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 [...]
You may already be aware of pay to play auction sites like Swoopo and Swipe Auctions, now there is a new player in town who is hoping to be the bid-to-win auction site for luxury hotels. There is a lot of controversy around the legitimacy of these types of sites and the marketing/advertising strategies are [...]
Do you have a pricing strategy for your travel products? I believe that the pricing of your travel products is both an art and a science. This Spring, I read Smart Pricing by Jagmohan Raju and Z. John Zhang. It is an interesting book that covers multiple pricing strategies for businesses. The book got me [...]
The founder of Patagonia, Yvon Chouinard has a saying that goes something like this, “place one-foot forward and if it feels good take another step.” I have been taking several steps forward for the past three months developing an online travel business called BarHarborDeals.com. My vision was to build an OTA (Online Travel Agency) for [...]
During the OpenTravel Alliance half day session at Eye for Travel’s Distribution Summit in Chicago, we had an opportunity to discuss new and emerging distribution channels including, believe it or not, destination marketers. Although many of the comments were not particularly supportive of this model, I think there is a huge opportunity for destinations to [...]
Last week I had an opportunity to talk to Claude Guay, formerly an analyst with PhoCusWright but now the CEO of iPerceptions, an analytics company based out of New York. iPerceptions recently published their Hospitality Index report around the same time that Forrester research came out with their report indicating the customer satisfaction in the [...]
This is not really a technology post, but since I have received over a dozen comments from disgruntled individuals complaining about either Travelocity or TripAdvisor, I thought it was appropriate to write this article. At the PhoCusWright 2007 Conference in Orlando, I had the opportunity to listen to some pretty high profile speakers and CEOs [...]
A recent survey by the Kelsey Group recently announced that consumers are willing to pay at least 20% more for products and services receiving a 5 star (or excellent) rating versus those receiving a 4 star (or good) rating. The study also indicated that about 24% of the Internet users that were surveyed use online [...]
A big part of both the Canada-e-connect and the PhoCusWright Conferences revolved around user generated content and the effect that online review sites have on a companies reputation. The TripAdvisor presentation, which I reviewed earlier, pointed out that hoteliers and destination marketers don’t need to fear public opinion and that feedback in the form of [...]
I’ve been following an ongoing discussion on the WIWIH forums about the effect that expert reviews and amateur reviews have on the reputation of a hotel. I find this discussion particularly interesting because it is directly related to the increasing use of user generated content by travelers in the decision making process. Trip Advisor, among [...]
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