Lilo locations for conferencers
March 15, 2008
Any city which hosts conferences should take a look at Air Bed and Breakfast where like-minded (you have to hope) people provide low-cost accommodation for attendees flocking into town. No, the founders won’t really “turn the hotel industry on the head” but the idea of a friend, not a front desk will always have a market.
via Mashable.
Travel agents and the magic of AIR
March 14, 2008
The online+offline world of AIR applications has huge potential for the travel business, combining rich desktop experiences with constantly updated data. Here’s an interesting video from the Flash Blog about the creation of an AIR app designed to help American travel agents sell Disney. Apparently agents like nothing better than to whip out their scrap books whenever clients mention the Magic Kingdom. Now, Frog Design have produced an application allowing travel agents to drag and drop their Disney wonders onto a virtual scratchpad, while summoning up special offers, playing videos and assembling live quotes.
Cheesy new food site
March 14, 2008
Well, it made me laugh. There’s not an awful lot to Forkd yet, the new social recipe site (I mean, my first foray turned up a recipe for a grilled cheese sandwich of all things) but I like it. And look at this: instead of beta on the logo - it’s a feta release. Boom boom.
The other kind of search experts: TSA bloggers
March 13, 2008
After my last trip to Philadelphia I am not exactly in love with America’s Transportation Security Administration (TSA). Few people are; they have taken quite a kicking in mainstream, blogs and other media over the last few years.
They deserve credit, however, for opening at least one extra channel for travellers: Evolution of Security - the TSA’s blog, which took wings at the end of January.
It’s not a great name but at least the blog has an honest purpose: to let people know what their officials do, what they have done, what they are going to start doing and most importantly, why to all of the above.
Predictably, the comments are lively - this is as much a punch bag as a blog - but the posts themselves are well-written and the TSA blogging team, (”Hi, my name is Ethel and I’m from Wisconsin”), are doing a good job putting a human face on a much-criticised service.
via CNN
Sabre rattling from the podium
March 13, 2008
On the subject of the Tourism Innovation Day: I gave everything full marks on the feedback form except for the very dull Ben Vinod keynote at the top of the day, which was little more than a paean to his beloved Sabre.
He talked about the value of online marketing and encouraged everyone to dive in. But I felt an almost collective drop of the shoulders in his room full of mainly small tourism businesses when he told us Sabre optimises one million search keywords every day.
Thanks, there’s nothing like a little healthy competition.
Mobile travel services: from magic to mundane
March 13, 2008
Martin Cowen at Travolution covers the recent Amadeus report on the future of the hospitality industry. Mobile looms large in this and Martin’s concluding “what’s a fax” question made me think of a session covering mobile technology at the recent Tourism Innovation Day.
Exhibitors talked about the clever things they can do to and send to your customers’ phones. One for example talked about selling hotels a service which allows them to deliver vouchers for local attractions direct to guests’ mobile phones and a member of the audience gushed “just like magic.”
Well, yes and more likely no. Remember the rush to get on the internet and all the web firms which sprung up selling their “magic” door to door to people who didn’t understand the internet but thought they’d better have some of it?
I think the same is happening with mobile and the travel business and some of the mobile people had better make their money quickly and get out before it stops looking like magic.
There are almost certainly cheaper and easier services coming which hotels and tour operators will be able to set up themselves. My personal computer can already send an annotated map and events info to my mobile via bluetooth; I can also send video to my mobile via the internet. It hardly takes a leap of imagination to extend that thought to simpler mobile services for the travel business.
In another room at Tourism Innovation, VisitScotland was selling its Web in a Box product to hotels and operators. I am sure it won’t be long before we are buying easy to use Mobile Services in a Box.
This is how traffic jams start (in Japan)
March 13, 2008
This little snippet shows how something as simple as a driver pausing to check that his wife had given him the right sort of radish in his bento box that morning can cause all the other cars - aimlessly circling behind him - to create a traffic jam.
In Britain this sort of experiment is usually conducted with a single traffic cone and a workman leaning on his spade at the side of the road.
Travel coordinates: blogging across the map
March 12, 2008
“Contextualised blogging interfaces” - it doesn’t exactly trip off the tongue, does it? However there are obvious attractions for a travel company when it comes to blogging from where you are rather than where your computer thinks you are. Combine this with mapping technology and suddenly the world and his mother can follow the progress of your safari, cruise or overland trip.
That’s why I rather like this Yahoo! pipes, Google maps, down and dirty blog editor mash-up created by Tony Hirst whose system:
“effectively allows you to use a Google My Map as a “geographical blogging surface”. Each marker on the map corresponds to a separate post, or feed item. “
And handily:
“The ‘View in Google Earth’ link from the MyMap can be passed to the pipe and a valid geoRSS feed will be produced as a result.”
It’s more than worth a look. Another happy example of blogging breaking free from the blog.