Hotel Blogs - Let's talk about hotels

Blog Watch #4

It's time that we focus our energy again to promote newly discovered blogs that we have found on the blogosphere related to the hotel industry.

This week, we've chosen to promote the blog written by Fabrice Burtin who lives in Bangkok and shares his thoughts and ideas around the hospitality industry. After spending several years at Accor Asia in various marketing roles, Fabrice is now Commercial Director at the branding and strategy agency Keen.

His latest posts were covering topics like Should Internet be free in hotels? or "Are Management Contracts hotel brand's worst enemies?"

You can follow Fabrice on his Twitter account as well @fabriceburtin

Blog Watch #3 - Conferma

It's time that we focus our energy again to promote newly discovered blogs that we have found on the blogosphere related to the hotel industry.

This week, we've chosen to promote a blog called Confermation written by CEO of Conferma Simon Barker. Conferma is a technology company who works with TMCs and HBAs to provide hotel content and billback solutions to the corporate travel world. Simon can cover on his blog different areas like the importance of accurate traveler information from a TMC point of view (see the recent situation due the volcano in Iceland) or travel hotel bills or hotel billback. This blog deserves more comments that it currently  have. Come on business travelers, TMCs, HBAs, get in there and talk.

TIG Global explains in videos

You know how much passionate I am when it comes to online videos for the Hospitality industry.

Well, I am glad the hotel marketing company TIG Global, recently acquired in January 2010 by Micros, has launched quick videos tips called "Ask the Expert" where you can hear staff from TIG Global explaining why you should bid on your brand terms on search engines or is it possible to remove bad reviews from user generated content sites or why does it take so long to move rankings through SEO.

I really like this idea and looking at the views on YouTube, it looks like these quick video tips have attracted some decent audience.

Have a look at their blog which gives a mine of information about what you should do with Social Media and different tips on Internet marketing techniques you should adopt to raise the bar if you want to attract more looks and books onto your hotel website.

Blog Watch #2 - Hotel Marketing Strategies Blog

It's time that we focus our energy again to promote newly discovered blogs that we have found on the blogosphere related to the hotel industry.

This week, we've chosen to promote the Hotel Marketing Strategies Blog written by Josiah Mackenzie who writes about key internet marketing tactics to promote your hotel effectively. His site also includes free ebooks available for you to read like "How to promote your hotel with blogs". You can clearly read that Josiah is passionate about the hotel industry and web 2.0. It's great to see that I am not the only one!

Follow also his Twitter account.

Blog Watch #1 - The Hotel Consultant

It's time that we focus our energy again to promote newly discovered blogs that we have found on the blogosphere related to the hotel industry.

So let's start with The Hotel Consultant written by Robert Smith, a former hotel general manager who set up his own hotel consultancy and management services company called Complete Hotel Services.

Robert has started his blog in August 2009 and have since coverered different topics like how to improve hotel websites or the usage of social media with hotels.

More recently, Robert has highlighted how hoteliers can benefit from better SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and also how he currently reviews GDS connectivity and PMS company for his hotel clients.

Also check out his Twitter account

Another Hotel blogs ranking

Thanks to Guido, I have found that this blog features quite highly on another hotel blogs ranking organized by Invesp Consulting.

The other thing I learn is that my Page Rank (named after Google founder Larry Page) is 5. Is that any good after 3 years of publishing content?

On other rankings, Hotel Blogs is compared to HotelMarketing.com or Hospitality Trends, sites that aggregates news across different sources. Not really a blog in my opinion.

USA Today launched HotelCheck-In

The famous daily American newspaper USA today (2.25M copies on average per day) has launched an online business traveler community around hotels moderated by the journalist Barbara de Lollis who has been writing on business travel for more than seven years (see her impressive biography).

The site/blog is called Hotel Check-In and integrated in the Travel section of the online version of USA Today.

You can see that Barbara already covered the story of the week, eg, Starwood lawsuit against Hilton with ex employees of Starwood involved in the launch of the new brand Denizen by Hilton. USA Today even features a guest post from Starwood CEO Fritz Van Paasschen to respond to his legal action against Hilton.

I think this initiative of inviting senior hospitality executives to blog on your site is an interesting one. And certainly it has paid off for both USA Today and Starwood with the recent news. I wonder how editors welcome other potential authors to join the conversation on Hotel Check-In. Surely, there must be a queue now from other hotel brands who wish to have their say on the blog as well.

Anyway, congratulations to Barbara and her team around this very informative site. You can also follow Barbara on Twitter at twitter.com/barbdelollis. You can also see below that Barbara is reading some good blogs out there :-)

 

Lastminute group created a social media website

I am surprised that I didn't spot that sooner. Lastminute.com created a very clear social media website on the blogging platform Blogger (owned by Google). The site aims to be a single repository of the recent press releases, pictures, widgets around the Lastminute brand activities.

You can also find RSS feeds, the latest activity on Twitter (more than 1,000 followers and 400 tweets messages), a video on YouTube embedded on the blog and also the famous blogroll.

 

TTG journalists have their own blog

Probably because their direct competition (Travelweekly, Travolution) is a step more advanced in embracing social media with different blogs, the travel media TTG (Travel Trade Gazette) has finally driven their journalists to blog about the travel industry.

I was happy to discover that Martin Ferguson has just started his own blog called Confessions of Travel Hack.

but you can also enjoy Journeys Through Travel written by Matt Parsons, TTG Business blog written by Adam Coulter (editor at TTG Business) and This Business of Travel written by Paul Revel (from TTG Business).

They've all adopted the blogging platform Wordpress, one of the best tool available today. (personally I am still loyal to Typepad even though they've changed recently their technology and I found the platform running a bit slow on my PC).

So welcome guys to this new adventure. I am sure you will enjoy this.

By the way, it reminds me that I am going to revisit the idea of selecting the 20 blogs I like and do a follow up text interview after what I have done in 2007. A lot of change has happened since then. Some blogs have died and others have seen the light. So it's time for a little update.

 

Have you heard of YoungHotelier.com ?

The great thing about blogs is that you never seem to find an exhaustive list of good blogs around the hotel industry. I have recently discovered this fantastic site YoungHotelier.com with plenty of videos and funny posts that can help the young generation to discover and maybe work for the hospitality industry.

The company has been founded by Erin O'Neill and Jitendra Jain (more info here)

The site has been running since October 2007 and I don't know how I could have missed this blog after all this time. Great content, vibrant, fresh...all ingredients that I like when I read blogs. Well done Erin and Jitendra.

 

Watch this first introduction video.