Hotel Blogs - When Hotel Marketing gets Social

The Milestone Hotel embraces Web 2.0

I am always looking for typical examples of how hotels have integrated web 2.0 tools in their B2C websites to disclose a bit more about what their hotel is a about.

The luxury hotel in London (a real 5 stars hotel!) The Milestone Hotel has added RSS feeds on its press section in order to get updates from the hotel and the hotel group Red Carnation. The site also explains very simply how to use RSS what is it for. Another step forward web 2.0 is the inclusion of podcasts with interviews from the general manager, the Food & Beverages manager or the hotel's butler. Quality of the podcasts is really good and the timing not too short and not too long. You could see that this hotel has really thought this through.

Did I tell you that the Milestone has one of the most exquisite tea time brunch in the city. in the winter, I enjoy spending a couple of hours with friends by the chimney on a Sunday afternoon in their library room.

Technorati Tags: milestones hotel, red carnation, travel 2.0, web 2.0, podcasts

Tourism Podcasts finally available...

The School of Hospitality Management and Tourism, part of The Dublin Institute of Technology has launched a serie of Podcasts on tourism. #1 is looking at trends in tourism and podcast #2 is an interview of Ciaran Lally, MD of Ebookers UK & Ireland. I will listened to them tomorrow on the train.

Day 1 at the Corporate Podcasting Summit...

That first day at the Corporate Podcasting Summit was quite intense in terms of content to swallow and digest. But overall, I thought the day went very well with good quality speakers and some interesting interactivity between speakers and the audience.

I would be lying if I have fully understood every presentation and panelists. There were 13 sessions of approximately 30 mins (questions included) and it's true at some point I was swathing off. Probably because I was already trying to see how could we adopt podcasting in the travel and hospitality industries. I am also more and more convinced about the usability of podcasting from a B2B perspective. I was quite hooked to the study case presented by Pascal Roobrouck from Alcatel-Lucent. They've produced a podcast aimed at their employees in Antwerp and is now available in English to all employees of the company. The preparation and the planning which he went into to make a podcast were beyond what I thought. It takes them on average about 4.8 hours to make a podcast (interview, editing,  planning, tagging, RSS, uploading all included).

The first session in the morning was brought by Tom Webster from Edison Media Research which was full of statistics about the awareness of the Podcasting and who is the audience listening to podcasts. I was quite surprised by the age spread of the sample who listened to podcasts.

12 - 17 years  18%
18 - 24 years  11%
25 - 34 years  21%
35 - 44 years  22%
45 - 54 years  16%
+ 55 years      18%

Another interesting presentation was given by Guillaume du Gardier from Edelman who shared with us 3 study cases of podcasting. One of them was the Accor one which I have mentioned before here and here.
I very much liked his top 10 obstacles to online tools like podcasting:

1/ Inadequate resources

2/ Disconnected Employees

3/ Resistance to change (I am always scared of that one)

4/ Desire to control communication / fear of the unknown

5/ Not convinced of the benefits (but please provide me with a business case...)

6/ Perceived lack of IT capabilities

7/ Resistant culture

8/ Senior Management won't allow it

9/ Legal/Governance/Regulations issues (the biggest headache, trust me!)

10/ Would require too much training

I am looking forward to the 2nd day already!

Technorati Tags: corporate podcasting summit, cpslondon

The International Corporate Podcasting Summit coming soon...

Just to let you that I will be attending the Corporate Podcasting Summit Europe in London on the 19th and 20th March. If you also plan to be there, let me know and we could maybe meet...

I am quite excited to attend this event as this new form of media is really taking off.

I think Podcasting could be a great opportunity for the online hospitality industry.

If I have more time in my hands, I would be quite keen to launch a podcast with interviews, a weekly personal view of what has been happening in the hotel industry, hotel visits...

As I mentionned before, Accor gave it a go recently in France to share with the young audience what is like to work for hotels. Jumeirah has also produced some videopodcast to present their hotels.

Technorati Tags: accor, podcasting, corporate podcasting summit, london, jumeirah, hotels, hotel

A hotel chain is launching its podcast...

The Dubai luxury hotel chain Jumeirah has launched its podcast Jcast. 4 episodes are currently available and show videos about the brand, the hotels...It's a good start for a hotel chain willing to adopt Web 2.0 technology but there are in my opinion some mistakes:

- the video is really slow to load
- it's open up another window in your browser
- the video is small (you can't read the text)
- it only works with Quicktime
- you can't leave any comments
- you can't download the video unless you have iTunes
- there is no publishing date

My advice would be to leave your customer read the video in the same window and use videos sharing platform like YouTube in order to get more traffic and also get different screen formats.

Technorati Tags: hotel podcast, jumeirah, hotels, hotel

TV travel channels are attractive but...

This morning, I was watching the TV travel channel called SkyTravel. It was my first time I have to admit. The program was about different packages in the Canaries or cruises in Western Europe. The way they present packages to the audience are quite well done. Nothing is left apart…”you have this for your kids, you have that for you…” with beautiful sunny weather all along and an attractive presenter who tells you this will be your next perfect holiday this summer. A 7 nights this summer in Ibiza in a apartment with self-catering (4 people min) starts around 199£ per person with flights from Gatwick Airport. No wonder now why so many people in UK are booking their holidays from Teletext or TV travel channels like Sky Travel (I still can't work out why there is a 2% Credit Card charge). The other reasons are probably due to an extensive explanation about the product and videos of the place, which is something still not there on the Internet.

We start to see travel podcasting coming from individuals which gives other consumers some tips about their holidays. We also have audio destination guides available on iTunes. This is something that TV cannot provide…real testimonials without director’s cut!

Captain Cy is one of the few examples of what I have seen so far on iTunes. He is an airline captain who has spent 35 years of travelling the world. Each podcast is about 30 minutes long. Recently, Captain Cy has talked about Costa Rica, Paris, Madrid or Boston.

Technorati Tags: travel, skytravel, podcasting, tv