Simpliflying has taken a look at what airlines are doing with Google Plus and came up with the following findings:

• There are now 70 airlines with brand pages on Google Plus.
• The vast majority of the pages are in English – about 78.5%. But on average, pages in Spanish are “liked” more often.
• The airline with the highest number of “likes” (known as “+1″s) was Mexican low cost carrier Volaris with almost 3000, double that of the second most popular page.
• The most common type of content on Google Plus pages is brand-related (as opposed to sales related on Facebook or customer service related on Twitter).

Opinion is still pretty divided as to the overall value of Google Plus, compared to rival platform Facebook, but certainly those that have managed to harness some kind of value from it are seeing some results.

Matt Rhodes, strategy director at UK-based agency Fresh Networks, for example, believes Google Plus has the ability to change search in fundamental ways over time and the data which Google is capturing and re-serving through its other, connected platforms is becoming a critical element of the social graph which, inevitably, brands will need to understand and utilise better.

Early days, early days.

Anyway, here is an infographic from the Simpliflying team to showcase the results:

There is one thing those “Ten secrets for a successful startup” articles never mention – the critical business need for a fuzzy shark suit.

Who could have predicted that a costume purchase would spark a burgeoning embrace of social video for marketing and PR at TravelShark?

Even if you don’t have a college-football-quality mascot, and whether you’re a scrappy travel startup or an iconic hotel, here are nine signs it’s time for your company to dive in:

1. You own a fuzzy shark suit, or its metaphorical equivalent

Last June we changed our name from Swiftrank to TravelShark. The inspiration to create a company mascot named Mako Mark and make him our video leading man seemed nearly inevitable.

We binned our plan for a standard press release and instead shot a playful Shark-on-the-Street newsreel outside our office, capturing opinions from the hot dog guy and our mailman. Total spend for the video press release and a few shorts: under $10,000.

The videos made a huge splash in social media, exceeding every expectation, with traffic spikes, thousands of views, Twitter traction, and incoming sales leads. Did we celebrate when we got the news that we won a Gold Adrian Award for this grassroots campaign? You bet we did.

2. You are marketing something with a visual “story”

Video conveys visual and emotional touch points, which are present in almost every travel offering.

Our case and point. Last week we launched TravelSharkPix, a social travel-photo sharing service. We added a charitable component and asked users to help us pick three charity partners.

Cause marketing plus photography made video PR a natural choice. Our tongue-in-cheek launch video shows Mako Mark’s foiled attempts to find a partner.

Over the next week, we are releasing short follow-on charity stories like this one shown first at Tnooz today:

3. You can defuse the “Honey Badger” cynics in your office

I see fear about using video. You pitch an idea, and you get the “this is no Honey Badger” backlash. Instead of comparing your concept to one of the most popular viral videos ever, compare it to your other alternatives.

If your other option is a staid media release with a few photos, you don’t need blockbuster badger stats to score a win.

4. You want to reach consumers

C’mon. You know this one. YouTube is the second largest search engine. Facebook is clocking billions of video views each month.

If you are marketing a travel business to consumers, it likely has a visual story. Video is a must.

5. You want to reach forward-thinking travel executives

You know who they are. Tieless conference-goers mobbed with groupies. You take notes when they talk. They are the new media thought leaders in travel, and if they can influence your customers (or they are your customers), reach them with every arrow in your social media quiver, including social video.

6. You still care about SEO

If in the post-Panda era, you still work at reaching incremental customers through organic search, the YouTube-Google nexus means video matters.

Don’t miss out.

7. You’re allowed to wade in the perfect-is-the-enemy-of-the-good waters

Viral video marketing and PR success rests a great deal on something you can’t control: luck. It’s tough to predict virality, and so don’t break the bank (money or time) on any one video because our best-laid ideas may fall flat.

If your company allows experimentation and testing of “good” ideas, this is your game. If brand standards make “good” not good enough, you’ll spend too much money and time for the likely ROI.

8. You want to get the viral ball rolling with your staff

All those folks in your office may work for you, but if you want them to pull a social media oar, you need to inspire them.
Here’s the math:

Number of employees x (250 Facebook friends + 150 LinkedIn/Twitter) = WOW!

Impressive numbers, but your team members will only advocate for company initiatives on their social graphs if you give them material their friends will love.

A dull industry release is a cul-de-sac. Highly visual video that tells a compelling story – “Check out our new hotel in Da Nang! Let’s go!” – is great fodder for all-company engagement to get that social ball rolling.

9. Your employees aren’t having any fun

Sign out of your email for a minute. Walk around the office and check out the creative energy. Is anyone laughing? Our companies all have stories.

Stories build emotional glue. Videos are a great way to tell those stories, and your people will love being involved in planning, shooting, and giving feedback.

Ask yourself: “What’s my company’s shark suit?”

Armed with that answer, make your iconic story a video star!

NB: This is a guest article by Sue Heilbronner, CEO of TravelShark.

The people behind the annual love-in that is Social Media Week produced a video to mark next week’s event to capture the thoughts of pensioners in 2062 reflecting on the heady days of social media, circa 2012.

It’s rather funny (especially the QR code reference, which is absolutely brilliant).

But as Mike Butcher of TechCrunch Europe says: “Social Media Week in danger of satirising itself.” Suspect it has already.

Enjoy…

During February, both the exterior and the interior of the subway shuttle, which runs from Times Square to Grand Central Station, has been decked out to appear like a Royal Caribbean ship.

The cruise line is calling it the Royal Shuttle.

And, Royal Caribbean International has created a photo album on its Facebook page and has asked fans to upload photos of the shuttle and to tweet them to @RoyalCaribbean, with the hashtag #RoyalShuttle. Here are a few of the images:

Where else can you step off your stateroom balcony right into Grand Central Station?

The marketing blitz comes at a sensitive time for Royal Caribbean, which like Carnival Corp., has seen cruise bookings plunge over the last few weeks because of the Costa Concordia disaster.

Costa is a Carnival brand, but it has hurt bookings for Royal Caribbean and other lines nonetheless.

While booking volumes for Royal Caribbean have declined “by low to mid-teen percentages” in North America, Royal Caribbean says, the drop-off in European bookings has been “higher.”

Royal Caribbean attributes booking declines in Europe, which “vary significantly by country,” to extensive media coverage in the region about the tragedy off the Italian coast.

The fallout from the January 13 Costa Concordia accident occurs during Wave Season, the busiest time of the year for the cruise industry.

Many cruise lines and travel agencies curtailed marketing immediately after the incident, but now they are getting back into gear.

Despite some very high profile and recent setbacks, generally the cruise sector is growing – 16 million passengers cruised in 2011, a 7% increase over 2010.

Around 11 million were North American – heading primarily to Caribbean posts of call. Occupancy rates exceeded 103% demonstrating that demand outpaces supply.

Last year 12 new ships set sail with guest capacities ranging from 101 to 5,400 passengers. By far, the most popular destination is the Caribbean accounting for nearly 42% of all bookings.

According to the Florida-Caribbean Cruise Association:

“We enter an era distinguished by fourteen additional innovative, feature-rich ships; international ports-of-call; and convenient departures from proximal embarkation cities.”

Not only does demand exceed supply in the cruise industry as a whole, growth also supports peripheral markets at destinations where 17 million people descend upon multiple ports of call.

Departure as well as destination

These peripheral markets are more important to the cruisers than any of the amenities on their ships. 74% of potential cruisers regard “visiting multiple locations” as the primary reason for cruising.

By comparison, onboard activities such as fine dining (62%), onboard activities (58%), romance (46%), and family fun (53%) are less significant.

The list of reasons to engage cruisers in off-board experiences is long when it comes to destination marketing at points of embarkation and ports of call.

Not only do three quarters of all cruisers regard visiting new places as essential to a successful cruise, 70% of them experience these new locations for the first time and 50% return based on favorable first impressions.

Moreover, cruise ship calls generated an estimated $2.8 billion in direct spending by passengers, crews and cruise lines. In the Caribbean alone, services and opportunities at ports of call comprise 56,000 jobs.

Since so much money is involved, questions must surround whether peripheral markets can expand and whom these expansions will benefit. To answer these questions requires fundamental re-assessments of what constitutes a peripheral market to cruising and what technologies can reach it.

Traditionally, markets peripheral to cruising have been defined as economic activities at ports of call. There is no argument about the importance of these markets in terms of motivating people to cruise and their positive impacts on local economies.

The term “peripheral markets” has had less to do with activities and opportunities prior to or immediately following cruises.

While there is little doubt that a lot of money changes hands before and/or after actual cruise events, the mechanisms for exploiting them are less readily defined or coordinated among the various operators and local destination marketers at points of purchase.

With this in mind, I would like to expand the definition of what constitutes peripheral marketing to cruising to include the economic impacts on the ports of departure in the days immediately prior to and after cruises.

To do otherwise is foolhardy given that this niche is huge and easily exploitable using innovative and agile travel technologies.

Where technology becomes important

I first got this idea after talking to a smart fellow who prints and deploys QR codes in Florida. What he said was this. In his area, thousands of pre-cruisers show up all the time looking for places to stay, things to eat and things to do during the time leading-up to their embarkation.

Cruise operators and destination marketers must ask how they can satisfy this demand for a variety of reasons. In the case of operators and booking agents, the need relates to offering a wider range of more satisfying services to their customers.

From the perspective of local destination marketers, the need surrounds bringing business to local merchants and introducing the destination as a place that demands further exploration beyond the cruise.

There can be no argument about the breadth of opportunity associated with pre-cruise markets. The point drives home when it is compared to traditional and more well defined opportunities at ports of call.

Average cruise passenger spending per port of call is between $97 and $193 depending on the port.

While the port of call market is worked to death, a market at ports of departure remains largely disorganized despite it’s being more valuable in a hypothetical sense. Consider.

The average hotel price in Miami is $140. Given that cruisers spend approximately $1,770 per person per week as compared to $1,200 for non-cruisers, one might expect cruisers to spend more than the average on nightly lodgings prior to their departures.

Add meals and cruise-related shopping to the mix and actual expenditures at the port of departure can easily exceed port of call expenditures by as much as 288%. Furthermore, these expenditures exclude things-to-do which would be added if the pre-cruiser arrives a day or two before he or she actually embarks.

What we’re talking about here is an enormous market of a type that is highly personalized and can only be responded to through targeted technology and creative solutions that include a confluence of mobile and QR code-led strategies.

To date, I know of no published study of this market niche. What is offered here is a first glimpse that deserves more in-depth investigation.

As you review the graphic below, bear a few things in mind. This survey comprises 76 cruisers. It is confined to Caribbean cruising from east coast US ports of departure. It also derives from surveys conducted through Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter and may disenfranchise some older and less technologically sophisticated cruisers.

Be that as it may, I believe strongly that survey opinions reflect an evolving marketing paradigm in all travel arenas.

When seen from the perspective of greatest good, this survey provides a rationale for affecting a synergy between the cruise industry and local destination marketers.

If successful, it will form the basis for a re-evaluation of techniques as they relate to new directions in mobile applications, webs and social medias at ports of departure.

Summing up

Certain things jump out from our sample and were doubled checked by phone calls to cruise operators and their booking agents.

Across the board, cruise lines and destination marketers fail to coordinate when it comes to pre-cruise logistical technologies related to air travel, hotel reservations, food and local tourism.

While destination marketers do their part and cruise agents chip in, no one seems to have lifted the phone and said something like, “hey, let’s work together and put QR codes in your pre-cruise packages that link to a mobile displays, maps, and/or coupons from local merchants”.

While most cruise lines and their agents offer help with travel and hotel bookings, most defer to local destinations when it comes to street level activities or commerce. The question is why?

All stakeholders should be eager to target as many as nine million pre-cruisers that arrive early, hungry, and eager for something to do.

To get the creative juices flowing – in order to incentivize collaborations among stakeholders toward a technology solution that addresses niche markets at ports of departure – I put dollar signs on the graphic below in all areas where technology can monetize the pre-departure niche market.

As Sherlock Holmes would say: “The game’s afoot.” Let’s go!!

NB: This is a guest article by Mark Mattson, a former university professor who writes agile software solutions for the travel industry through TravelTools, a service for destination marketers.

NB2: Ship in Miami image via Shutterstock.

The Dutch carrier is claiming to be the first airline to integrate social networking within the regular flight process.

KLM says it is trying to give travellers a more ‘inspirational journey’ with the service enabling them to see who is on the flight, perhaps meet for a coffee beforehand, select seats next to each other or share a taxi at the other end.

Meet & Seat is available under the ‘Manage My booking’ function on the website and is only open to users who have linked their social media accounts to their flight.

Users can also choose what information from their social networks they wish to share with others on the flight.

Meet & Seat is available on intercontinental flights beginning with a pilot from Amsterdam to San Francisco, New York and Sao Paulo. The plan is to extend it to other intercontinental destinations shortly.

While analysts and tech-heads pored over the finer details of the S1 filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, shedding light on some of the company’s financials for the first time, TripAdvisor will no doubt be overjoyed at the inclusion of the Trip Friends system it integrated in June 2010.

Facebook is looking raise around $5 billion from the IPO in the US.

The S1 revealed Facebook’s profit in 2011 was a staggering $1 billion, gleaned through revenues of $3.71 billion, while founder mark Zuckerberg still owns around 30% of the business.

Facebook currently has 845 million users worldwide, with more than half using the network every single day.

What surprised some was the letter from Zuckerberg at the head of the filing, in which he pretty much warned investors that Facebook wants to stick to its so-called ethos:

“Facebook was not originally created to be a company. It was built to accomplish a social mission — to make the world more open and connected.

“We think it’s important that everyone who invests in Facebook understands what this mission means to us, how we make decisions and why we do the things we do.”

He continues:

People sharing more — even if just with their close friends or families — creates a more open culture and leads to a better understanding of the lives and perspectives of others.

“We believe that this creates a greater number of stronger relationships between people, and that it helps people get exposed to a greater number of diverse perspectives.”

In terms of the integration used by TripAdvisor, basically a enhanced version of Facebook Connect, Facebook says the service illustrates how third party sites can “design more deeply integrated social experiences built around users and their friends”.

“By tapping into our rich social data, TripAdvisor connects users to their friends and shares relevant content about where their friends have traveled and where they would like to visit in the future.

“While on the TripAdvisor website, friends can discuss their travel plans and recommendations and build out personal profiles of places they have been.”

While initially it did seem to some sceptics to be just another fancy feature that people wouldn’t use, over time it appears to have started having quite a significant impact.

A TripAdvisor official says by December 2011, over 57 million people had “personalised their trip planning experience” on the site using Trip Friends.

Furthermore, these people are twice as more likely to contribute content to TripAdvisor than its other users.

No wonder Facebook likes talking up the Trip Friends integration in probably the most important documents the company has ever produced.

NB: Facebook Like image via Shutterstock.

The technology uses customers’ flight choices to suggest relevant hotel options during the booking process.

But, what if Expedia started drawing on likes and dislikes from customers’ social networks such as Facebook? The company could refine what it offers according to real knowledge.

Smart Cross Sell uses an algorithm to match the highest converting hotels and best deals with a user’s profile.

Expedia says that while the technology is currently aimed at airlines and only uses data from the booking path, it is exploring other options.

Kellie Glazier, product manager for Smart Cross Sell says:

“We are examining all the options to help us provide customers with the most relevant choice of hotels possible, which includes the potential to work with data from other sources, such as social networks.”

BMI is already using the technology and the airline has seen a 9% uplift in hotel room nights and a 6% increase in incremental transactions.

The airline also attributes more than 50% of its growth in hotel sales year-on-year to the tool.

The visual social network, which enables you to “pin” images to your pinboard and Facebook Timeline from around the Web, and share them with your friends and others, has become an emerging force and was the subject of a brief discussion during an Association of Travel Marketing Executives panel on 2012 travel forecasts in Manhattan today.

Will droves of travelers one day do their travel planning, sharing inspirational images, on Pinterest, and will it provide leads to airlines, hotels, cruise lines and online travel agencies?

After ATME chairman Henry Harteveldt asked the panelists about their take on Google, Facebook, Apple and Pinterest entering the travel arena, Dennis Corrigan, vice president of sales and revenue management at JetBlue, noted that “a lot of our customers are Gen Y and we want to be where they are.”

Corrigan noted that Google+ recently introduced corporate pages ”and as Pinterest starts to go down that road, we’ll be there, too.”

JetBlue is playing catch-up in the mobile arena — Corrigan hinted that a mobile app will be forthcoming — and apparently has its eyes on Pinterest in the event that it gets some real travel juice.

A Pinterest blog post states that “people use Pinterest to plan their vacations, redecorate their homes, and create menus for holiday dinners.”

By some accounts, Pinterest is larger than Google+ and people already are strategizing about how companies can use it as a marketing vehicle.

Other ATME panelists (from left: Scott Hyden of Travelport GDS; Terry Dale of USTOA; Greg Brown of Choice Hotels; Dennis Corrigan of JetBlue, and Joe Byrne of Tourism Ireland) discussed the emergence of new travel gatekeepers, as well.

Joe Byrne, executive vice president, North America, of Tourism Ireland, said he looks as these social networks, search engines and Apple as “important shopping windows and secondly they are distributors.”

Google wants to be part of the transaction in travel, which already is a low-margin business, Byrne said.

“That distribution cost, which doesn’t exist today, is troubling from my standpoint,” said Byrne, who also expressed concerns about “more fragmentation.”

But, Scott Hyden, vice president of sales in the US and Canada for Travelport GDS, argued that travel agencies are split on Google’s travel efforts and aren’t necessarily having nightmares over the prospect.

“Some people feel, just bring it on, bring on another competitor if they can provide another qualified lead,” Hyden said.

“For every FairSearch member there is, there is another competitor who isn’t scared,” Hyden said, referring to the Google opposition group.

On other tech-related matters, Hyden recalled how Travelport partnered with Worldmate on an itinerary management service in 2010, but said “it didn’t take off as much in corporate travel as we expected.”

He said these types of services have potential for business travelers seeking to pay a bag fee and for other services while they are in transit.

“But, until we get to the place that there is real booking capability, the itinerary management stuff has settled out,” Hyden said.

Both Greg Brown, vice president, loyalty, Choice Hotels, and Byrne of Tourism Ireland spoke of the importance of geo-targeting.

“Today’s retirees are not your father’s retirees,” said Brown, adding that they are more “digitally inclined.”

“This allows you to be a lot more personalized, a lot more targeted, a lot more direct,” Brown said.

Tourism Ireland, meanwhile, is allocating more than 40% of its marketing budget in 2012 for digital marketing and has identified 15 US cities as its “honey pots,” Byrne says.

The tourism body is trying to “focus on the right people” in these select markets, Byrne says, adding, “if you live in the 16th city you don’t see us.”

Unless, of course, a Pinterest user from that 16th city pins a photo of Kilarney, Ireland, and shares it with friends.

The Australia-based site launched in December 2010 [TLabs Showcase - TraceMyTrip] with a promise of a platform where users can book trips, store photos, video and journals, and create maps.

Within its first four months, founder Ryan Adams was claiming 1.5 million people had registered to use the service after the company had secured a “small private investment” to fund the startup alongside his own personal capital.

At first glance, TraceMyTrip had a business model – using what it called a geo-located pay-per-click ad platform as well as a plan to launch a subscription fee for some services in the future.

Within its first year Adams was hoping the site would reach six million active users around the globe.

However, something appears to have gone wrong as the site is currently inactive and redirects to an affiliate link-laden holding page – with the URL apparently no longer registered and now available to buy.

Adams hasn’t tweeted since June 2011 and the official TraceMyTrip Twitter account last posted a message the month before to announce its up-time had returned.

The site was taken down shortly after the TLabs Showcase article in April last year when a number of people questioned the veracity of the claim to have 1.5 million users register for the service.

Adams claimed at the time that the site had been the victim of a hacking attempt.

It is difficult to determine when the site was eventually pulled down completely and when the URL was handed back to a domain registration service.

Strangely, none of the 1.5 million registered users took to the social media airwaves to lodge their dismay at the end of the service.

NB: All reasonable effort was made to contact Adams to discover more about the fate of TraceMyTrip, but no response was forthcoming.

Launching in early-2009, unfortunately just as the global economic crisis kicked in, Best Job in the World and its various offshoots captured the imagination of marketers for its cross-platform approach and original idea, but visitor numbers to the Australian state did not mirror the enormous praise it received in numerous quarters.

Which is a shame.

But it does beg the question as to whether so-called innovative marketing campaigns, which are said to hit potential consumers in many channels and get huge mainstream media attention, actually make a significant difference compared to “traditional” methods such as long-term efforts through PPC, SEO, above-the-line advertising and others?

A relatively recent viral from MySwitzerland, the consumer-facing website from the Swiss tourism authorities, is called Holidays Without Internet and is, once again, a prime example of a campaign which captured the attention of many blogs, marketers outside of the travel industry and consumers.

First of all, the premise of what looks initially like a promotional video is funny – two elderly farmers from the sticks visit a Swiss town on their tractor, but just when the viewer thinks the clip will focus on stereotypes of a demographic not in tune with the web, both men walk into a cafe and open up their Apple notebooks.

Immediately, the pair start talking via the chat tools on Facebook, making quips about the inevitably rather attractive waitress and if she’ll become a “friend”.

And then the clever bit starts.

The men invite the viewer to connect with them on Facebook. If the viewer agrees (the two men wait patiently for the user to click the Facebook Connect button)

Once connected, the farmers start looking around the user’s Facebook profile…

Checking how many “friends” a user has…

And browsing through the image pages…

Before uncovering the most brutal element of the whole thing – how much time the user spends on Facebook every day (tapping into the API). Which leads nicely into the point of the campaign: the user should be getting away from the internet and enjoying some piece and quiet…

Clearly the cleverest part of the entire campaign is the integration of the user’s Facebook content into the film. It’s very slick and smartly done.

But back to the question: would the user be compelled to research more on the MySwitzerland website to find out where those out-of-digital-reach places are?

Possibly – but not guaranteed. What is most likely is the user would simply send on the link to try it out to their friends or share, inevitably, on Facebook.

NB: For the record, the author does NOT spend 2.67 hours a day on Facebook – just leaves the window open to monitor the Tnooz Fan Page

NB2: MySwitzerland was showcased at the ENTER2012 conference in Helsingborg, Sweden.

The quirky promotion is being run over five weeks on the brand’s Facebook pages for the UK, France, Spain and Italy and invites users to take part in a Turn The World Around Game and explain why they want to visit the destination.

The initiative is part of a wider TTWA campaign with a second phase to be unveiled in the spring focusing on tourism facts and figures.

According to Bob Samii, head of social media and SEO for eDreams parent Odigeo, eDreams has spent the past year building up its social media team and presence and now has a five-strong team dedicated to social channels.

“Social media is a powerful communication tool and there are so many statistics and facts related to tourism that we thought we could try and create some awareness around those facts. There are some great locations around the world but for whatever reason they are not very commercialised so we want to see if we can create a buzz around them.”

The company is also using Twitter and YouTube to support the campaign.

Here’s a clip:

The report is from research organisation ChildWise and looks at technology in the lives of children aged between five and 16.

The past year has seen a surge of children with their own internet-enabled mobile phone with 61% saying they have one and especially those aged 11 and over where the figure rises to 77%.

The mobile phone has now become the item they can least live without according to 30% followed by computers 23%, games consoles 17% and television 15%.

Children are spending more than an 90 minutes a day using their mobile phone for activities other than calls with 52% using them before they go to school and 45% using them in bed at night.

Most youngsters, 58%, can now access the internet in the privacy of their rooms and 74% have their own laptop or PC although the ChildWise Monitor demonstrates the trend towards portability with 61% having a laptop, 11% a tablet and 26% a PC.

More than half of all children who access the internet had visited Facebook in the previous week and the website emerged as favourite for a quarter of children compared with YouTube for 12% and 5% who say they like Moshi Monsters best.

Of those accessing Facebook, 39% were under 13 years of age.

Kids are most likely to use media after school with 60% using the internet then, 59% are listening to music, 47% using their mobile phone, 47% watching the TV and 46% using a game console.

On average they are engaging in more than three of the above activities at this time of day.

Surprisingly, given the choice children still prefer to communicate face-to-face with 53% saying it is their top communication channel for talking about something serious and 43% prefer face-to-face for a private chat versus 13% who say phone and 11% who say text.

The research was carried out by interviewing 2770 children aged 5-16 in 108 schools across the UK.

The 214-page study, Distribution Channel Analysis: A Guide for Hotels, warns that third-party “gatekeepers” such as Google, Facebook and Apple, will expand their influence as “preferred points of entry” when consumers search for hotels and make reservations.

“… It is plausible that upwards of half of the hotel business could ultimately pass through third parties before being delivered to a hotel or brand …” according to the study, which is billed as a special report from the American Hotel & Lodging Association and STR (formerly known as Smith Travel Research).

The study, published by the HSMAI Foundation, was written by Cindy Estis Green and Mark Lomanno. It is geared toward the US market, although many of the interview subjects have global operations.

The study estimates that US hoteliers paid $2.7 billion in online travel agency commissions in 2010, with another $1.3 billion going to traditional travel agencies through global distribution system bookings.

“… The prospect of paying double these costs to a widening array of third-party intermediaries within 3 to 5 years may be shocking, but it is not unrealistic,” the study says.

And, referring to “this emerging new network” of gatekeepers, the authors argue that US hoteliers may end up paying them 10% to 20% of revenue in distribution costs.

The big intermediary brands are coming, and as the study states:

New players, such as Facebook, already in a relationship with Microsoft (active in travel search with Bing), and Apple, possibly in partnership with Kayak (or other meta-search sites, like Room Key, with access to a robust travel inventory), are dabbling in travel and can gain traction quickly due to deep pockets and a high level of consumer adoption. Likewise, large consumer sites like Amazon, eBay or other consumer-savvy retailers as well as media companies who need to expand their traditional reader base like USA Today or The New York Times may well get in the game. It is not clear which business models they will offer and what kind of control a hotel may have to gain visibility and participate cost effectively.

The study further contends that channel vendors “are unlikely to bring meaningful incremental demand into any US marketplace in the near term.”

And the primary source of new hotel demand in the US come from an influx in visitors from India, China and other international markets, the study says.

And, while major hotel brands are expanding in markets such as China and India, “third parties with marketing savvy and substantial budgets” are focusing on tapping into their inbound potential, the study says.

And this, the study suggests, will further entrench intermediaries as “crucial players in the consumer hotel selection process.”

And, speaking of demand generation, the study raises questions about the billboard effect, which is the theory that a brand’s presence on OTA sites such as Expedia creates incremental demand for the hotel’s own website.

The billboard effect theory was most prominently espoused in 2009 and 2011 studies by the Cornell Center for Hospitality Research.

But, the AH&LA and STR study faults the Cornell research for failing to prove cause and effect between a brand’s presence on Expedia.com and increased bookings on brand.com. The AH&LA and STR study notes:

The more comprehensive April 2011 study of 1,720 hotel bookings does not give any credit to the other seven to eight travel websites visited by consumers in the run-up to each booking, nor does it evaluate email, offline advertising, banner ads or any other commonly used promotional vehicles, each of which may create the effect of an added ‘billboard’ on a travel shopper’s path.

No one doubts, however, the current clout of the OTAs, especially during recessionary periods. The AH&LA and STR study estimates that OTAs accounted for 11% of room nights and 7.7% of US hotel revenue in 2010.

So, with hotels’ frenemies at the OTAs still forces to be reckoned with, and with the likes of Facebook, Apple, Google and other gatekeepers fast-emerging on the scene, what is a hotel to do?

The study offers several strategies for hotel managers or owners — none of which on the surface sound promising as a means of stemming the tide.

Among the recommendations:

• Manage the hotel’s most beneficial channel mix;

• Manage your channel mix against the competition, and compare channels in terms of shifting share, their fees and how they encourage consumer engagement;

• Invest in sustainable channels which enhance customer retention;

• Conduct systematic channel audits to ensure they are reaching the customers that they are supposed to be targeting.

• And, safeguard your pricing, brand and inventory, and “price smart.”

The luxury operator, which has more than 5,000 followers on Twitter – up from 3,031 a year ago and 14,459 likes on Facebook – 5,340 in December 2010, has been using  the social channels to gauge opinion for some time.

The operator asked fans questions such as ‘did you go on holiday with Kuoni this year (2011)? Where did you go and what’s next on your wish list?’

Feedback was in line with overall trends with the Maldives and Thailand taking the top two spots for holidays taken in 2011 as well as the top positions on the 2012 wishlist.

The operator also posted questions to help it compile other sections of the report as well as future trends with respondents predicting a move from less expensive holidays with short-haul and particularly Greece tipped.

Earlier this week Kuoni announced plans to maximise digital channels this year through the use of augmented reality via Aurasma in print advertising and dynamic message creation in online display ads.

The operator says moves are part of strategy to create a multi-channel experience and it has also launched a Facebook competition asking users to post their ideas for a perfect holiday.

Other travel companies, including Saga Travel and the Mexico Tourism Board are also using the Aurasma application.

The idea is to post your travel dreams and experiences to your Timelines using these Facebook apps and to share them with your Facebook Friends.

In addition to travel, Facebook also gave users the ability to add Facebook apps for music, news, giving, food, shopping and fashion, fitness and entertainment to their Timelines, which is Facebook’s new user profile format.

The idea, of course, is to build traction for Facebook through apps from some high-profile brands and to let them, in turn, be more social and market themselves further on the social network.

Facebook users can add apps here.

For example, you can add the Where I’ve Been app to your Facebook Timeline and create a map pinpointing the cities you’ve visited in France or those on your bucket list. You can then post your Where I’ve Been map to your Facebook Timeline and have your friends comment or make suggestions.

Facebook notes in a blog post that you can do similar things with the TripAdvisor and Gogobot Facebook apps, and you can also record your condo rental or room rental activities using the Airbnb Facebook app.

With Wipolo’s Facebook app, you can organize your travel itineraries and share them with friends and associates.

Facebook apps aren’t as ubiquitous as iPhone apps, but maybe one day they will get there.

And now with Siri included as part of the latest Apple iPhone, some applications are emerging, including a system developed by social travel booking startup Bonvoy.

In this clip, Bonvoy founder and CEO Mujteba Naqvi demonstrates how the system works, including integration into the existing Bonvoy search and booking system.

The idea mirrors in part the winning entry to THack London in February 2011, developed by SITA Lab, using voice recognition on a Android mobile device.

In this final article we’re going to look at the big picture and go through some high-level marketing trends we saw over the past year.

International marketing became very important

With different countries and economies recovering at different speeds, a global communications strategy helped maximize revenues and reach new markets. This is obvious for large, multinational hotel brands, but we saw that even small independent hotels can do something similar.

For example, Isabelle Lozano at the Apostrophe Hotel in Paris creates unique versions of their site in French and English to reach different audiences:

“We noticed that there’s a slight difference between the English part of the website and the French part. The French part has more articles and talks more about things that are less-known than in the English part. We’ve realized that the French customers were really reading alot of our posts.

“After arriving at the hotel, after their booking, they would say: ‘I’m going to go see this exhibition that I saw on the website.’ The English part follows the same idea, but talks more about the hotel itself, because that’s what English clients want to learn about, we’ve realized.

“At first we were just translating, but we asked customers what they thought, and we found out that our English and French customers wanted different things. English and Americans were saying: ‘That’s too much information; we just want to learn more about the hotel.’

“I’m not working only for my own pleasure; my main aim is to please customers, so I keep asking them what they think.

For executives at travel companies that oversee multiple properties in multiple locations around the world, understanding specific cultural travel trends – like this piece from New World Hotels – can be very useful.

I talked about the trend towards image-based social networks in part one of this series, but it’s interesting to note here that a focus on images in your marketing not only taps into a hot trend – what Robert Scoble calls “the currency of Facebook” – but it transcends language barriers to tell your story to potential visitors from around the world.

We saw this with the unveiling of the Four Seasons’ new $18 million website – the pictures do the selling:

Increasing blur of “online” and “offline” worlds

This is increasingly happening with mobile technologies such as augmented reality. Yelp and other review sites launched mobile applications that display a live overview of reviews:

Google Googles identifies things you see on the go, and Amazon introduced its Flow app to help you discover products around you – and buy them – using image recognition.

But beyond these technologies, the basic truth is that real life happens offline. It seems the best marketing campaigns understood this – such as the Swiss village that became a worldwide hit after printing out profile photos of all their Facebook fans.

That’s why I expect to see more companies trying to bridge the gap when it comes to online-offline activity:

[NB: Trendwatching has an interesting report on the OFF-ON trend that you may want to explore in more detail]

Real-world events and “Advertainment” becomes critical for branding

Online and offline are more than just blending – offline experiences and promotions are increasingly critical for generating online buzz. Attention is the most valuable commodity today, and companies are increasingly trying to combine entertainment, media, and advertising to raise awareness.

Fast Company recently profiled this trend in its feature, Co.Create Nation: The worlds of Silicon Valley, Hollywood, and Madison Avenue have blurred, and a new realm of business has emerged.

“Once upon a time, entertainment and advertising were two separate lands. Each land was dynamic and cool, in its own way, but their denizens rarely commingled.… And then the winds of innovation blew through. Everything has changed.… The barriers between these businesses [are falling] away…”

Hewlett-Packard launched its Music Influencer program last year as a way to spread the word about HP products through traditional blogs and giveaways. Building on the success they acheived there, the company expanded to real-life parties to engage some of the web’s most influential people.

“We measured success by who we were able to get into the room, the amount of content generated (about 330 pieces) and the reach of that content.”

In hospitality and travel, this becomes even more natural. People like James Kinney have been doing this for a while in New York and beyond through music and events:

“Hotels have an extraordinary opportunity to become mavens of culture, which increases their brand impressions and their bottom line. In the case of the Forty Four Music Series that we have at the Royalton… we’ve had Grammy Award nominees, Grammy Award winners – literally the best in New York City – play right in the lobby of the Royalton and people absolutely have that WOW factor, like: ‘Wow, I never expected this to be here.’

“We’ve seen an increase in sales and in their social media and digital assets as well, because the artists are tweeting about the property.”

“Content is key, and there’s this big thing around social media where people say: ‘Oh, if I tweet that you get 25 percent off of your next drink,’ then I’m going to have a herd of people coming over to my hotel.

“As you and I know, that’s not the case. Whether you’re doing music or a movie screening or live dancers or whatever you’re doing, the content itself is how you communicate the property’s brand.

“We have so many artists that are on the verge and that are famous coming to the property; when they’re tweeting and they’re taking pictures — ‘Oh, we’re at Royalton NYC at Morgan’s Hotel’, we’ve automatically increased their content strategy and their social currency and, specifically, their digital assets; all these things are very real in the digital world that we live in. But saying that you have a special on pancakes just doesn’t work anymore.”

Location-based services grew up

…and they became an important part of how hospitality and travel companies encouraged loyalty, discovery, and service. Again, this is right in the center of all that’s hot in marketing today – social/mobile/local – and it helps hotels and travel companies bridge the online-offline gap.

With the sale of Gowalla to Facebook, Foursquare has become the king in the space and matured beyond checkins to present expanded opportunities for advertisers and a very solid business case. Radar makes it easy to find what’s cool around you. Companies can create curated experiences with lists.

For example, The Ritz-Carlton introduced World Concierge on Foursquare as a way to extend their brand to a mobile audience. The project was a simple concept: taking internal knowledge and making available it outside four walls of hotels.

The team collected the knowledge and the tips from concierges at each property, and collected it all into central account.

The company got the whole team to contribute through close collaboration between the agency, brand, and staff at each property. There are 76 Ritz-Carlton locations around the world – representing a huge infrastructure of knowledge – so it was just a matter of collecting this and putting it online.

Travelers have two ways to access this information. The first is to follow The Ritz-Carlton on Foursquare, where you can see every new tip that is published. The other way is through traditional check ins.

The program was designed to not be exclusively about The Ritz-Carlton, and you don’t have to be a guest to engage with the brand. For example, if you are at the Red Square in Moscow, you might see tip or something special about the neighborhood. Promotional messages are not the priority.

Using location-based services and other similar technologies are a powerful way to create a curated brand experience. Which is crucial, because…

Branding became paramount

As time-starved consumers, we crave direction – and brands often provide this by making buying choices easier. Today, we’re seeing social media increasingly used to define and shape the way successful brands are built.

Product design – and in the case of hospitality, experience design – is an integral ingredient in branding. We’re seeing hotel and travel companies increasingly use customer feedback to share this design process – and then increase the amount of buzz around these great designs.

CitizenM is a powerful example of this in the hotel industry. They aim to provide a new type of hotel experience for a new type of traveler: guests that may not want to stay in their rooms for the entire duration of their stay.

“Our guests just want a good bed, a good shower, and then they spend most of their time out in the city or in our hotels’ social spaces,” says chief operating officer Michael Levie. An innovative building system (hotels are constructed from pre-fabricated modules) in offsite unit factories allows the company to consistently maintain high quality standards while accelerating the building process.

The story of how their hotels are built is remarkable, and the impact of design on their brand, reputation, and overall success is undeniable. Among other awards, citizenM was voted The Trendiest Hotel in the World by TripAdvisor two years in a row – in 2010 and 2011.

Systems for constant improvement

The link between design, branding, and the social web takes place when online feedback is used to guide the design process.

Many of the strongest brands were created through more than just big-picture brainstorming – it is also the result of daily, consistent operational improvement. Constantly refining and tweaking the way service is delivered leads to remarkable experiences – which, as I mentioned – is how the best brands are built today.

Until recently, hotel managers have relied upon some combination of internal guest satisfaction surveys, mystery shopping and intuition to understand sentiment and improve service.

It took a herculean effort to collect these, and since each of these feedback channels is somewhat self-selecting, there are significant structural flaws that can prevent gathering an accurate understanding of satisfaction.

The social web changed that. Today, online travel agencies, review sites and social media platforms have provided the potential holy grail of customer insight.

Since customers now share unsolicited feedback everywhere and anywhere they are, the challenge is now how to collect all of the relevant conversations, separate the signal from the noise, and create insight for action to improve guest satisfaction levels.

Insight for action is key. Your brand is defined with every single interaction each of your employees have. This makes intentional experience design and excellence in service delivery critical parts of this brand building process.

Create that set of tools and operational processes so you can continually incorporate customer suggestions into your product improvement process, and along the way, build a brand that sets you apart from the competition.

The importance of branding is clear once we see how it affects everything social media: the type and format of content you publish, the tone of that content, and the platforms you will distribute it on. In fact, branding activities touch multiple departments:

• Strategy: How will you define the message in a way that instantly communicates what your brand stands for?
• Marketing: How will you distribute this message?
• Operations: How will you deliver on that promise?
• Service and Reputation Management: How will you defend and stay true to that message?

Because the social web plays a key role in each of these activities, it has become the biggest brand-building opportunity the travel industry has had in decades.

Summing up

In this series of articles, we’ve examined some of the most interesting and engaging opportunities that exist on the social web.

What are you doing to take advantage of this opportunity?

John M Richardson Jr:

“When it comes to the future, there are three kinds of people: those who let it happen, those who make it happen, and those who wonder what happened.”

You don’t have to foresee the future. You have to create it. Go make something happen.

NB: Email me if I can help you or tweet @HmarketingHelp.

NB2: Image via Shutterstock.

According to Eezeer, compiler of the monthly report, AirAsia was the most popular airline in December 2011, capturing just over 17,000 tweets mentioning the brand, followed by American Airlines (16,000) and EasyJet (13,500).

The previous top three airlines were Delta, AirAsia and SouthWest.

The volume of tweets also dropped over the same period, with AirAsia throwing out 4,200, Iberia (3,500) and Delta (3,500) in second and third place respectively.

NB: Other airlines on Twitter reports here.

In this article, we’ll be looking specifically at what happened with reviews and customer-created content.

The rise of the review economy

Over the past year, we saw insights from customer reviews increasingly used for more than just reputation management and PR. It was used in all departments of hospitality and travel companies: sales, marketing, operations, quality, revenue, and distribution.

This has led to the emergence of what I call “The Review Economy”, an environment where customer feedback plays a central role in all areas of a business.

This effect is partly due to the rapid diversification of customer-created review formats, and also the creation of better analytics that can separate the signal from the noise and reveal insight for action.

In terms of review validity, we’re seeing a shift away from anonymous review sites and toward company-gathered feedback: reviews verified with bookings.

This December, Expedia announced its new Verified Reviews program, which only includes feedback from guests that stayed at a property (review requests are sent in the booking followup email).

“We like to call it the new source of truth, internally,” said John Kim, Expedia’s senior vice president of global products, in a USAToday interview. “People love the idea that our reviews are verified so you can’t randomly leave a review.”

Hotel companies are joining this trend as well. In October, Starwood introduced its own rating and reviews program.

Members of the Starwood Preferred Guest program can review the hotels they have stayed at over the past 18 months – if they provide their loyalty program credentials or the reservation confirmation number for their stay.

Un-edited reviews will be posted to the hotel’s website after at least five reviews have been collected. Starwood executives are doing this to encourage guests to engage with the company more and book more repeat stays.

Many of the hotel marketing professionals I’ve spoken with say it’s highly likely other hospitality companies will follow suit and begin collect their own guest reviews. This, and the fact that more reviews are validated by bookings, provides increased assurance to executives that this feedback can be trusted for making management decisions.

But quality data without the right tools to extract meaning from it is useless. Review collection and analysis technology has become much more sophisticated over the past year, and now we’re seeing examples of hotels doing very interesting things with this.

For example, Cristina Mulet and her team at Sol Melia Hotels do a great job of taking insights from their customers on the social web and using them for product improvement, quality management, and revenue optimization.

Diego Sartori and his team at CitizenM Hotels do something similar, taking online review feedback into consideration for each new property they open. And on the individual property level, Ricardo Samaan at Olivia Plaza used this approach to improve the quality of their breakfast.

In order to use customer feedback to consistently improve product quality and business performance, semantic analysis of online reviews is very helpful to identify major issues that need to be resolved.

Specific, department-level reporting for each manager is critical, as is a workflow system to manage the whole product improvement process. It requires a culture of using guest feedback to guide improvement. Co-creating with customers helps hotel and travel brands build loyalty and create a product that better fits market needs.

Semantic technologies made sentiment analysis a lot smarter

Valyn Perini wrote about the opportunities semantic technology will provide consumers in her Tnooz article this week, but there is also a powerful opportunity for using semantic analysis to understand sentiment from online customer feedback (as Martin Soler and I wrote about back in September 2011).

It’s providing travel executives with valuable insight in how to improve both their business operations and marketing communications, by instantly revealing exactly what guests like and don’t like about the business.

Here’s an example semantic analysis report from a popular New York City hotel:

As you can see, quality, location, views, and the bar are all parts of this hotels’ experience that guests talk about positively. These elements should be present in all marketing communications and mentioned over and over again in the advertising copy.

Meanwhile, we can see that price is something that comes up as negative. This typically happens when the hotel is giving the impression of having great value, but guests do not perceive it that way.

This hotel could increase the effectiveness of their communications by focusing on promoting these elements guests appreciate most, and guide the customer perception of the hotel before the booking.

Promoting these attributes of the hotel through advertising will likely lead to an even better online reputation, since it will help attract guests that appreciate what the business does best.

Short-form and mobile-based reviews dramatically increased in popularity

While written reviews began as the standard in travel planning websites, the rapid rise of social networking and mobile communications has lead to short-format and mobile reviews becoming increasingly important.

I’m increasingly finding myself hesitant to write a long text review of a hotel or restaurant – I simply don’t have time.

But it is very easy to send out a tweet or check-in on Foursquare to leave a tip for my network there while I’m waiting for something. I suspect I’m not alone.

The quickly growing popularity of mobile-based social networking combined with time-starved travelers makes it likely to be even more important in the year ahead.

For companies using the social web for service or reputation management, it’s critical to focus on these types of feedback. And given the real-time nature of the web, response time is critical.

But when looking at all of the tweets and social networking content in aggregate, hotel executives are also extracting valuable operational and marketing insight.

While it’s clear these individual pieces of feedback play an important role in customer service and reputation management, all this data together provides a rich source of business, market, and customer intelligence.

Reviews and social played a bigger role in search visibility

Generating business from the web is often very dependent on how easy your business is to find. Do you appear on the radar of travelers planning a trip to your destination?

For many consumers, search engines are the first stop on this travel planning process. Google research found that on average, every travel purchase is preceded by 2.5 hours of research time and dozens of unique queries.

This has been true for a while. What’s new is that now social activities affect search rankings and search content.

Building visibility and authority in social networks provides a benefit beyond that site…and into search results pages.

While many in the search marketing industry have guessed this for some time, last year we clearly saw social media affecting search engine results pages.

Bing integrated Facebook data as a way to personalize search results based on someone’s social network – such as links or content that friends have Liked. When a person’s friends have not shared any content related to a search, Bing will prioritize content that is popular with the Facebook community at large.

And while Google has been experimenting with social search for quite some time, this week it introduced a whole new approach to including social content – initially from Google Plus – in results pages.

Danny Sullivan of SearchEngineLand called this the “most radical transformation ever” of the Google algorithm in his detailed overview of the changes. On TechCrunch, Jason Kincaid explained why he thinks there are bigger changes afoot:

“This may not sound like a huge deal, but it’s foreshadowing a bigger change to come: Google is going to increasingly become a search engine for all of your stuff….

“The key, [product director Jack Menzel] says, is that Google is getting a lot better at figuring out when to incorporate this socially relevant data. They’re focusing on showing content not simply because your friend shared it — but because it might actually be helpful.”

So both search positioning formulas and the very content showing up in those search results pages is changing based on activity in the social web.

Why exactly is search engine visibility important?

As mentioned above, web search plays a central role in the travel planning and purchase process. Each of these searches is an opportunity to introduce your brand….if people see your website. A few statistics from Hubspot to remember about the importance of ranking well in search results pages:

• The top 3 results get 79% of the total clicks
• Only 3% of searchers go beyond the first page of results pages

Clearly, your placement in search results plays a disproportionate role in website traffic they will receive. If your websites are not near the top of page one of a search results page, the website is practically invisible to potential guests.

The key takeaway here is to invest in building your social media presence and cultivating as many online customer reviews as you can to increase your ranking and drive more website traffic.

Encourage customers to review you on Google Places and any other review websites they participate in. Also, make it easy for people to share content about your hotels on the social web.

From Google Plus to Pinterest, people are looking for material to post – so make this easy for them.

In the next and final part of this series, we’ll look at international marketing, location-based services, branding, and other big-picture ideas.

NB: Image via Shutterstock.