In one fell swoop, getaroom.com figured out a way to increase viewership of its commercials, boost its Facebook fan base, increase interaction with consumers, bump up traffic on its blog and plug a hotel partner.

getaroom.com, which features unpublished rates over the phone for hotel stays which often are cheaper than its online rates, is running a video contest for its Facebook fans.

Ever the deal-maker, getaroom.com is asking Facebook fans to create videos to inspire the next getaroom.com commercial, and the grand prize is a two-night hotel stay — worth a mere $300 — at the Royal Plaza Hotel in Orlando, Fla.

Here are the contest rules.

The winning video will be posted on the getaroom.com blog and will serve as “inspiration” for the company’s next video, getaroom.com says.

The contest may also be inspiration for other social-media marketers.

MySkyStatus, a system developed by Lufthansa to allow passengers to send status updates to their social networks in-flight, has doubled the number of messages sent out in the space of a month.

The airline launched the system in October 2009 and in mid-January had pushed out around 17,000 tweets from passengers – a figure which has risen dramatically to over 36,000 within the space of four weeks.

Lufthansa says it will be launching a new version of the product in the coming months with a number of new features, including the ability to send pre-written emails through the system.

MySkyStatus works by connecting to a passenger’s Twitter account and allowing them to place a standard message in a store, released only when the aircraft is in the air and at a specified time.

The system also tracks flight details and data from every airline in the world in order to establish when a passenger is off-line.

Lufthansa has opened the system to passengers on any airline but admits a good proportion is currently coming from its own customers.

Surprising news for the digerati from a large survey by budget accommodation provider Hostelworld indicating that Facebook and YouTube lead the way in use of social media by travellers at the expense of Twitter.

The poll of 2,000 regular hostel users found that only 9% used the Twitter micro-blogging platform, while almost half used Facebook  and nearly a third were users of video sharing service YouTube.

1. 47% – Facebook
2. 31% – YouTube
3. 9% – Twitter
4. 6% – Flickr
5. 6% – MySpace
6. 1% – Bebo

The results, presented at Hostelworld’s annual customer conference in Dublin, Ireland, also revealed how travellers are booking their accommodation online.

Home desktop computers secured 34% of the vote, behind laptops at 46% but way ahead of smartphones with just 5%.

Although 87% of respondents claimed they would take take a mobile device with them when travelling, almost half said it was for SMS messaging (46%) and calls (41%). Only 13% pinpointed web browsing as an activity they would use their phones for.

Other areas covered the survey included booking windows for travellers, with the strong majority buying accommodation within a month of their arrival time.

• 13% – 3 months or more
• 41% – 1 month
• 27% – 1 week
• 12% – 3-4 days
• 7% – 1-2 days

The travellers represented 70 countries around the world (Australia – 9%, USA – 8%, Britain and Canada – 7%) and 42% were aged 25-34 and 36% were 18-24.

Social Media has only one constant – and that is change, according to conclusions in eMarketer’s recent The Future of Social Media Marketing.

There is a lot of talk about the value of social media, but as regulars readers will know I am something of a skeptic.

Social media is one of the best metric’d vehicles for advertising and marketing to come along in years, yet when its proponents are asked for a rationality for it in economic terms, the arguments I hear liken social media adoption to that of the PC and initial forays on the web.

This turns off traditional media buyers who are looking for something more tangible.

The Shearwater Blog had an interesting post recently about Twitter, citing the study done RJ Metrics which combines a number of analytic tools together.

It confirms the position that despite the huge buzz around Twitter, adoption is somewhat sporadic and its usage is decidedly inconsistent.

The web can be an unforgiving place when you venture into un-prepared. Even established brands can get trashed quickly by the mood of the crowd.

However, the mood of the crowd moves on but everything stays forever on the web. And the crowd does tend to report bad things rather than good things.

How many tweets have gone out about “how great  is someone’s Prius”  vs, say, “it’s the brake system or the cruise control”?

The process of social media is not a dark art where there are specific experts. Common sense in the main will carry the day. However when it comes to optimizing your delivery mechanism then do seek help. Just don’t confuse the delivery with the message.

The use of social media has to be a clearly thought out process. I don’t buy that just because everyone is there that you need to be making noise as well.

Lemming behavior never benefits anyone (just as the airlines). I do agree with many of my fellow TNoozers that you cannot avoid it. However attempting to control it… well, that’s akin to putting fingers in the dyke.

So here is my advice on the subject. If you are expecting to get ROI from social media… it doesn’t happen.

Once you are involved – you have to stay involved. Focus your attention on providing value. And remember that the crowd is not collective wisdom.

Anyone who relies on the wisdom of the crowd will be brought down by it.

There is little doubt that Facebook is well on its way to becoming the dominant homepage for many online users in the United States.

Not to mention the social network’s slow but steady rise in popularity around the world.

For marketers, it is a basic concept.  We want our message to be in front of as many consumers as possible for the lowest possible price.

Put 350 million people in one place, online or otherwise, and marketers will fall over themselves to hock the value of their product or service.

In the case of Facebook, we know the audience is there, but are they listening to the message?

For example, take our recent tweet from @travel2dot0:

“Facebook users will vote for anything if you ask: http://ow.ly/12Cy8 Which state will reach 1mil fans first. Did DMOs miss something?”

The tweet is referring to an article about one of the many flavors of the week on Facebook – numerous pages devoted to which US state can gather 1 million fans first.

Alas, these state pages have been created specifically for this contest and do not represent the official DMO Facebook pages.

That said, in less than a month, Texas has amassed more than 714,000 fans in this very unscientific survey.

But what types of users are represented in the 700,000 number?  As a DMO, we want to be friends with all of these users, right? Are these users as valuable as all others?

We have some thoughts on that.  We call them status hoarders.

Of course, there are numerous users within Facebook who are brand advocates for their favorite destination (Breckenridge), coffee shop (Starbucks) or sports car (Ferrari).  We need to be careful not to paint everyone with the same broad brush.

Status Hoarders:  Users who attach themselves to numerous groups, typically relating to a pop culture or fashionable topic, in order to maintain a hip or favorable perception among other users.

Ah, now we are getting somewhere.  As we mentioned in the tweet, users on Facebook (or Twitter for that matter) will vote for anything… Avatar, the Oscars and, apparently, states around the US.

This is a perfect example of how Facebook exaggerates the already existing social tendencies of our culture online.

The majority of us care deeply about the perception of others, how cool we appear and what products, people and things we are associated with – not to mention our inherent competitive nature.

Which brings us back to the state popularity contest on Facebook.  The article asks several questions about the post-vote existence of these pages:

So what happens to these pages after the first state reaches 1 million fans is a good question. Will Facebook roll them into the states’ official pages? Will states try to obtain them and turn them into tourist or government-focused pages?

Um, no thanks. And here is why.

The users who have become fans (ah, such a nice term) of these pages are simply passing through and have no real loyalty or interest in a deeper conversation.

They are, for the most part, status hoarders, voting for their state in one of several non-productive breaks during the work day.  I am pretty sure they also voted for their favorite Jersey Shore cast member, some sort of Star Wars vs Trek debate and probably a celebrity-related fashion question.

No, you can keep those users; DMOs really don’t need fans like that.

Travel social network WAYN has been through a number of incarnations over the years and is now considering a move to add gaming functionality as a result of seeing FourSquare’s early success.

WAYN completely overhauled its user interface and proposition in April 2009 as a result of a wide-ranging review of the entire business in the face of competition and growth from the likes of Facebook.

Now, co-founder Jerome Touze admits that the concept of adding some kind of gaming element into the WAYN system has become attractive following the rapid growth and broadly positive critical reaction to FourSquare in late-2009.

Touze says WAYN doesn’t see FourSquare as a competitor – FourSquare is a far narrower service based on location, rather than WAYN’s wider remit of a lifestyle tool – but it is seeing the benefit of broadening its own platform.

“What Foursquare is proving well is the benefit of an exciting gaming platform where the fun comes from the number of places you have checked in and the status you get as a result of that – ie mayors etc.

“This is actually opening our eyes to broaden our horizon to adding a gaming feel to WAYN’s world where users feel more encouraged to contribute and rewarded as a result of that.

Although Touze and his two co-founders appear to be keen on making something work for WAYN members, gaming looks like it’ll come as a revenue-building opportunity rather than something at the heart of the service such as with FourSquare.

“Executing this vision well means we will be able to further unlock commercial value from our users as the micro transaction combined with an engaged gaming environment focused on location based  services can be a powerful proposition if done well.”

Touze says WAYN is currently adding around 10,000 new registrations every day to the system and is also seeing healthy growth to a new “activities” element added to the site in December 2009.

Around 35,000 activities are added to the system every day, he says – activities being broadly defined as places or things to do that members suggest while using the system.

OK, so I am really comfortable with email. I have been an Outlook user since I beta’d the first office suites when I was at Microsoft with the Office 1997 version.

So here we are more than ten years later and I still prefer it over all the other tools I have tried and abandoned.

Now its Office 2010 beta. It’s pretty useful and has some nice new features.

I thought that Office 2007 was a major upgrade and so far to me while there are nice new features 2010 is not as ground breaking.

I have tried to use the free tools like Google Docs and Open Office. I even went cold turkey for a week – well that lasted two days before I returned to the fold.

I do like Office for the Mac 2008. It has nice features. I may yet cross over to the dark side in the next year and go to the Mac. My old G3 Mac no longer functions for anything but the minimalist of tasks.

So, it would seem I am not alone. I recently saw an interesting study courtesy of eMarketer.

The survey shows that the primary source of content sharing is email. I believe this to be so for people like me.

However it is no longer the unique source of my information sharing services. This year – my Christmas greeting will be via Facebook, Twitter and my blog [here it is].

My private email users will get the email I usually do and if your one of the (un)lucky people a Christmas Greeting is probably due to you in the next 24 hours.

I have a quite a few friends who have moved their primary social interaction tool to Facebook. [So far I have yet to find someone who communicates exclusively via Twitter and I really hope I don’t!].

I have also noticed a trend among professional people who have abandoned their use of Facebook for personal stuff.

The ability to control personal vs professional remains a challenge for the Big Kahuna of social media. And its not getting any better. So despite the new privacy rules I have now essentially withdrawn my personal info from FB as well.

I never liked the phone and still don’t. So my usage – as measured in total minutes over the past decade has fallen dramatically. However my digital volume of email as measured in the respective growth of my PST files has accelerated.

Email has clearly evolved. I still get way too much and I am struggling to keep up. I need to revisit my filters again.

I have unsubscribed to a wide variety of newsletters in the past year. I seldom have time to read RSS feeds – again there is just too much data out there. I have found that the tools are getting better. Two of my favorite Outlook Add-ins are:

• YouSendIt – this is a great tool for sending sub 100MB files.
• Xobni – a great info manager.

I highly recommend both, however the latter is still unstable in Office2007 and will likely be so in 2010 although so far it does suffer from some annoying mis-features such as the occupation of valuable real estate on the screen and some inframe nav issues.

So for now I will continue to use email as my primary communication tool. Am I a Luddite, I don’t think so – but you might disagree.

Travel planning and online concierge service TripIt is launching Facebook Connect functionality to allow members to share and create trips on the social network.

The tie-in works by posting a user’s trip information on Facebook and re-feeding responses back into the TripIt profile of a journey.

TripIt says the tool will also be useful for people to get “relevant and timely” advice which, in turn, will flow through the existing Tripit connections into mobile for on-the-move services and assistance.

Interestingly the launch is as a direct result of user demand for a connection between the two services and is one of most widely requested services of the year, TripIt says.

The development marks the end of a busy year for TripIt following the launch of suite of products, including most recently its Android app.

But more importantly the launch of Facebook Connect illustrates the growing desire by what were initially pre-trip planning services to integrate with platforms which are increasingly offering real-time functionality.

These links are also giving platforms such as TripIt a new distribution channel in terms of marketing to a wider audience.

UK online travel agency OnTheBeach claims a world first today with the launch of a Facebook application to allow a customer to organise bookings for friends.

Once the BeachMate application is shared around a group of people, each member can input a unique BeachMate reference number of another person’s holiday into the service and be directed to the relevant booking page on the OTB website.

The application then aggregates friends into groups of those going on a particular trip.

One of OTB’s popular segments is holidays targeted at younger travellers for such destinations as the party island Ibiza in the Mediterranean – a natural habitat for Facebookers.

The Manchester, UK-based agency currently has over 18,000 fans on its Facebook page and has embraced social media under the direction of marketing director Alistair Daly.

Facebook apps have generally been a bit of a mixed bag for travel firms since the social network’s API was opened to developers in mid-2007.

TripAdvisor’s Cities I’ve Visited app currently has around 2.7 million monthly active users and the Travelpod Traveler IQ Challenge attracts roughly 75,000 players.

But they are relatively lone successes in a sea of often crushing disappointment to many travel firms who thought an app would be a key to social media glory.

Many other apps have come and gone quickly, primarily due to a lack of usage and/or high running costs, leading many to throw their Facebook efforts into Fan Pages.

Not a day goes by these days that we don’t get something in our mail box about social media.

If it’s not another article telling us how to incorporate it into our business strategy, it’s another webinar featuring experts in the field.

And, oh yes, it’s the most discussed topic in boardrooms.

Well, here’s another one – but this one, transcribed from a 10-minute speech given by Morris Sim, CEO of Circos Brand Karma, at WIT-Web In Travel is worth reflecting on if only for the context it gives as to how big social media has become, and why it’s so fundamental to human nature.

First, the Taiwanese-American sets the stage. There’s been an explosion in the last 12 months, he says.

Citing Alexa statistics, he says, Facebook is the second most popular website today, although he was later challenged by Robbie Hills of GroupM Search who says Comscore statistics had Facebook as ranked number five.

“They are growing for sure though,” said Hills.

And growing it is – Sim says Facebook was the number one site in Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines and Bangladesh.

And of the top 20 sites ranked in the last 12 months, eight of them are powered by social media, adds Sim.

AirAsia has 95,000 fans, JetBlue has 1.5 million followers on Twitter and there are 5,000 photos on Peninsula Hong Kong on Flickr.

He’s merely using numbers to prove his point that “the amount of content, the number of people talking” is incredible.

Moving on to commerce, he says one out of every 20 users that are going to Singapore Airlines’ website, or sites such as Wotif, Asiarooms, Webjet and other OTAs, were at Facebook previously before they went to those sites.

He says a battle had been occurring for a very long time and it has to do with “our fundamental need to access information in an efficient manner”.

Traditional media had dominated this access and this had been powered by man until 10-15 years ago when a company called Google kicked the apple cart over.

It put together a bunch of machines, scoured the web, compiled the information and asked the user to ask questions to which it responded with a list of answers.

It worked like a research model – “the way academics would look for material”, says Sim,

“In that sense, when Google came in, it set up a battle between machine and man (traditional media).

“The machine won in the viewership perspective and the advertising dollar perspective. That left a vacuum, data was moving to machines and information was moving back.”

A counterpoint was needed and a classic battle is now ensuing between man and machine, says Sim.

“We as human beings are inherently empathetic – we need to relate to each other and one of the biggest actions we take is to share about what we do and what we are thinking.”

Back to numbers – four billion photos on Flickr, 100 million videos on YouTube, 269 languages on Wikipedia.

Facebook is “all about sharing, sharing, sharing” –  two billion new photos a month, 14 million videos a month, 40 million status updates a day, six billion minutes spent in viewership – the average – 30 minutes a day.

“You pick the people you trust and you see only the content you want – the people are the filter for the content. The context is personal to you. You toss out the question and you get the recommendations and referrals.”

And – another number – 74% of users trust peer reviews.

So why is man going to win this latest battle? Sim shares a story:

“On April 18, 1775, a 40-year-old man, Paul Revere, rode from Boston to Lexington to tell everyone that the British were coming.

“What the ride did was emphasise the importance of the timing of receipt of information – man has a fundamental awareness of timing in a different way to machines.”

It is this awareness of time that explains the importance of Twitter, argues Sim.

“Twitter is all about relevance, breaking news illustrates this, it explains its meteoric rise – from 1,000 most popular website to 13th in one year and 60% of its users are now from outside the US.

“It’s a utility to get relevant information out in a timely manner.”

Look at it another way – Twitter allows you to pick who you want your editorial staff to be by following their tweets and unfollowing them as you wish.

JetBlue, with 1.3 million followers on Twitter, uses it as a distribution mechanism to get its rates out. “This is not possible under the search paradigm,” says Sim.

Man’s deficiency is “we cannot process large amounts of data. Machines are optimized to gather, collect and organise data – that has becomes its weakness in this era of information glut.

“Social media and social networks have made it so much easier to process information and recommendations from friends – 4 answers as opposed to 4 million.

“And if the answers come from those you trust, well, you don’t have to do the research work,”

So man or machine? You choose.

Traxo, one of the companies featured in the PhoCusWright Travel Innovation Summit this week and a fledgling trip planning and itinerary management service, is one of many firms that suffers when the tech-heads at Facebook fancy a change.

Founder and chief exec at Traxo, Andres Fabris, fresh from unveiling his new company to the wider travel industry, says Facebook notified Traxo a few weeks ago that it would be changing the protocols associated with its Connect tool.

Now this might sound a bit trivial to some but, as Fabris admits: “It’s a pain the butt.”

He stresses that the change will not have an impact on the Traxo service but being at the whim of engineers at Facebook creates problems.

The Facebook Connect API is used by Traxo – and countless others – to handle the sharing tools central to its platform. It pulls in content from Facebook to the website and vice versa.

Facebook, of course, has good intentions with the changes, but giving third party sites using Connect just a month or so (deadline, end of the year) to upgrade their system could potentially be problematic.

This could be even more of a difficulty for larger firms using the system where their code releases are often scheduled weeks or even months ahead of time.

In the Traxo case, Fabris says its size (ie small) and agile development team will be able to make the changes within a few weeks.

TravelMuse has broken with convention and appears to be the only travel company this autumn not talking about Twitter.

The California-based travel guide and trip planning website today launched a series of new features which utilise Facebook, rather than everyone’s favourite micro-blogging service Twitter.

The suite of tools include a trip recommendation tool, account syncing system through Facebook Connect and a new Facebook app allowing users to create trips or get advice from friends and connections.

TravelMuse has written a detailed post on its blog explaining the new features.

Good.

In fact, seeing some interesting tools being developed for Facebook makes a nice change

The fuss/hype/confusion over Twitter during 2009 – the year the service really took off around the world – will no doubt go down in web history.

But does it feel like the momentum is beginning to wane?

Twitter was the subject of many conversations during this week’s TravelBlogCamp, but to paraphrase a number of people on the night and on several occasions this week during World Travel Market: “Twitter is quite useful, often fun and conversational.”

The praise does appear to be faltering there.

Read the Silicon Valley tech press and they are falling over themselves with the apparent shock news that Twitter’s traffic has remained static (even fallen by a few percentage points) over the past few months in the US.

This isn’t a crisis, of course, as some would have it.

But there is a sense that usage is beginning – at least in Twitter’s motherland – to stablise.

This matters in travel because despite the uber-trendy status of Twitter, everyone’s other favourite social network, Facebook, appears to have more of a chance of relevancy for travel brands and consumers alike.

It has the user numbers as well…

Think about photos, recommendations, context, fan pages, likes/dislikes and all those other functions that Facebook has which Twitter doesn’t sand perhaps this notion of Twitigue makes sense.

Travel companies that dismissed micro-blogging service Twitter (”Why do I want to know if someone is eating a bagel or not?”) may well be rethinking their strategy this morning.

News initially from Microsoft’s Bing and a few hours later from Google confirmed that tweets from Twitter will be included in the search duo’s organic results.

Bing has a rudimentary service up and running already. Google’s integration is expected to begin over the coming weeks. Facebook status updates are likely, too. So what?

These series of announcements are more than fuel for the watercooler conversations for the Silicon Valleyites and wider digerati.

For travel and its relationship with search, indexing of live Twitter and Facebook updates will trigger a seismic shift – once again - in how travel companies think about SEO and social media.

Take the Google-Twitter deal as an example.

It is unclear as yet how Google will index and rank the stream from Twitter – but if it uses the same relevancy and linking protocols it applies at the moment to natural search, then this is a powerful change in engine’s capability.

In the past, results for a search for “Tnooz Hotel Paris” [it doesn't exist, obviously] would probably have returned the property’s website, a TripAdvisor review, a handful of aggregator sites, an OTA or two, and maybe a blog post or forum entry in the first few pages.

But now the results may include relevant tweets from Twitter. The relevancy may be determined by how many other Twitterists have re-tweeted the post, number of inbound links from respected and page ranked authorities, number of followers for the tweeter, etc.

In one quick stroke the search engines will be including the Zeitgeist of travel:  the here and now of the travel conversation or what the web community is saying about destinations, airlines, hotels, tour operators, agencies and, most importantly,  the reaction to it.

If this is the case, Twitter becomes a powerful channel for travel companies and can no longer be ignored.

Take any of the recent Twitter-induced social media outpourings of comment – #balloonboy, Jan Moir – and apply it to travel.

The sheer volume of content, cross-linking and re-tweeting would see conversations or products – in the new social world of Google or Bing – soar into search results by virtue of being active topics.

Think of Twitter’s trending topics being thrust into search results.

Some points to consider:

• For the searching-the-moment purists this is manna from heaven – finally search engines will have their finger on the pulse of the web.
• To those that despise Twitter for its lack of control and/or relevancy and/or quality, this is a dark moment. Search engine indexing mostly takes a fair degree of time to filter relevancy. By including tweets it potentially removes the current evaluation process of search?
• Reacting quickly to comments on Twitter will be more important than ever for travel brands, regardless of size and resources. There is also, for example, possibly no guarantee that a swift reaction to correct a flagrant inaccurate tweet would stop content from finding its way into search results.
• Travel companies may well possibly (if they aren’t doing so already) flood Twitter with hundreds or even thousands of messages in the hope that it ends up on an organic search result relevant to their brand.
• Good news for SEO agencies working with travel clients! Tweeting, similar to that of writing destination content, will become a fine/dark art.
• Twitter for travel brands may simply become a huge distribution network of offers and late deals, arguably destroying its “What Are You Doing?” mantra. If Travelzoo isn’t looking into this already, it should be.

Nevertheless, perhaps the most important element outcome to come from this hugely significant development for search is it appears that Twitter has finally got itself a major revenue stream, if rumours that the deals with Bing and Google were commercial arrangements.

Or, keeping in line with much of Twitter’s usage, this service from Lufthansa could also be targeting those who want to show off where they are (and think their followers care).

Jokes aside, Lufthansa has tapped into the social media zeitgeist by creating a tool which allows Twitter or Facebook members to send a status message to their profiles mid-flight.

MySkyStatus simply asks for the name of the airline, flight number, date and departure airport. It logs the request and then sends out the update either at departure time or half way through the flight.

Lufthansa isn’t restricting the service to its own passengers. Every commercial airline on the planet appears to be included.

Appears to be catching on already.

There is some confusion about extra services (which are mainly non mandatory to the end customer) that are now available on many forms of mainstream travel products such as flights.

Much of the confusion and concern comes from agents who sell these products [e.g. see this Facebook group setup by agents who are upset with the new BA seat reservation charges] [Hat tip: Travel Weekly UK]

Or read what tweeting business travel agent Murray Harrold has to say about the new United Airlines baggage package:

Why should United travelers “save” money of baggage fees? – The fees are not supposed to be there in the first place!!! I mean: First, take something away and charge for it, THEN turn round and say, “Here’s how you can save…all this goes to show that airlines have got themselves into a big hole – more precisely, all these bright young exec’s…and they are just ruddy clueless how to fix it. What a ruddy shambolic lot. I wouldn’t trust any of them to run an airfix model airport.

Murray is worth paying attention to if you are on Twitter as he summarises the agent perspective eloquently.

The problem is these agents are looking at all these ancillary products through the wrong lens. Yes of course it is about the money but it is also about centralising bookings. No wonder agents are upset – but they put the issue down to airline incompetence rather than well considered strategy. The agents are complaining about the wrong point!

To understand what I mean we have to go back to initial principles.

I do a lot of work with small tour operators. Many of them come from a tailor made tour background. They start with the idea that they are based in a destination and can pretty much sell you whatever tour you want.

These tour operators really struggle to be successful online. In effect they are promoting a service not a product.

A lot of my conversations with these small tour operators relates around advice to create a few sample products (tours). These products can then be promoted and used as the basis of a tailor made tour. These products can be listed on a website (and 3rd party websites).

In this situation these tour operators have had to decrease variations of their product in order to be able to market online.

It is the same with working with agents. By decreasing variations it makes the product easy to learn, easy to sell and enables an agent to be confident they are selling an appropriate product.

Back to the airlines. By increasing variations they make it much harder for agents to sell their product. A customer who finds they can’t get the information they need from an agent may end up looking on the airline’s own website and therefore booking directly.

Summary – if you want agents to work with you, if you want distributed transactions, then reduce product variations. If  you want customers to book direct (via centralised transactions) then increase product variations.