The Westin Dubai Mina Seyahi, which threw the hottest opening bash in Dubai last week, has now opened it's doors to guests and the hotel occupancy is already looking strong, according to sources. The Westin Dubai, the brand's flagship resort property in the Middle East and the only hotel of its kind in the UAE, is also offering a limited-time internet special for bookers on its official website.



Links: Official Website | Special Offers Page

Go Mobile With Choice Hotels: Worldwide lodging franchisor Choice Hotels International announced the launch of a mobile Web-enabled Choice Hotels Website. Travelers can now access choicehotels.com on any Web-enabled mobile devices such as cell phones and PDAs. The mobile version of choicehotels.com works on every mobile carrier network and allows users to search for hotels and make reservations, view and change reservations, access online profiles, log on to Choice Privileges and contact customer support.

At first this video may come across as something a well-meaning guest may have put together...or perhaps a really dedicated prankster who's brought old internet humor to life (you'll find plenty of lists with these badly translated hotel "signs" on the web)...but wait! It's not a guest or a zealous joker...it's Expedia! Watch the video below:

yatt’it, the new online travel community from Hyatt Gold Passport, offers travelers an essential combination of candid, fellow-traveler advice and insider knowledge with a unique advantage – credibility. Designed for members of the Hyatt Gold Passport loyalty program, but rich in benefits for all travelers, yatt’it is the first travel site to offer expert insight and tips from local Hyatt concierges in over 40 destinations worldwide along with advice from confirmed frequent travelers. In addition, partnerships with well-trusted sources like Frommers.com and FlightStats.com will quickly establish yatt’it as a valuable online resource for worldwide travel tips.

Researchers say that the internet is the very encapsulation of ‘one-to-one’ marketing and, as such, gives a hotel the ability to establish enduring relationships with individual customers. But others think that internet will encourage disloyalty with the comparability with the competitions’ offering is ‘just a click away’.

Would really be ‘virtual contacts’ build a good business relationship between hotels and customers?

A hotel ecommerce professional shares his take on the art and science of Web Page Optimization, a key for any hotel or business website aiming for high visibility and traffic on the Web.

Web Page Optimization at Sheraton Doha: As it is a known fact that while eCommunications evolve, internet has become a mainstream media outlet used frequently throughout the day. Studies show that the web is the leading medium at work and second leading medium at home behind the television. The ease of communicating being provided by the internet is embraced by different sectors particularly the hospitality industry.

In the Middle East, as the number of hotels grows, the competitions are becoming so aggressive in marketing specially the hotel’s presence in the virtual world. Ergo, the eCommerce initiatives of hotels top with the Search Engine Optimization (SEO) which plays a vital role in hotel’s eExposure.

While the online marketplace is gaining ground in terms of channel mix, especially for established hotel companies, the GDS still contributed significantly to the distribution break-up. Travelclick reports that there is a growing influence of GDS Hotel Promotions on the bookings realized by hotels. The release is provided below...

New Study Finds GDS Hotel Promotions Have a Growing Influence on Bookings: Now over 50 percent of travel agents with ad recall, book the advertised hotel: CHICAGO (February 6, 2008) — TravelCLICK, Inc. the leading provider of emarketing solutions for the hotel industry, today released results from a survey that demonstrates travel agents continue to increase their reliance on Global Distribution Systems (GDS) promotions for hotel bookings. Conducted for TravelCLICK by Phoenix Marketing International, the online, biannual survey included 500 travel agents from 30 countries, representing the four major GDS systems—Amadeus, Galileo, Sabre, and Worldspan.

TravelClick recently launched a viral marketing campaign including a short video titled "So, You want to be a Hotel eMarketer?", featuring spoofs of various celebrity characters like Ozzy Osbourne, Borat, Ali G, Woody Allen and more. Check out the video here

Ouch! This Hotels.com ad was featured right before a new report on credit card data loss / fraud related to Hotels.com. How's that for bad timing...? Must've made the folks over at Hotels.com cringe (to say the least).

tags: advertising, hotels, hotel, hotels.com, hospitality, fraud, credit-card, data-loss, commercial, advert, tv, bad-timing

Cognizant of the fact that we are now in an era of revolution and phenomenal changes, it is true, one may say, that the world has continually changing even the fundamental movement of transmitting thought, i.e., communication. An instance on this movement is the electronic commerce (eCommerce) which has evolved technically from telephone, fax, and other electronic form of media. Now, this business communication or eCommerce has changed with the breakthroughs of technology, thus, electronic then is considered to be the Internet.

While in many parts of the world, eCommerce is just starting, it has already reached sizeable proportions in developed countries like the United States. The internet has changed many ways of conducting business, as well as the buying of goods, and promises to further change the way of life for consumers and producers in the future.

Guests Control Their Hotel Experience Through Their Own Interactive Platform

"Le Meridien is providing a proscenium, a stage, a platform in which ideas can play out to a much larger audience. I hope the guests of Le Meridien will join this exchange in order to find a new perspective." - Ralph Gibson, photographer and member of LM100(TM).

Today, Le Meridien announced the launch of the re-designed LeMeridien.com, a website created for guests interested in traveling to discover a new perspective in arts, music, fashion, design and cuisine. The re-designed website offers a unique image-based navigation system, allowing guests to create a personalized interactive experience in those fields.

The Clickz take on current advertising and marketing efforts on Social Networking Sites:

Search marketing works because it understands search's essential nature: people looking for stuff. Where social networking advertising (at least the passive model that uses banners or, in many cases, contextual advertising) falls down is it fails to recognize the essential nature of social networking. People come to hang out with other people. Anything that gets in the way ruins the experience and will be avoided.

This is why widgets have been getting so much play lately: they don't intrude on the user experience. Yeah, they're branded. Yeah, they're obviously a product of crass commercialism, but when done well they enhance rather than detract from the experience. They're something to share within a social network, not something to detract you from it. They can become part of the conversation you're having with friends and acquaintances, not an interruption of that conversation.

True in a sense - just placing ads in high traffic areas without a consumer desire to look at / for them seems like an awful waste of money...I think the long tail approach needs to be incorporated into the social media advertising angle too to bring better return on investment.

tags: social-networks, social-networking, social-media, advertising, marketing, ecommerce, emarketing, ebusiness, media, PR

An interesting article that does a take on the role of reviews on online travel buying decisions.

In a survey this year, Yahoo Travel found that 61 percent of people now go online for vacation recommendations, says Fiona Lake Waslander, the company’s director of product management. “Travel 1.0, when travel planning moved online, was really all about prices,” Waslander says. “No longer are you looking for a hotel just based on a price, but you’re looking at user reviews and user ratings and photos.”

TravelCLICK has just sent out the above email / HTML campaign to subscribers announcing their new SearchVIEW product. SearchVIEW, which was announced in June 2007, is a product aimed at the hospitality industry (or specifically hoteliers without the dedicated resources to focus on online marketing & distribution) which will cover Online User Reviews, Search visibility / marketing and Online Travel Agency / Meta-search engine visibility.

New Tools and Features like "MY SPG" and "HOTEL EXPLORER" Give Members Personalized Access and Customized On-Line Experience

Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide, Inc. has announced the re-design of SPG.com, the dedicated website for members of Starwood Preferred Guest - the industry's top rated hotel loyalty program. The re-designed site showcases a new look, new tools, features and downloads unprecedented in the hospitality industry that provide members with personalized access and a rich, customized on-line experience.

"The new SPG.com highlights the synergies between our award winning Loyalty program - Starwood Preferred Guest and Starwood's forward thinking and innovative web strategies," said Mark Vondrasek, senior vice president, Interactive Marketing and Loyalty Program, Starwood Hotels & Resorts, Worldwide, Inc. "Our goal has always been to offer our members benefits that set a benchmark in the way travel loyalty programs do business and the new site remains true to this promise by delivering a vanguard and unique on-line experience that can only be found on SPG.com."