booked travel online last year—80% more than in 2008.

All this would appear to imply that companies eyeing up tourism opportunities in China need to work out how to appeal to web-savvy customers. As we have previously noted, the world’s travel businesses are looking towards China for future growth. Even as the global industry struggled last year, China’s tourism revenues grew by 9%, and the number of outbound trips climbed slightly.

Some foreign travel websites have sniffed an opening. Minube, a Spanish “social travel portal” that allows users to describe and recommend locations (for which they may even be paid), launched a Chinese site in April. But generally the omens aren’t good. Foreign social networking sites like Facebook have flunked in China so far, losing out to local competitors with a better understanding of netizens’ proclivities. Among travel sites, meanwhile, the Chinese website Ctrip takes the lion’s share of online booking revenue: foreign sites have conspicuously failed to break in.

Little wonder that an international carrier like Lufthansa should choose to work with a Chinese social-networking site such as Renren (previously called Xiaonei), nicknamed by some the “Facebook of China”. If companies like Lufthansa manage to graft themselves onto China’s burgeoning internet travel scene, their bottom lines should benefit. And so, Gulliver dares to hope, should the rest of us when Chinese tourists bid down prices. Apart from being increasingly web-savvy, Chinese consumers are also notoriously price sensitive.

Get the full article from economist.com