November 2008 Archives

Is this Tips From The T-List 2.0?

Voyageek has compiled a list of the Top Travel Twitterers.

Given our wholehearted conversion to Twitter as a useful and reliable medium over the past few weeks, we're happy to repoduce the list - and be included, of course.

    * Carrie Marshall
    * Kelly, Travellious.com
    * Stevo, Asianramblings.com
    * Kevin May, Travolution
    * Blogontravel.com
    * Jessica, Italylogue.com
    * Erica Johansson, Travelblissful.com
    * Passenger Only, Passengersonly.com
    * Paul Brady, Jaunted.com
    * Travelography, Travelnews.ning.com
    * Chris Mitchell, Travelhappy.info
    * Matt, nomadicmatt.com
    * Jennifer Leo, jenleolive.com
    * Mike Richard, Vagabondish.com
    * Elliot Ng, Uptake.com
    * Darren Cronian, travelrants.com
    * Blog.4amexpat.com
    * Albert Barra, Hoteljuice.com
    * Jens Thraenhart, Tourisminternetmarketing.com
    * Christopher Elliott, Elliott.org
    * Chris Noble, WorldNomads.com
    * Gary Arndt, Everything-Everywhere.com
    * Sean E Keener, Bootsnall.com
    * Guillaume Thevenot, hotel-blogs.com
    * Guido J. van den Elshout, Happyhotelier.com
    * Tim Hughes, Tims-boot.blogspot.com
    * Claude Benard, Hotelitour.com
    * Michelle Snow, Zengrrl.com
    * Beth Whitman, WanderlustAndLipstick.com
    * Sheila Scarborough, familytravellogue.com
    * Pam Mandel, Nerdseyeview.com
    * Jeanne Dee, Soultravelers3.com
    * Karen Bryan, europealacarte.co.uk
    * ramblingtraveler.com
    * Christine Cantera, missexpatria.wordpress.com
    * Richard Branson, Entrepreneur.virgin.com
    * Amanda Howson, Thericebowl.net
    * Nathan Midgley, Travelweekly.co.uk
    * Philip Arthur Moore, Aloneinvietnam.com
    * Kerry, theflyingmum.wordpress.com
    * Cherrye Moore, my-bella-vita.com
    * Stuart McDonald, Travelfish.org
    * Deirdre, Beginningwithi.com
    * Aurae Beidler, nwtravelonline.com
    * Mathieu Ouellet, radaron.com
    * Kara Williams, TravelingMamas.com
    * Shannon Hurst Lane, TravelingMamas.com
    * Lea Woodward, locationindependent.com
    * Tanya Brothen, Parisianspring.blogspot.com
    * Merrill, Voyageek.com

Within minutes of the list being published we had 20 new Followers.

Powerful...

Linda Fox is on the ground at the Virgin Atlantic social media day, VJAM, at London's Nesta.

Catch the Twits and photos on our dedicated page.

A thoroughly enjoyable breakfast seminar with those bastions of the finer things in life, Mr & Mrs Smith, and travel social network Dopplr (they have a content partnership).

The pair hosted a press morning at the classy Kettner's in London's Soho and a brief Q&A took place while the consumer hacks cooed and digested news about hotel-esque developments such as 'Shabby Design Chic' etc.

Anyway, Dopplr revealed some interesting statistics:

* 70% of users are "active" - in other words, using the service to post details of their trips and connect with others.

* 40% are from the IT industries. This is no surprise given that Dopplr is something of a darling in the dot-com world of Silicon Valley and, er, Shoreditch.

* 10% are in architecture and design.

* 10% are media-types.

* A fair split between business and leisure travellers.

But perhaps most interestingly:

* Two-thirds of those with trips in the system have NOT booked a hotel.

Following our news story about Amadeus Extreme Search earlier today, here are some more screenshots of the system in action.

The overall winner from the Innovation Summit and Five Minutes of Fame at the PhoCusWright conference, iM@, was perhaps not everyone's first choice.

Now you can make your own mind up. Here is the company's ten-minute initial pitch to delegates last Monday.

Watch it all here.

NB: I was one of the judges for the final round.

Good to see our exclusive last week about Expedia being dropped by Ryanair was picked up up by one of Ryanair's fiercest rivals, easyJet.

"Following the announcement that Ryanair has carried out its threat to terminate its hotel supplier contract with Expedia, easyJet is offering Ryanair customers the opportunity to book their hotel at: easyJetHotels.com

"EasyJetHotels are also offering Ryanair customers an extra 5% off already guaranteed lowest rates at easyJetHotels."

Fast movers.

The PR-blogger-journalist-travel company debate continues apace following last week's shenanigans at the inaugural TravelBlogCamp in London.

This week both I and one of our regular freelancers received an email from a London PR agency, titled: "Press Trip: Valencia Wants Bloggers."

It was the usual blather about shopping, sightseeing and how Valencia - getting there, but not quite, in our opinion - is "one of the most vibrant city break destinations in the world".

At the foot of the email were these killer lines:

* Yes, I (or a nominee) would like to undertake a trip to Valencia in return for editorial coverage

* No - I am not interested

Let's forget for a moment that Travolution's writers are not generally known as bloggers and we have never produced any colourful destination content, so a bit of a badly targeted pitch.

Secondly, the sender also attached a Media Assessment Form for each writer to complete outlining how much coverage they would give to the trip, airline and hotel.

This is the usual pre-trip checklist for the client - but unfortunately on this occasion a completed form from a well known West of England newspaper was attached, rather than a blank form.

Needless to say, Valencia (read, PR agency) will be doing rather nicely from the titles this particular person is representing.

Anyway, back to the "blogger" pitch. This indicates a number of things:

1) That there is a concerted effort amongst some PR agencies to involve bloggers in the traditional 'media trip' to destinations. No harm in that at all.

2) That circulation and traffic is not an issue, replaced perhaps by influence. [The newspaper in question stated it had print circulation 54,000 per issue and web traffic of 43,000 - figures that most consumer travel bloggers would love to have, let's face it).

3) That the PRs at TravelBlogCamp last week (remember: they made up 20% of the audience) must remember that an approach such as the one above will undoubtedly fail, because most of the bloggers there - unless the bloggers were fibbing, of course - did not want to be influenced by travel firms.

These are fascinating times for the relationship between the media and travel.

Does anyone know of other press trip pitches specifically targeting bloggers? Will the traditional pitch ("in return for coverage") work for bloggers? Does anyone care?!?

You can always count on Kayak co-founder and chief executive Steve Hafner to speak his mind/tell the truth/opt for the controversial (take your pick).

At the end of his one-on-one interview with PhoCusWright boss Philip Wolf, he said:

"It still baffles me why some of the biggest OTAs have such cluttered and ugly websites."

With tongue planted firmly in cheek, Expedia president and chief executive Dara Khosrowshahi sauntered on stage yesterday at the PhoCusWright conference in Los Angeles and said:

"It's always a pleasure to be here to talk about the end of the world as we know it."

Fantastic!

The final of the six finalists is Triporati.

The site is an online platform which assists customers in selecting a travel destination by matching the needs and affinities of the traveler with the unique character of over 1,000 global destinations.

It claims to have no competitors and is funded by CEMA Ventures.

The site monetises traffic through advertising and is fronted by former-vice chairman of Travelocity, Jim Hornthal.

Chief product officer, Sharlene Wang:

Yapta - Your Amazing Personal Travel Assistant - is a travel shopping website delivering a unique combination of price assurance and transparency to consumers who have purchased air travel online. It also alerts customers of price changes and changes to rewards redemption values.

The founders - including Tom Romary - claim there is no other travel website which automatically and continously checks flight-specific prices.

It is venture funded, raising $2.3 million is seed captial from First Round Capital, Voyager Capital, Swiftsure Capital and Bay Partners in July 2007.

Here is Yapta's Megan Kiernan:

iM@ (I'm at) is a geographically-aware content management platform providing travellers on-demand access to destination-specific information on accommodations, transportation and entertainment on a variety of mobile devices.

Funding details are unknown but it is fronted by Kerry Cannon (CEO) and Tony Santoro (president).

PhoCusWright says: "IM@ has some great ideas to leverage the growth of mobile use both with technology and an effective business model. Its system provides multiple ways to deliver destination content and targeted advertising in a geographic context to a variety of mobile platforms."

Fogglight is a free platform that enables travel businesses to integrate trip planning and booking tools into their online service offerings. It allows users to create a travel Web site from scratch.

It is angel-funded and claims to have no competitors at all. It is part of the Home&Abroad company.

Customers already using the system include Marriott Hotels, Hawaiian Airlines, Worldspan, Starwood Hotels and Enterpise Rent-a-Car.

The Wandrian API integrates global rail booking systems and allow travelers to search, shop and book global rail travel from a single platform.

The service already has Amtrak, STA Travel, Amadeus, Eurail and FlightCenter on board and PhoCusWright claims the company's "innovative technology addresses these problems and provides a compelling global rail shipping and purchase experience".

The company is privately funded and has institutional investment from Brook Venture Partners, Boston Capital Ventures and RVS Ventures.

* PhoCusWright president and CEO Philip Wolf is on the board of directors, but did not vote on Monday.

Here is senior vice president William Phillipson:

 

Following Day One's Innovation Summit, six companies were selected by the audience to go forward to the final round of voting over the next two days.

TripIt is the first to be featured here.

It is an online platform that builds a travel itinerary from various booking confirmation emails and integrates travel information, weather, maps, and city guides to an itinerary that can be shared via social networking.

It makes money from online advertising, lead generation and premium services. Competitors are WAYN.com and Dopplr.

TripIt raised $6.1 million from a number of investment vehicles including Sabre Holdings.

The Twitter craze for PhoCusWright this year has seen a few people ask me what the code is for the embedded Twitter feed we have on our landing page.

Here it is:

<P align=center>
<SCRIPT src="http://widgetserver.com/syndication/subscriber/InsertWidget.js?appId=3c90ebea-b921-4958-a058-e48ae6611200" type=text/javascript></SCRIPT>
<NOSCRIPT></NOSCRIPT></P>

1) You can talk to all manner of bizarre people in the hotel lobby. [My tutor at journalism college urged us to always speak to four strangers every day. The emphasis in LA being on 'the strange' part of strangers]

2) And you get to see sights like this:

It's a shame the city gets shrouded in smog - and more recently, smoke from wildfires - from about 8am.

My earlier post about Twitter being the best method for live blogging was boosted after learning something else as the sessions came to a close.

I noticed that on the right hand side of the feed page, the #phocusw08 tag was in the top ten 'Trending Feeds' for all of Twitter.

The breaking news at the time was the departure of Jerry Yang from Yahoo, thus his appearance at the top.

The interesting thing about this is that it was only two days ago that I sent an email to a handful of bloggers saying that I would be using the tag.

Word of mouth, viral, call what you like - collaboration in action.

.....is something like this.

Twitter Live Feed for #phocus08.

At various points on the first day we had around 15 people all chipping in with comments and posts. Fascinating...

Old school blogging suddenly feels a little bit slow and clunky.

So today is taken up with a procession of innovators, showcasing their wares to around 400 delegates.

Some interesting offerings so far include TripIt, Travelmuse and a travel content B2B service called Fogglight.

Quite a few of the presentations are claiming "industry firsts", as you do.

Travelmuse says it's the only travel site to tackle the inspiration element of the booking (Expedia's Inspiroscope anyone?).

TripIt, which has Silion Valley fawning over it - and deservedly so - seems to us Europeans remarkably like Dopplr, but with quite a few more bells and whistles.

One of the problems of reporting from an event such as this is that I am waking up and you ending the working day - almost.

First impression from talking to a few people last night is that the UK is suffering from the economic malaise - at least in terms of how the media are reporting it - far worse than other countries.

The US is still in the throes of Obamamania in many respects. The French economy is "in pretty good shape"; Australia often does it's own thing; Canada follows the fortunes of its southern neighbour in many respects; and Italy had economic problems of its own before the Credit Crunch!

Today's activities centre mainly on the Innovation Summit - a place for 32 difference companies to showcase a new product and the audience selects a group of winners to present to the full conference on Wednesday and Thursday.

Meanwhile, in other news:

The wildfires that surrounded the much of the outskirts of the city of Los Angeles are still "100% not contained" [fantastic use of English], according to one of the many local cable channels this morning.

Made for a quite a dramatic view as the aircraft landed at LAX yesterday.

There were some pretty heated exchanges at the TravelBlogCamp event last week - so Los Angeles will seem the perfect place to be.

[Fire menaces Los Angeles suburbs]

Thankfully The Terminator California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger is on hand to offer words of comfort to Los Angelinos, tourists and a 1,000 travel executives descending on Hollywood this week.

"When you walk around the areas that were devastated, it looked like hell today".

Jokes aside, I will be in LA for the PhoCusWright conference this week, so please check our PhoCusWright 2008 - News, comment, multimedia page for regular updates.

Finally, some time to talk about the Travel Rants-hosted TraveBlogCamp from earlier this week.

It was the first time we can recall that an informal Silicon Valley-style event has been planned for the UK, where bloggers can meet up and discuss issues about travel and their craft.

Given that the event was held in the middle of the four-day melee of World Travel Market - Tuesday night, in a bar on London's South Bank - around 80 people showed up, which I think is pretty incredible.

Fair play to Darren Cronian for having the guts to put something on when there are plenty of other distractions associated with WTM.

What is interesting is that the evening didn't really end up resembling a typical dot-commers hoedown at all - for a number of reasons, the majority of which are all valid.

The networking was very good: an ideal and informal opportunity to meet some new faces and catch up with other contacts and also some chaps from Travel Weekly's bitter rival.

The evening was dominated somewhat by the speaker-led sessions.

I followed Alex Bainbridge, Karen Bryan and Molly Flatt with what was supposed to be a short discussion about the Travolution Blog, why we do it, where is it going, etc?

Roaming Tales, Sandwagon and The Trailbeater have good summaries of those sessions. TTG sub-editor Matt Parsons has quotes.

Before the event I managed to get hold of an attendee list and discovered that around 20% of those attending were PRs or from the comms departments of travel companies.

Anyway, I reckoned this was a good starting point for a debate, bringing in Jane Sinclair (Thomson), Sarah Chambers (Holiday-Rentals) and Charlotte Wilmots (lastminute.com) to talk about why they were attending the event.

We also discussed - at some length, admittedly - about the differences between bloggers and journalists, prompted by a profile piece I was asked to do on the Happy Hotelier blog.

Trailbeater says: "Unfortunately what ensued was a navel gazing circular conversation about the triumvirate of PR, journalism and blogs (must admit I kind of switched off).

"The shame was that by highlighting the distinctions this rather poisoned the mood for mutual supportive networking."

I disagree strongly, and told them in their comments section:

"If the event was supposed to be 'mutual supportive networking' surely that then becomes similarly navel gazing."

If anything the debate was useful because of the number of PRs in the audience. Someone has suggested privately that by exposing them (only by mentioning the volume, initially) I alienated them.

This is a shame. Personally I think there is a healthy debate to be had about why travel companies are turning to bloggers as a means of getting their message across.

There are a few reasons why so many PRs turned up on the night, but one would certainly be to learn more about how to influence bloggers and forge relationships.

As I mentioned on Trailbeater:

"Some have even said in the past that much of the editorial content in the mainstream media surrounding travel is 'poisoned' by PR.

"What I was trying to understand is what is the motivation for PRs to get involved with an event such as that.

"It's pretty obvious, in some respects. Blogging is becoming a hugely influential form of media within the travel purchase funnel, so travel firms need to understand more how to influence bloggers."

I have an enormous amount of respect for the vast majority of PRs. Exposing them on Tuesday was simply to bring them into the debate and demonstrate how important blogging is becoming to the travel industry.

A few other things stood out on the night. At one point, one of the bloggers (I not going to say here for fear of bringing him to the attention of the legal community) said as a blogger he could get away with saying things about travel companies.

This is a critical point. As blogging continues to position itself as an increasingly influential information source for consumers, travel firms will soon intervene when they do not like the message.

This is not heavy handedness. Bloggers - as publishers of information - are governed by the same laws as media companies to protect individuals and organisations from libel and ensure fairness and accuracy is maintained.

The smugness which some bloggers have - thankfully, not at the event on Tuesday - is that they are above the law. Perhaps at the moment they have been lucky - but some trigger-happy lawyer make decide to turn his or her attention to them at any time.

"I'm not a media company" is not a valid form of defence at all.

So that's about it from the TravelBlogCamp - it was a fantastic event, let's not forget.

And decent debate, for me, is must better than the self-congratulatory nonsense that so often dominates many Web 2.0-type events.

The list below contains analysis from other bloggers who attended the event. Feel free to comment on any of the above or add your own link...

Heather from On Her Travels
Caitlin from Roaming Tales
Guido from Happy Hotelier
Alex from Musings on travel ecommerce
Anthony from Mr and Mrs Smith
Ben from Trailbeater
Kelly from Sandwagon
Molly from STA Travelbuzz

Personality led advertising.......

Courtesy of the On Holiday Group

World Travel Market banned the press this week from a session entitled 'Get The Latest From Google Travel'. Thanks...

Luckily we had a man on the inside willing to tell us about it (as he did before) - so handing over to Alex Bainbridge of Travel UCD.....

As part of the WTM08 conference yesterday, I took part in a panel discussion with Google UK's travel industry head, James van Thiel.

In response to yesterday's question about what Google were going to do about the growing problem James replied that there was little they could do - after all the advertising system is a marketplace.

Previously Google have stated that in Q1 2008 there was 20% CPC bid price inflation.

I understand Google's point that, as the marketplace controllers, there is little they can change in order to bring bid prices down.

I disagree - I believe not only are there actions they can take but they must take them. Increasing supply by getting Expedia on board as an advertising publisher is a good start but more travel websites need to be incentivised to follow.

If Google fails to act to curb bid price inflation then those distribution companies that are out there looking for 25% plus distribution fees - which currently look expensive - suddenly become much more attractive.

Come on Google. As travel suppliers we much prefer the open marketplace approach vs other travel distribution systems that have technical or commercial barriers to entry.

We need you to succeed - and to do that - we need you to curb bid price inflation.


Alex Bainbridge is managing director of Travel UCD and author of the Musings on Travel Ecommerce blog.

It's not every day you see words "enlightenment" and "East London" in the same sentence, so a pleasure to discover something completely new yesterday at World Travel Market in the capital's ExCel.

I do not feel such a technological luddite for not knowing about this nugget beforehand, after learning that the vast majority of agents and intermediaries using a GDS are also completely in the dark.

So, anyway, how many people know that a technology firm exclusively sells placement for hotels on GDS results across Galileo, Worldspan, Amadeus and Sabre?

The system - known as Preferred Placement - works by allowing hotels to appear at the top of search results for city accommodation.

There is no marker to indicate that the results are paid-for. The company also sells a line or two of free text for other hotels within all search results.

The company says that around 20% of the 15,000 or so hotels it has on its system are currently using the Preferred Placement service.

This means, for example, a search for Glasgow hotels in Scotland will throw up around ten or so paid-for properties on all GDS results, ahead of the dozens of others in the city.

[I saw a live search on Sabre]

The company's international president was obviously talking up the product when he spoke to me yesterday morning.

But data is data. A performance report I was shown for a very well known hotel in Manchester showed searches converted at 12% when it is in the Preferred Placement programme, against an average of 1% when it is not. The UK average is actually 15%.

I'm not going to name the company for fear of being accused of giving them free publicity.

[It should be pretty easy to work out]

So what are the questions arising from this:

* Should hotels ensure they divert some marketing spend into Preferred Placement? [The boss told me on average most hotels put around 1% of their marketing spend into the programme]

* Should intermediaries be made aware of the fact that the top listings on the GDSs are paid-for?

* A rather incredible aspect to all this is that the company had managed to get the Preferred Placement system to run across all four GDSs exclusively, as mentioned previously. So should the GDSs be operating a system such as this with only one organisation? In theory, some would argue that hotels have no choice in terms of supplier and therefore competition might be stifled?

Lots on mobile and travel from yesterday's EyeforTravel@WTM session - consumers not ready to book a holiday, you can't just stick up your website and hope for the best, the launch of Google Android and location-based services are working best...

It got us thinking back to a session run by Google last week on what it has been working on. Getting lost will soon be a thing of the past with our children's generation probably the last to experience. Soon we'll all be carrying a device to help us pinpoint where we are.

Teams from the search giant spent the summer driving round cities filming street level scenes.

On a PC you can now bring up a map, find a hotel, read a review, check the website, get directions to places nearby, find the nearest cash machine and see what the street where the hotel is really looks like.

Cities across Australia and North America have been covered as well as five in France and some in Italy and Spain.

Google's resident geospatial technologist Ed Parsons said the search giant is looking at having the same capability available on the desktop on phones.

A version of Google Earth has already been launched on the iPhone and once you combine that with Panoramio and Wikipedia, the traveller on the move can start to build up a good picture of their destination.

The Google Android phone already has a built in digital compass, a maps application and Wikitude - a third party application, which puts labels on pictures telling people what they're looking at.

It's all there now and after days getting lost at WTM we could do with some of this for the ExCeL exhibition centre.

Guidebook giant Lonely Planet is reaping the rewards of its cash from the BBC and has relaunched the main website today.



Read more about the new elements. More to come in January apparently.

Weber Shandwick and FutureBrand presented their 2008 Country Brand Index Report this morning. It's a detailed, well researched, study, available online.

One theme emerges that Travolution has touched on before, albeit in a different context:  the importance of the actual travel experience matching what the marketing has promised.

One page in the report highlights this perfectly. China has done a great job not only marketing itself as a destination but also delivering -  the country has a 7% positive differential, meaning that any one visiting is likely to visit again. Their experience is then shared with others, positively enhancing the overall rating of the country.

Compare this with France and Egypt, where a visit to the country makes it less likely that someone will visit again, and detracts from the overall ranking because, one assumes, their disappointments are shared.

"Underdelivering compared to expectation" is a dangerous game in any climate, never mind the current one. And this applies as strongly to an airline, hotel or package holiday as much as to a destination.

And having spent two and a half hours getting to WTM from Kings Cross this morning, I wonder what the London 2012 team told the IOC about access to the Olympic Park.

...if you hadn't already noticed, is:

Aldi

Well done to all of you who earlier today got it spectacularly wrong.

"Travel companies must adapt to stay competitive," said Eye For Travel's head of research, Amy Scarth, at the start of her presentation at WTM this afternoon, winning hands down the Travolution No Sh*t Sherlock awards for the opening day.

But once Amy got into her stride, she revealed some interesting bespoke research, released in advance of EyeForTravel's conference-within-a-conference tomorrow, all about mobile travel.

E4T talked to "700-800" travel suppliers for the study.

Nearly three quarters felt that mobile is becoming an increasingly important element of their online/digital strategies, and that nearly 30% are planning to invest in the mobile channel in 2009.

Panellists Chris Carmichael and Pablo Alvarez from BA and lastminute.com respectively were also part of the session.

Carmichael talked about the airline's early experience within the mobile space. "In 2000 we launched a WAP-based online check-in service," he said. "When we turned it off in 2001, neither of the customers who used it missed it."

[Although he did say afterwards that this was a slight exaggeration to make a point...]

"New pricing models for travel and tourism brands" is identified as the key UK trend in the WTM Global Trends Report 2008.

In other words - free, or at least customers paying what they want to.

We've heard this before - Chris Anderson's long-awaited follow-up to The Long Tail is Free - Why $0.00 is the Future of Business.

There was a collective scratching of heads at Travolution Towers about how free travel would work, and the WTM report does little to help us out.

The full report talks about Ryanair's "free" flights but then points out that its load factor for the months when it was running the promotion was lower than easyJet's which wasn't offering seats for nothing, trips for free.

Leading this trend towards free in the UK is "Generation Y" - by 2012 there will be 7.5 million Brits aged between 18-26, with an average income of £23K, who are going expect that part of their travel experience will be free of charge. At best, they will want to pay what they want not what they've been told to pay.

[Good luck in advance to yield and revenue managers]

If the economy is  going to be so bleak for the next year or so, why don't UK travel suppliers try to get on the right side of Gen Y now by trying this "free" model.

Maybe Anderson's book will offer some hints on how to make this work for travel.

Travolution has a good story in the bag but embargoed for publication until midnight tonight.

In the meantime, can readers guess which UK High Street retailer is launching an online travel offering?

The British Guild of Travel Writers has finally entered the 21st century, giving the "Ed Lacy Memorial Award for Best Radio Feature" to a podcast.

Tim Richards has been in a travel broadcaster/writer for thirty years, and picked up the gong last night for a guide to Istanbul, which was podcast on his heartbeatguides.com.

The site is an interesting model; some of the podcasts are free - others have to be paid for.  There are more than 270 audio guides on the site, ranging from reports on British canals to ski guides.

Podcasts are currently the ugly duckling of social media; consumers are more than willing to share their holiday experience by writing a hotel review or by downloading photos or videos. Is there any reason why podcasting hasn't blipped the user generated content radar?

There was little else to report from the  awards dinner - affectionately known as "the drivels"  by travel media whose WTM starts with a black tie dinner on the Sunday evening before WTM.

Other than heartbeatguides.com, it was as if the internet didn't exist.

Surely 'photograph of the year' is a defunct category when there are 1.4 million photographs of hotels on Tripadvisor alone.

World Travel Market gets a lot of stick for being too big, too unwieldy and too, er, well, based at ExCel in East London.

[Critics should try ITB Berlin for sheer scale]

But let's not take away from the fact that it's the biggest trade exhibition in the UK and attracts the great and the good of the world tourism and hospitality sector for four days and, frankly, ExCel is the only place in the capital that can host it.

So what can we expect this year?

For the uninitiated, WTM is prmarily a destination-focused showcase of tourist destinations around the globe, with a fair heap of travel providers and tech firms thrown in for good measure.

There are plenty of seminars and the like going on over the four days and promotions galore.

Our favourite - and we're not being biased here - is the Travel Weekly Passport promotion for travel agents, which is actually quite a lot of fun [Watch an agent taking part last year]

As far as news is concerned, almost every one of the hundreds of stands will have some kind of product news (we'll be including relevant ones here alongside as our Twittering, blogs, photos, etc]

The big question will be how much the downturn in the economy is in evidence in terms of visitor numbers, deals being done (impossible to tell, but you can get a feel for it) and whether people will be trying to talk/down up the current situation for company.

Some recent conferences for the UK travel sector were positively brimming with a laissez faire attitude to the whole thing. Some might call this foolhardy.

Nevertheless it will be an interesting week. It's the first time Travolution has attended for a few years as the PhoCusWright event in Orlando coincided with WTM 2007.

The May Fair Hotel in London deserves a thumbs-up for its use of Youtube to spread the word.

The rather classy establishment, a stop-over for many a celebrity, has created its own channel on the omnipresent video sharing site to showcase not only its rooms, food, etc, but interviews with many of the high-profile people that grace its halls.

Here is Paris Hilton chatting with general manager Charles Oak.



Nice idea...

Okay, so we inserted the word 'ever', so it sounds like one of those dreaded Top 100 countdown shows loved so much by Channel 4 and Five here in the UK.

But the Telegraph website has today produced a list of the best 25 travel blogs on the web.

Good bits:

Well done to Travel Rants for making the list. No stopping the lad at the moment.

And, of course, to some of the other smaller, independent bloggers such as Brett Snyder (Crankyflier) and Paul Johnson (A Luxury Travel Blog).

Rubbish bits:

Well, in summary, it's either poor research or...something. Anyway...

Youtube is not a blog (the Telegraph calls it a videoblog).

Oh, and neither is Tripadvisor.

Or Cruisecritic.

The same goes for Wayn.com (which is primarily a social network)


I suppose it's a good idea for travellers to be aware of more travel sites but this is just irritating.

Travolution is devising a special chart for Christmas.

Top Ten Lazy Lists on National Newspaper Websites in 2008.

In the new world of Obamamania, some things that might have seemed a little silly just a few days ago are just, well, accepted.

So rather unfazed this morning to receive an email from none other than former US vice-president and winner of the 2000 election presidental candidate in 2000, Al Gore.


The former politico turned tie-less filmmaker is now following Travolution on Twitter - or so it seems. Well, us and 2,000-odd other people.

Click through to TheRealAlGore's Twitter page and there are plenty of links to aninconvenientblog.org - Gore's new platform for spreading the word about climate change.

It's all worthy stuff about his film - An Inconvenient Truth - and general climate change issues, but the alarms bells start ringing when one turns to the About Me section.

"Former United States vice president and Nobel Prize winner Al Gore is the inventor of the internet and global warming. He is a world-renowned expert on a whole host of issues, including technology, communications, nuclear disarmament, the environment, economics and the electoral college system."

I think Tim Berners-Lee might have something to say about this...

Rumours of a hoax abound.

Travolution is heading to a post-election USA on Sunday 16 November for the annual travel extravaganza that is the PhoCusWright Conference.

This year's conference - actually, two conferences - is in Los Angeles and promises to be an event to remember.

Travolution will be podcasting, blogging, reporting and the usual array of social activities, including hosting a table in the Network Exchange room.

I will also be on a couple of panels during the Bloggers Summit on Tuesday 18 November.

Drop me a line to arrange a meeting, an informal chat, feature on the Purple Pod, or just simply to say hello.

For the more officious among you, visit the Network Exchange connection page on the PhoCusWright website to book a meeting.

See you there!

Full programme for the week and booking details.

There's no end to the daft surveys companies churn out - but we thought this one was quite, er, cuddly.
 
It seems there's nothing hotel guests like more than chilling out with in-room entertainment, 71% rate it higher than a nice hot bath or meal in the restaurant.
 
When it comes to watching a film, 38% of us like to be curled up under the duvet, more than 25% on top of the bed and 14% watch while we're eating.
 
Many hotel guests go so far as to say the quality of the in-room entertainment system is directly linked to their impression of the room - ranked third after the quality of the bed and the bathroom goodies.
 
37% of respondents said the latest programming and in-room entertainment were key factors when booking a hotel.
 
The research was from in-room movie provider Filmbank - no surprises there - and Opinion Matters.

You have to hand it to Expedia - they never miss a trick.

Barack Obama-mania is about to kick in across the US and Expedia is seizing on the inevitable desire to see the senator from Illinois take the oath of office in January.

Within hours of Democrat Obama's victory overnight in the US, Expedia had an Inauguration 2009 landing page ready with information about Washington DC's hotels, airports and details of the parade on January 20.


Users can also book a hotel, flight etc from a widget on the left hand side of the page (shame they've used dates for November as the default rather than late-January, but we'll forgive them).

Expect other OTAs to follow...

We suspect Expedia is quietly relieved at the outcome of the election.

An inauguration for Senator John McCain - as his campaign rallies and concession speech have shown - would probably not have had the same pulling power as the Obama one will undoubtedly have in ten weeks time.

In the meantime, some good exposure for the Hyatt Regency in downtown Chicago, where Obama, family and close advisors were holed up last night as the results came in. [See Barack Obama in Chicago...But where is he staying? for more]

Interesting news today from the On Holiday Group regarding its partnership with Travelzest to take over the day-to-day running of holiday.co.uk and flight.co.uk.

Essentially this is a strategic move, it seems, to offset the day-to-day running of the two websites to a third party.

According to Steve Endacott, who we spoke to after the deal was announced, it's a straight revenue-share deal over two years with a one-year notice period.

OHG takes on the running costs such as technology, administration and other core services and - hopefully - will take a cut of the profits.

There is more, one suspects.

Firstly, as marketing costs increase as a result of inflating PPC costs, could this be a trend other companies consider as they look to protect brands during the downturn by diverting operating expenditure onto someone else?

On other words: allow a third party to share the burden/joys until it is advantageous to bring it back under complete control.

Another senior figure put it another way: Travelest could be cutting back on running costs in order to make its balance sheet more attractive to a prospective buyer.

Incidentally, the deal is protected under contract even if Travelest is sold on.

This may trigger a plethora of comments about how this is being done everywhere already (Hello, Musings!), but we were mildly impressed by an announcement today from Dolphin Dynamics to unveil a new Microsoft Virtual Earth mash-up with their reservation platform.

Anyway, here are some grabs of the mapping platform integrated within Dolphin's consumer booking engine.

By "loud", we are talking about the visual noise!

It makes our purple-driven redesign seem positively pastel-like.

Give a warm welcome to.........LateCruises.co.uk.

As the busiest season for non-business travel, Christmas presents a great fraud risk for operators - a risk that is only worsened by swelling costs.

The folks at Cybersource reckon a few pointers will ensure only customers feel the good will, not the criminals.

So, Dr Akif Khan, head of client and technical services, presents 12 top tips for preventing fraudsters endangering your profits.



Home for the holidays
Don't be fooled by family bookings. Some fraudsters will make family bookings including an infant ticket in an attempt to make it look harmless. They'll end up travelling alone on the day and you'll risk transporting one fraudster and an empty seat. Keep your guard up even when the booking looks like a wholesome family holiday.

One size does not fit all
There will a huge variety in the risk that a travel merchant faces. For example, transporting a fraudster across the world in business class will be more of a profit loss then transporting a fraudster across the Channel. Make sure you segregate your risk management, and have different sets of rules and thresholds for the different aspects of your business.  

Be data savvy
Travel bookings have a very rich set of data for fraud screening compared to normal ecommerce such as time till departure, origin/destination airports, one-way or return, frequent flyer numbers, etc. Make sure you are getting the most out of data by checking that your fraud screening system can handle it. Factor it into the decision making process to beat fraud.

Make a list, and check it twice
Your fraud screening system is only as good as the data you feed it. Make sure that all the data from your bookings are correctly mapped, and that you are giving your screening system the best possible chance of identifying the bad transactions.

Christmas abroad: it could be costing you
The world is getting smaller. Stolen card details used on your site may have been sold over the internet to someone else on the other side of the world. Make sure your fraud screening system looks for fraud patterns worldwide, not just in the UK.

Fatten the Christmas bonus: keep your fraud lean
You and the rest of the travel industry need to be trimming back on overspending, not just the turkey. Work out how much fraud is actually costing your business by looking at more than just chargebacks. Look at the costs of automated fraud screening, manual review and the cost of chargeback management process. You may be able to decrease the cost of fraud by streamlining the fraud screening process, giving you more time to play Santa: delivering loved ones all over the world.

Give the gift of time
Christmas travel can be a bit of a headache. Your customers are trying to make it home to their families and are busy! Neither of you benefit if you have to wait for a decision on their transaction. Make sure your fraud screen is giving you real-time decisions.

Keep in touch with the family
If you are taking bookings online and by phone, does your fraud screening work in real-time across both channels? If someone was just rejected from your website and then immediately tried using the same card through your call centre under a different name, would you spot it?

Christmas is global and so are you
Bookings from abroad are necessary in the travel industry, but also terrifying because of the potential for fraud.But modern fraud screening systems can manage transactions from all over the world and a wide array of payment types.

Don't play Santa alone, get help!
You don't need to protect against fraudsters by yourself. Implement Verified by Visa and MasterCard SecureCode. While sometimes controversial, if implemented correctly and smartly, the schemes provide an extra layer of defense with minimal impact to the booking experience. This will provide a useful liability shift against fraud for those orders that make it through your screening.

Make sure your moving the right people
With the pressure on the travel industry this Christmas, it's important to be confident of your customers' bookings. Device fingerprinting can tell you more about the PC used to make an order: like whether it is the same machine that a regular customer usually uses. If there are other telltale signs that a transaction may be fraudulent, this can confirm your suspicions.

Find out who is naughty or nice
Don't assume the same set of fraud screening rules that have worked well for you during the year will work for you over Christmas. Use your data and resources to find out who's being bad or good.