Small Travel Agencies have advantage in Social Media

It’s not very often that small travel agencies have any kind of advantage over their much larger and better funded counterparts, but when it comes to Social Media they have a distinct advantage.  Small agencies whether they have one employee or many tend to be better prepared to handle personal requests and offer one on one service.  Large agencies, especially OTAs, are generally more focused on volume and, although many have excellent customer service, their smaller margins and focus on the bottom line mean that personal interaction in social media needs to have a clear and measurable... Read more »

New Travel Bookmarking Site a Cross Between Del.icio.us and LonelyPlanet

I recently came across a new website called TravelBookmarking.com. I found it quite by accident while using Stumbleupon to look for travel related sites. TravelBookmarking.com is a sister site to SoMuchWorld.com which is a free web based travel guide similar in nature to Wikitravel.org or World66.com but written by a set of professional travel writers. The reason why I like TravelBookmarking.com is because it gives travelers the ability to bookmark sites (in del.icio.us style) in order to create their own personal travel guides. Travelers can even copy and paste in creative commons or open... Read more »

Hospitality Managers Pay Attention! The Truth Doesn’t Have to Hurt

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 reviews is a valuable tool from a customer service standpoint. This survey, by Marketing Vox seems to support the idea that reviews are really not as bad as hoteliers think. Here is a snippet of the results as posted by Joe Buhler: Fully... Read more »