Linking It Up:
Hopefully you have a few key, select social media networks to help promote your business and your website.
Your social media profiles probably link to your website (if not, fix it) but make sure your site links to your social media presence.
Travel technology beasts Sabre and Amadeus are at the centre of rather bizarre war of words – except one is gagged from saying anything.
Two weeks ago Amadeus issued a press release to say it had won a standard but nice piece of business within the STA Travel empire – grabbing the GDS elements of the agency’s retail presence in the UK.
The sense of excitement was obvious given that “STA Travel is one of the UK’s largest travel agents and was previously with Sabre”. Unfortunately, not all was as it appeared.
In a suite of announcements today – including how real time search will look in results – the new photo search product Google Goggles has plenty to get the traveller excited.
The new product has a limited release on Android-powered mobiles at present but is essentially a photo recognition system which allows users to send a snap from their phones to Google and receive information back about it.
Sounds simple – and it is.
Solutionz Media, a new venture by travel industry veterans Chicke Fitzgerald and Tiffany Topcik, partnered with GuestCentric Systems to go after business from independent hotels looking to enter into and/or monetize their social media efforts.
Solutionz Media, a unit of the Solutionz Group, will do much of the consulting and strategizing for independent hotels as they implement GuestCentric Systems’ Customer Engagement Platform, which was an entry in PhoCusWright’s recent Travel Innovation Summit in Orlando.
The platform, available in Software as a Service mode for a monthly flat fee, contains marketing and distribution components, including social media monitoring and promotions.
FareCompare introduced a Twitter beta today that mashes-up Google Maps, FareCompare deal tweets from consumers’ favorite departure airports and Twitter users who are following those alerts from selected airports.
Fare alerts on social networks like Twitter and Facebook have become a hot arena as companies like FareCompare, Travelzoo, Travelocity and countless others vie for bookings and the allegiances of deal-hungry consumers.
FareCompare’s Twitter beta takes the competition to the next level by attempting to further engage consumers with a Web 2.0, community-oriented flavor.
Most popular travel websites in the UK for the week ending December 5 2009.
Data includes Top Ten travel search terms and the Top Ten Agency, Airline and Destination/Accommodation sites.
Get an External Opinion:
You, your designer, and your staff are too close to your website.
You can’t see how the latest tweaks are meshing with the original structure, and you’ll look past minor niggles that could be causing real problems.
Just days after Travellerspoint revealed its simplistic, on-demand email city and country guides, social and travel publishing giant Time Out unveils its own take on the on-the-go guides.
The publisher’s popular city guides are in the process of being formatted for eReaders, Blackberry, PDA and web and will available for download from its own store and other online retailers this month.
Time Out says the eBooks will be fully interactive and include the usual mapping functions and ability to add bookmarks and make notes against the content.
It’s Not a Billboard:
This one is easy: unless you make more off those advertisements than you do by selling your products, get rid of them.
What you missed on Tnooz this week, Sunday 29 November to Saturday 5 December 2009.
Read on to see the most commented articles, every other article this week, and the most commented articles of all time…
As the always-connected traveller turns to mobile and other devices to search and book products, travel brands must finally grasp the importance of providing a seamless multi-channel customer experience.
Another year, another 2,500 articles published on Tnooz. But which stories attracted the most traffic or moved readers in their dozens to add their comments?
Tnooz is lucky and privileged to have some of the brightest minds in the industry reporting and contributing to its service almost every single day of the year.
With the rapid advancements in mobile and social media, travel companies often find themselves struggling to separate hype from fact.