The travel & tourism industry is all about connections. Connecting people, places, and cultures. Using new technologies, social media, and social networks can help to foster the connections that we share. I would like to share with you some of my experiences as an innovator in this new world of connectivity and build connections for all tourism related businesses both large and small.
Benjamin Jost from TrustYou presented their latest innovation, the Semantic Magic Box. The Magic Box analyzes the contents of a review and identifies the meaningful statements within the review content. By analyzing the content, TrustYou can provide the sentiment of reviews. Jost claims to provide intelligent results to search by matching the sentiment of the user to the reviews that have been... Read More...
Presented by Jo Preston – Voyavo is a social trip planning platform that allows friends to collaborate and plan trips together. The trip planning process that Preston presented started with a search for a flight. Next he added a baseball game and then finally a restaurant. All the items are added to a primary itinerary. The user can add contacts to the itinerary using the popular Plaxo... Read More...
The concept of a loss leader is nothing new. Businesses have been using loss leaders for ages, products that are sold at cost or below cost in order to stimulate other sales. For retailers, this often means selling something at a great discount in the hopes that the customer will buy other (higher margin) items while they wonder around your store. Restaurants have been successful at using loss... Read More...
I’m getting set to head south for a week of desert sun and travel technology learning at the annual PhoCusWright Conference. This year’s theme is “Chaos Calls” and, if similar to previous years, will have great coverage of the big OTAs, travel distribution, hotels, airlines, car rentals, and the emerging vacation rental space. I predict, although it’s really not... Read More...
UpTake Networks, Inc. announced today that it has acquired RealTravel, Inc., a social hotel recommendation site. UpTake Networks, Inc. owns UpTake.com, a semantic search engine designed to help travelers research and decide where to go, where to stay and what to do. With the addition of Real Travel, UpTake Networks intends to accelerate their investment in the online travel research experience and... Read More...
In this month’s Travel Business Profits e-letter, I look at how the private-sale travel site business model works and why I believe it will be a powerful business model in the online travel industry. As an online travel business consultant, and an intrigued entrepreneur, I have been researching the new private-sale travel websites that have been gaining momentum in the online travel industry. Private-sale... Read More...
The underlying goal of any social media strategy is to build corporate social habits for your organization. In the same way that you and your staff interact with people in the “real world” you should be interacting with them in a similar manner in the social web. The philosophies and techniques that you use to handle customer interactions face to face don’t change when you handle customer... Read More...
The plan you create based on the Listen, Engage, Articulate, and Demonstrate social media strategy should be reviewed on a regular basis to make sure that the objectives for each phase are being met. I recommend you schedule the following reviews into your social media plan: Monthly review – This review should look at how effective you are at executing on your plan. For example: Are you listening... Read More...
Your success metrics will be different for each step in your L.E.A.D. social media strategy. To summarize, you can expect the following outcomes from each phase: Listening Where users are talking about you What users are saying about you and your brand Where users are talking about subjects that are important to your business What information users are looking for and how they hope to get the... Read More...
As you may be aware, I am now a big fan of Prezi, the web based zooming presentation tool. I have started converting all of my presentations over to the Prezi platform and I may even upgrade to a pro account. Those of you who know me, know that for me to consider paying for a service, it better be darn good! Needless to say, I really like the dynamism that you get from the Prezis. The zooming... Read More...
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