Owner: Blog on travel: eTourism, eTravel, eHospitality URL:http://www.blogontravel.com Join Date: Wed, 14 Mar 2007 12:37:17 -0500 Rating:0 Site Description: All you ever wanted to know about eTravel, eTourism and eHospitality Site statistics:Click here
Accor sold Govoyages.com to LVMH 2007-03-04 23:35:42 The famous french Online Travel Agency Govoyages has been sold by Accor
(the world’s fourth largest hotel company) for $364 million to the investment company Financiere Agache Investissement (Groupe Arnault) and members of GoVoyages management.
Accor and GoVoyages will maintain a three-year marketing deal “to ensure the preferred distribution of Accor hotels by GoVoyages.”
Back in Sept. 2006, Accor doubled its profit and its board of directors curiously asked its CEO Jean-Marc Espalioux to step down (see hotelmarketing’s article) after many years at the head of the group Accor (from 1997 to 2006).
Now at the head of Financière Agache Private Equity (Groupe Arnault *) Jean-Marc Espalioux has his revenge by acquiring majority stake in Govoyages.com. This acquisition came along with the announcement of very good results for Govoyages.
* Groupe Arnault owns 51% of LVMH (Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton), along with Christian Dior SA. Bernard Arnault is the Chairman and CEO of bo
Join the T-List (Travel Tourism Bloggers List) 2007-03-04 22:27:52 Here are the instructions:
- Write a post.
- Copy/paste the link list from the post you’ve discovered the T-List into it.
- Make sure the links are active and correct.
- If your blog is on the list, remove it’s not a self-promotion post.
- Add your favorite tourism and travel blogs on it.
- Add the url of the blog where you’ve discovered the T-List as well.
- Publish the post.
- People will notice the T-List and continue it.
Here’s the list:
Radaron
Les Explorers
Chrispitality Media Blog
A Luxury Travel
Blog
Travel Rants
Travolution Blog
BootBlog
Erin Julian
My Travel Backpack
Happy Hotelier
The Travel PR Blog
DotTourism
The Tourism and Hospitality Diaries
Tourism Internet Marketing
Happy Hotelier
Web2.0 Travel
The Informed Traveler - Luxury Hotels
Hotelblogs
Blog de viajes
ADV Italia
El blog de Albert Barra
I have discovered the T-List on Hotelblogs and I have decided to add Blog de Viajes (a blog on travel from Argentina) ADR Italia and Tourisme et Internet (french blog)
Information is spreading…fast. 2007-02-06 11:55:27 I have been looking around to find out if hoteliers were uploading video about their hotels on www.youtube.com or www.dailymotion.com. My third try was to search for the term “hotel madrid” in youtube.com, and on the first page of results, I saw the following entrance:
Translation of the spanish comment with the video: “Don’t go to the hotel Mediodia in Madrid in front of Atocha.” […] “This is our wash basin.” This video has been here for 3 months now, and is posted under the category “Comedy”. It has already been viewed by 361 persons.
Here is the video of an anonymous customer of this hotel located in Madrid:
I was looking for a new type of hotel promotions (using youtube, dailymotion and else) and in the end I found a new type of hotel review… I saw a lot of comments on the internet about Travel 2.0 and a lot of them were trying to define “Travel 2.0″. Maybe it is just about that; about spreading the in
New Google feature: Local Business Centre 2007-01-17 13:10:58 I was surprised to see that some websites had snippets with their local business addresses in the pages of result of Google
. If you click on the Plus Box it will expand and show up a map of the location right of your business right below the result like shown below. Clearly it makes it easy for customers to find your business online.
The hotel Aiken (by the way the hotel website uses wordpress) was the first hotel I saw using this great feature
:
How does it work? Well it is quite simple, you simply have to register to the Google LocalBusinessCentre
, entering the details of your business, the category, phone number etc. You can also specify the operating business hours. It is totally free and google verifies your info via postcard! Once you have received the postcard from google, you will get a pin number that will be used to activate your account.
You can register your hotel, or travel agency right here: Google’s Local Business
Centre
google, google local business centre, l
Yet another google mashup, on Tripadvisor.com 2006-10-30 22:56:23 Another Google Mashup in the Online Travel Industry… Tripadvisor
displays the hotels according to their popularity on the site and their availability (their price too?). It displays the number of reviews per hotel and the average price found among Tripadvisor partners.
I hope it will be available in more countries and more cities (not just for the US). That’s funny to see that Tripadvisor only displays the average price of the hotel for the dates selected, they have chosen not to enter into the war of the aggregators that compare travel retail sites between them to retrieve and publish the best price found for each hotel..
google, google mashup, mashup, tripadvisor
The 10 most influential people in the online travel industry 2006-09-24 07:22:12 The english media portal Travolution* has gathered the votes and opinions of its readers (I haven’t had time to cast my vote) to finally released a list of the 10 most influential people
in the online
travel industry
over the past decade (tough job!).
“The final 10 is, we believe, a collection of the finest thinkers and strategists since 1996, and sometimes those just simply brave enough to try to break new ground.”
Here are 5 people selected from the list of the 10 most influential people:
Sergey Brin and Larry Page, Google
Barry Diller, InterActive Corp/Expedia
Brent Hoberman and Martha Lane-Fox, Lastminute.com
Stelios Haji-Ioannou, EasyJet
Steve Kaufer and Langley Steinert, TripAdvisor
If you want to know who else appear on the list and WHY they appear in that list, Travolution provides an analisys/rationale.
Pierre Chappaz (and Dominique Vidal Kelkoo) did not make it to the final ranking of the 10 most influential person but was present among the 20 most Read more:travel industry
Click-to-call provider eStara acquired by ATG 2006-09-20 15:45:04 I mentioned eStara in a recent post when talking about the click-to-call features of Yahoo (and Google); eStara has been acquired
yesterday by ATG (NASDAQ: ARTG), a leading provider of e-commerce platforms.
Buying eStara (which provides Click
to Call, Click to Chat, and Call Tracking Solutions) will enhance ATG Market-leading e-commerce offerings and will expands ATG’s OnDemand Business.
Among the numerous clients of eStara, we can name Starwood Hotels and Continental Airlines. Talking about eStara clients, I just realized yesterday that eStara provides now its click-to-call technology to the french Yellow Pages (http://www.pagesjaunes.fr). Here is a capture of the features on their pages:
Art Technology Group (ATG) provides solutions to many actors of the travel industry, like American Airlines and Intercontinental Hotels. We will most likely see Intercontinental Hotels website with eStara features in the future.
See the press release on eStara website and some explanations of
RyanAir nightmare at a poor promotional event in Barcelona! 2006-09-18 14:23:43 The ireland based company Ryan Air decided to organize a promotional event
giving away free round flight tickets (17€ with taxes ) to people waving banners displaying messages against the spanish airline Iberia on the famous place called Plaza Cataluña in the city center of Barcelona
.
‘With this initiative we wanted people to see for themselves that flying with Ryanair is much better than flying with Iberia,’ said Ryanair’s executive for marketing and sales in Spain.
300 people were present, but unfortunately when RyanAir staff ran out of flight claim forms to distribute, the promotional event turned out to be a nightmare for RyanAir. Indeed people started protesting against the staff, complaining that they complied with all the requisites and thus that they were honestly eligible for their tickets. Local police rescued RyanAir staff in a local police station and people started changing the name Iberia on their anti-Iberia banners for RyanAir!
Throughout the day, RyanAir hurri
Small Luxury Hotel of the World needs mystery shoppers! 2006-09-08 14:02:43 Who never dreamt of working as a mystery shopper for a luxury hotel chain?
Good news, your dreams might come true if you follow this link reported by Usatoday’s blog “Hotel
hotsheet“.
SmallLuxury
Hotel of the Word (SLH) needs about 200 volunteers; the perfect job applicant should be a “discerning, experienced” traveler familiar with high-class hotels”. Volunteers must pay their own transportation (it will hopefully help them to get a little bit more objective in their reports!), but get reimbursed for one or two-night stays, plus meals and drinks. They will check-in anonymously, inspect the hotel in secret and report to the hotel chain.
“As far as the hotel is concerned, this means that every hotel guest is a potential inspector,” commented Paul Kerr, Joint Managing Director of Small Luxury Hotels of the world.
Interested? Then fill out the job application right here and … enjoy your stay!
job application, job offer, luxury hote Read more:World
Google will add a click-to-call feature to its ad program 2006-09-06 19:45:55 I can already hear some of you saying, “Google
did not invent anything launching a click-to-call feature
on the internet. That’s true, Google is not innovating there BUT how many hotel’s official sites offer this type of feature for their users? Not a lot, although there are companies that already propose this type of (great) services.
Basically it consists of placing a button on a webpage to allow the internet user to be called back for free immediately. The technology being involved is VoIP (Voice over IP).
Let’s take a concrete example: Imagine you are confused with the cancellation policy of a hotel just before you validate your booking online. You will probably stop the process until you have a clearer idea of the policy (or maybe you will book somewhere else). Now imagine you find a button on this page saying that if you provide your phone number (that will remain private) you will get an immediate phone call from the hotel to support you for free..
I like Read more:Google will
UK online travel agencies ready to blacklist hotels! 2007-03-15 16:34:16 I just read an article on Travelmole stating that Lowcostbeds.com and OnHolidayGroup have decided to blacklist hotels!
Both UK companies will use a system called Travelsafe in order to be able to determine what hotels must be blacklisted or not. I know for a fact that in the past Opodo also partnered with Travelsafe in order to perform health and safety audit with its hotels.
According to Travelmole, Lowcostbeds.com and OnHolidayGroup will use the system to be able to blacklist the hotels, apartments and villas that does not satisfy the new standards; I have no information about those specific standards yet, but there will be a focus on safety standards in such areas as fire, food hygiene, and swimming pools.
About child safety, upon completion of the audit, Travelsafe will classify hotels into 4 categories: Gold, Silver, Bronze and the ones that are said to be non compliant.
It will be offered the possibilities to assist hotels that are said to be non compliant to implement the nece Read more:online
, agencies
, ready
AC Hotels has been banned from Google! 2007-03-20 21:49:09 I received 2 emails today yesterday telling me that the official websites of the Spanish hotel chain AC Hotels
had been banned from Google
! Well, this won’t be the first time it happens to a big company, in fact depending on the changes of Google’s algorithm during the so-called Google Dance, many websites can be left behind for usually two main reasons: Poorly designed websites (from a SEO perspective) and/or abuses of SEO techniques..
A lot of companies do not have a clue why they have been banned or penalized from Google index. That’s why I will approach the case of “AC HOTELS” from different angles that respect the following assumption: “Banned from Google= Not Spidered, Not Ranked, Not Indexed”
Are they still present in Google index?
Let’s see if AC HOTELS website is still indexed in google database with the simple command site:www.ac-hotels.com (same thing for the second website site:www.ac-hoteles.com)
As you can see (click the
AC Hotels and Google - A learning experience 2007-03-24 22:59:35 There is a lot of buzz going on concerning AC Hotels
and the ban of many of its websites from Google
index; I have covered this issue in my previous post AC Hotels has been banned from google but there is a need for an update.
Read more:experience
Excellent Ambient Marketing at Venice Airport 2007-04-09 23:12:33 Absolutely great campaign of an Italian advertising agency (Admcom) for the promotion of the “Casino Di Venezia“. They have turned a traditional and boring luggage claim belt into a giant roulette wheel at Venice
Marco Polo Airport (VCE):
The agency has successfully spotted a real good place for their campaign ironically named “Keep playing“. A good spot indeed, as people spend about 10 to 15 minutes (sometimes more!) staring at the belt while waiting for their luggages. This new kind of roulette will only bring one type of losers: the ones whose luggages have been lost!
According to the Venetian Casino, visits increased by 60% since the eye catching ad appeared at the airport. That seems a lot, but that’s what you get for doing an original ad, with good visibility and a good sense of humor.
Via: Estering (for amateur pictures of the roulette) | Disruption
Related information about losing baggage:
Here is a recent survey of the Association of European Ai Read more:Marketing
First TV ad for Expedia in France 2007-04-23 23:47:14 Expedia.fr launched a new campaign of advertising in France
. It started with a TV ad on national TV; this was the first TV ad for Expedia on public TV, before that, Expedia did TV spots but only for 15 channels on cable TV.
(Update: Expedia also sponsored TV shows on Canal+ and TF1 in the past.)
The name of this new campaign is “Expedia, le voyage que je veux.” (Expedia, travel as I wish”). It is very similar to the famous slogan of Club Med : “Club Med, Le bonheur si je veux.” (Clud Med, Happyness as I wish”). The spot draws a parallel between a tailor made clothing shop and the way a couple can customize its future vacations.
According to Marc Ruf, former Vice President of Expedia France:
“[Expedia] gives the ability to anyone to become its own travel agent. Who better knows the needs and desires of the traveler than the traveler himself?”
Expedia kindly sent me the link to watch their TV spot:
Besides this TV spot, Expedia also launc Read more:First
Web Reservations International to launch a “revolutionary” travel website! 2007-05-01 20:03:41 If you passed by WRI’s stand at the last ITB in Berlin, you certainly saw it! The Dublin firm Web ReservationsInternational
(WRI) is about to launch a new online travel website
that claims to “revolutionise the travel industry and pit it against internet giants such as Google.”
WebReservations International is a well know actor of the online travel industry. They bought the famous Worldres in 2005 and is now at the head of the following major online brands: hostelworld.com, worldres.com, hostels.com and trav.com. Hostelworld provides the hostels product of RyanAir’s website (whereas Expedia provides the hotel product).
Web Reservations International CEO and Co-Founder, Ray Nolan, stated in January 2007 that “Google throws you the Yellow Pages and says go find it yourself“. Ray Nolan also had good things to say about the aggregators, stating: “For any one destination, there are probably on
Inside look of the Easyhotel of London (video) 2007-05-01 17:44:42 “Art Du Service“, a french blog that talks about the service sector in general (with a focus on services in the tourism, telecommunication and banking industry) stayed at the Easyhotel of London and came back with a candid video
of the room.
easyHotel brand is part of a larger group known as EasyGroup which also holds easyJet, the famous budget airline mostly known in Europe.
Check below the amateur video of the easyHotel London South Kensington. You will see that the bathroom is as tiny as the toilets of an easyjet aircraft!
For your information, he booked his room online, willing to pay 10 pounds (about 15) as advertised. In the end he paid 60 euros, his credit card was instantly charged . His room did not have any window, there was only one towel (an extra towel would cost 1 pound at the reception) and a soap; the room came with a TV but you need to buy a remote control from reception (£5 for 10 channels for 24 hours). There is no bar, no restaurant in the hotel.
ea
Pegasus acquires Wizcom 2007-05-02 23:47:50 The Dallas, Texas based Pegasus
has acquired yesterday its long time competitor Wizcom (a subsidiary of Travelport). That means that Pegasus becomes the only provider of Global Distribution System (GDS) switch services on the market! A switch being an alternative to the so called direct connect to the GDSs.
Wizcom’s product range includes Global Distribution System (GDS) and GDS-related products, Internet Distribution Systems Connectivity and Data Management solutions.
GDSs use switching companies like Pegasus and WizCom to access hotel, car rental and tour inventory. Now that Pegasus is the only switch solution, we will take an in depth look at the pricing strategy that will adopt this broader offer of Pegasus Solutions.
Looking for a Dopplr.com invitation (offering Joost invitations!) 2007-05-02 21:35:36 There is a lot of buzz for a new travel website called Dopplr; buzz is mainly coming from the “web 2.0 blogosphere”, if I may call it this way. Unfortunately, I am not able to give you a lot of details concerning the new website as I have not received an invitation yet. (my email can be found in the contact section of this blog).
What is dopplr?
“Dopplr is an online service for frequent travellers. It was created by an international team of world travellers as a tool for our own use. We liked it so much that we decided to open it up to our global friends. If you travel more than five times a year and have friends who do as well, then Dopplr is for you. How does Dopplr work? It lets you share your future travel plans with a group of trusted fellow travelers whom you have chosen. It also reminds you of friends and colleagues who live in the cities youre planning to visit. You can use the service with your personal computer and mobile phone.
On the other hand I have r Read more:offering
, Joost
Loic Le Meur interviews the CEO of Trivop 2007-05-21 04:43:35 Here is an interesting interview of Thomas Owadenko that Loic Le Meur just uploaded on his blog. Thomas is the CEO on the new travel 2.0 site called Trivop.
Trivop.com is a very good example of a good use of web 2.0 in the travel industry. It is a platform of video reviews of hotels (located in Europe and then in the future in the US).
Like I said in the past, the future of hotel reviews is strongly connected to the future of online video; we previously saw the impact of a simple video uploaded on youtube to report a poor hotel room in Madrid. We also saw Tripadvisor launched a video uploading feature on their website to follow this (hotel) trend.
Now we have a dedicated website only for hotels which combined a mashup of Google maps, Tripadvisor text reviews and videos generated by hoteliers and guests.In the video Thomas says that it will be focused on hotels for the first 3 years, Trivop does not have a real competitor since there is no other 100% similar site. However it mig
500 feedburner readers and good SEO results! 2007-06-06 12:31:32 500 RSS Subscribers:
I am pretty happy to announce that Blog on travel finally passed the psychological barrier of 500 subscribers to its RSS feed today (via feedburner). It has been quite a long way to achieve this, you can see this in the graph below that shows the RSS Subscribers of this blog from the very beginning:
Thank you very much for all readers
of this blog for adding our RSS feed to their favorite blog reader! If you aren’t subscribed yet, please do it now by clicking this RSS link or by submitting your email on the right sidebar of this blog (you will receive a confirmation link by email that you have to click).
Here is another graph that shows the RSS audience of Blog on travel; 53% of the audience comes from the great RSS reader Netvibes (which I highly recommend), then 15% of the RSS audience comes from Google Feedfetcher. Google Feedfetcher represents all users that have added Blogontravel on their Google homepage or on Google Reader!
Note: Feedburner has just bee Read more:SEO
, results
Introduction to Flight Reviews: 7 hours stuck in a Delta Airline airplane 2007-06-29 18:33:47 We are now quite familiar with customer-written hotel reviews; we also know about the trendy use of video reviews of hotels but what about reviews of flights?!
Yesterday I stumbled upon an incredible amateur video that made it to the top #20 of the most watched video of Youtube. The statistics speak for themselves:
Views: 76,062
Comments: 468
Favorited: 175
Robert McKee took a Delta
flight (n°6499) and got stuck on tarmac during 7 hours straight.
Fortunately, he had a video recording device (a lot of batteries) and enough know-how to edit and post this video to the Consumerist Blog.
The same way, I thought of blogging my last trip to Barcelona (with a connection in Rome); it was an Alitalia flight planned at 7pm from Nice. The flight was delayed, re-scheduled at 11:45pm, then delayed again to finally be cancelled around 1h20am. My flight finally got scheduled 24 hours later. It got cancelled twice! After the first cancellation, a voice quickly came out of the airport speakers saying: Read more:Introduction
, Flight
, Airline
US government forces a European airline to stop flying to Cuba 2007-07-12 08:33:33 Two days ago Mario Hidalgo, CEO of the Spanish airline “Hola Airlines“ , announced that Hola Airlines (Baleares Link Express SL) has been obliged by the US government to stop its operations in Cuba .
The US Government threatened Hola Airlines via Boeing to end the service of maintenance of the Boeing aircraft belonging to the carrier. As its fleet is entirely composed of Boeing aircrafts, Hola Airlines has been forced to give up its operation in the Carribean Island overnight.
The US government applies the 1996 Helms-Burton Act that prevent non north-American countries from trading with Cuba by penalizing foreign companies.
The Helms-Burton Act was condemned by the Council of Europe, the European
Union, Canada, Mexico, Argentina and other U.S. allies that enjoy normal trade relations with Cuba.
Mario Hidalgo made it clear that this decision goes totally against the company’s will: “This decision is unfair, specially for Cuban people” and added he was &l
New spanish travel aggregator Minube.com launched today! 2007-07-23 16:09:09 Surprisingly the Spanish online travel market is not saturated by the emergence of aggregation and comparison engines; there is still space for newcomer(s) to enter this segment of the online travel industry. That’s what Minube.com (that literally means “My Cloud” in Spanish) did today by launching this new flight/hotel aggregator “Minube”.
Minube.com referred itself as being a web 2.0 site. A simple, clean and original design with green, red and orange clouds! It uses features that made Web 2.0 sites so convenient such as the suggestion search box; as you type in a query it will display the available cities/countries/airports dynamically via some AJAX. Pretty useful when you don’t know how to spell those Spanish cities or when you don’t know the airport name of your destination.
Of course it also integrates maps from Google maps (I did not manage to see the mapping of all hotels of the first page of result on one map), and reviews (reviews ar Read more:com launched
The new Tripadvisor site is online: a retail look and feel! 2007-10-18 16:03:58 You can have a sneak preview at the new Tripadvisor
site by browsing this “beta” microsite that TA globally announced today in its newsletter.
The user-generated reviews’ giant Tripavisor (part of the Expedia, Inc. family of travel companies), decided to “create a new and easier to use” site. Kristen Nicole from Mashable previously published an article saying that people have complained about the cluttered homepage of the (curent) site.
Look at those “before-after” screenshots I took and make your own opinion:
A typical WEB 2.0 launch for this new version: As it has been said by Tripadvisor: It is a beta site! “Beta” means [Tripadvisor] is still polishing a few things! This beta version was first launched on the co.uk site of TA a few days ago, and it is now for everyone to REVIEW!
I have noticed myself a few mistakes in the list of countries/cities of the Europe section, like Lisbon listed under Romania(!), Rome in Latvia (!), Ve Read more:online
Invitations to Netvibes Ginger! 2008-03-04 12:51:22 I have been among the lucky ones who were invited to test Netvibes
‘ new version called Netvibes Ginger
Beta (the RSS feed reader).
I am an earlier adopter of Netvibes, and I think it’s the best RSS readers available; I have enjoyed a lot the new features Ginger Beta adds and apparently I am now [...] Read more:Invitations
Introducing Domegos: A New Web 2.0 Vacation Rentals Directory 2008-01-27 19:57:58 Wandering around the internet, I was searching for 2 different things at the same time: a hotel for a romantic weekend getaway (with our lovely dog!) and a new apartment to rent. I suddenly asked myself: “Why not renting a vacation home instead of booking the usual same type of hotels (those few hotels that [...] Read more:Introducing
, Vacation
, Rentals
, Directory
, Vacation Rentals
Google Chatback: New functionality added to this blog 2008-04-02 05:39:10 Those who want to add this Chatback feature to their own blog (or website!), need to register to Google
Talk and then they need to create a Google Talk chatback badge. Copy the script and paste it to the page of your choice. You're done. Enjoy.
10 things that annoy me when booking holidays online 2008-04-04 09:00:30 Today I read a great post on Travelrants called Ten things
that annoy me about booking holidays online
. Darren made a list of 10 things that annoy him while booking holidays online.
It’s clearly the kind of feedback/information people that work for Online Travel Agencies or Hotel Portals would love to gather from their visitors. That’s [...]
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