Hotel Blogs - When Hotel Marketing gets Social

Amadeus Hotel Roundtable 2011 (video) part.1

Back in June, I was invited to participate in the Amadeus Hotel roundtable organised by Simon Taylor who heads up Product initiatives for hotel distribution in the UK. The panel was very interesting with executives from Premier Inn, HBAA, The Goring Hotel, Conferma, NetTrans, Great Hotels of the World, Total Revenue Solutions and of course Amadeus IT.

This is the first part of our discussion: enjoy and sit back as it is one hour long!

Ask the Hotelier with Charles Yap from IHG (video) - part.2

Ask the Hotelier is a new series of interviews that I am launching on HotelBlogs. You probably get the idea with the title. This section will be about spending conversations on videos with hoteliers. We will cover topics like branding, social media, reputation, technology and so on.

This week I am spending some time discussing Social Media with Charles Yap, Social Media and Global Brand Communication Director at IHG (Intercontinental Hotels Group), the largest hotel group in the world with brands like Holiday Inn, Intercontinental, Indigo, Holiday Inn Express and more. Charles Yap is addicted to Twitter and has grown a good solid base of followers on @hotelPRguy.

Ask the Hotelier with Charles Yap from IHG (video)

Ask the Hotelier is a new series of interviews that I am launching on HotelBlogs. You probably get the idea with the title. This section will be about spending conversations on videos with hoteliers. We will cover topics like branding, social media, reputation, technology and so on.

This week I am spending some time discussing Social Media with Charles Yap, Social Media and Global Brand Communication Director at IHG (Intercontinental Hotels Group), the largest hotel group in the world with brands like Holiday Inn, Intercontinental, Indigo, Holiday Inn Express and more. Charles Yap is addicted to Twitter and has grown a good solid base of followers on @hotelPRguy.

Hotelblogs meets with Patrick Fothergill from Mosho.co.uk

Mosho is a UK company specialised in mobile development for the luxury market. One of their competencies is to develop successful mobile channels to promote and sell you product on the phone.

Hotels are starting to understand the importance to make their website mobile friendly and hotel groups look at developing their mobile application on different devices like the iPhone, Blackberry or Android.

I met with Patrick Fothergill who is Business Development Manager at Mosho. It's always interesting to hear different views from somebody outside the hotel industry.

HotelBlogs meets Ray Mason from Availpro

Availpro is a hotel technology company based in France (cocorico!) who offers a leading online hotel booking engine that plugs into 3,000 hotels mainly in France and Europe. Availpro booking engine works on a business model where the hotelier pays a small booking fee (€2 - €2.5)  rather than a commission on each transaction taking place on his own website. They also connect hotel availability to a 2 way connectivity with more than 300 OTAs. Recently, Availpro launched their Facebook booking engine which proved to be a good way to convert bookings via the social media platform.

HotelBlogs meets Fiona Robson from Rocketseed

Rocketseed, a 5 years old company based in London is specialized in email marketing. They work with the hospitality industry to increase opportunities to drive your messages across enewsletter, email communication and more.

Are hotels waking up to Social Media? (video)

HVS Executive Search and ESSEC Business School conducted a roundtable in Paris in February inviting hotels to discuss how the industry is embracing Social Media.

The table was moderated by both Professor Peter O'Connor and HVS Executive Search director Chris Mumford.

Sofitel, Rezidor, White Line Hotels and the hotel online reputation tool ReviewPro were discussing:

"How are we doing on Social Media today?".

HotelBlogs meets Ciaran Delaney from Meetingsbooker

Meetingsbooker, an Irish company led by Ciaran Delaney, allows hotels to make their meeting rooms available online on one single website. Meetingsbooker is mainly used by corporate who are looking to book simple meeting rooms across 100 countries. The company offers more than 50,000 meeting rooms loaded on their inventory platform.

Why are we not good at work?

This is what Jason Fried from 37 signals is telling us at a Ted Conference. This is a must see for companies who preach the office to much whether you are a boss or human resources.

Who have experienced this before?

 

 

Radisson Blu Hotel Berlin and its aquarium

Whilst visiting Berlin last week for ITB 2010 edition, I paid a visit to the Radisson Blu Hotel near by AlexanderPlatz where you have a lot og big commercial centres and also the famous needle radio station. The hotel has something particular - so people said to me - as they host the biggest aquarium in the world inside their lobby. So indeed, they have this huge aquarium where you can take inside an elevator from the top floor of the hotel and play up and down to see all the different fishes in this very blue aquarium.

By the way, since when Radisson introduced Blu in their brand name? I totally missed this change in their branding strategy. Any reasons why they added Blu now?

Back to the aquarium, from the reception or the bar, the aquarium is very impressive and you can stare at the whole thing for a while. So well done guys at Rezidor to make this quite unique. Here's a quick video snapshot of the lobby.