The Travel PR Blog

In his post about new PR practices, Robert Scoble says the new PR is about “creating visually-rich experiences”. I completely agree.
Recently some clients hosted a welcome party for the Singing Children of Africa who were touring Scotland to raise funds for their school and orphanage in Kenya.
We talked to the media and as a result [...]

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We just returned from a short family break at the Isle of Eriska. Stunning: weather, facilities, service. This is one of those places which constantly evolves (new spa suites, water garden, statuary) while retaining its essential character.
That character comes across in spades in the Isle of Eriska blog. I was glad to hear Beppo’s updates [...]

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I find plenty of cynicism in the hotel business about the value of blogs in their online marketing. That is why it is encouraging to read recent comments from Scott Allison, a Marriott VP, on the subject of Bill Marriott’s blog.
As reported on the Idea Hatching, Allison considers his boss’s blog to be very successful.

Even [...]

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Hotel chain City Inn has decided to put a brand new iMac in every room in its London and Manchester hotels. [From UK hotel chain adds iMacs to the list of in-room amenities]

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It is more than two and a half years since I helped the Isle of Eriska set up a blog (c’mon Beppo, time for a blog make-over) but it still provides a breath of fresh air among my daily reads.The hotel may be one of the smartest and most expensive in Scotland but it has [...]

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Who pulls out the Rants & Raves on the Trip Advisor front page and will they take a bung to add or remove your hotel? That was my first thought when I saw the new-look site. Maybe these highlighted quotes have been there all along but now the front page has been de-cluttered, there’s no [...]

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I wonder how many hotel PR’s would be relaxed about the blogosphere if they thought staff were writing about their guests’ filthy habits on a near-daily basis.

Hotel Chick (via the VacantReady hotel industry blog) does this and more in a forthright blog, which pulls back the covers on - no, you probably don’t want [...]

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I am very confused. Hotel Marketing covers a new study of the travel space by Compete, which summarises lessons to be learned from the way three travel brands respond to or integrate consumer generated content. There’s good stuff here such as:
Sheraton Hotels - Integration into eCommerce Platform: In late 2006, Sheraton transformed its website [...]

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Hotels of the world, two bits of advice for distributing late deals: 1) publish an RSS feed, 2) create a widget. No, let’s make that three bits of advice: 3) make sure the deals are worth talking about in the first place.
A new service from Widgetbox makes the business of creating widgets ludicrously easy. Just [...]

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Of course I can’t just rely on Pixsy as a gateway to the travel pages. For one thing it doesn’t include content from the Guardian. And as Antony Mayfield points out today, they’ve just redesigned the site, both for clarity and to include more user content.
It’s certainly bigger and brighter but then so are the [...]

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Thanks to everybody who made my APRO talk such a great experience - for me anyway. I loved the way so many people took copious notes. Or maybe they were just doodling.
As usual the TripAdvisor question popped up: as in “what do we do about TripAdvisor?” I’d love a pound for every time I get [...]

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The latest ABTN newsletter has a piece about the Hoxton Hotel. It has garnered some online buzz but given its target market, I think it could be trying harder to connect with bloggers and web commentators.
My eye was caught by this quote from the GM half way down:
And while The Hoxton doesn’t yet have [...]

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