Gluten free skizza -@ Gigi Trattoria in Rhinebeck, NY

You will be amazed to discover how many products of everyday life contain gluten, even pickles can have gluten! Traveling with celiac disease is not easy at all and eating out can be a nerve wracking experience: you are basically trusting complete strangers and your trip can be totally ruined by what you eat. Eating out for celiac people is not a pleasure, most of the times they have to choose what they can eat and not what they like to eat from the menu if they are lucky enough to have a gluten free menu in front of them. They can give to their waiter every possible recommendations. However, if the restaurant does not pay any attention or underestimates cross-contamination, the risk of being glutened becomes high. It is not enough to say that something is gluten free. It is not gluten free anymore if it is cooked together with ingredients that contain gluten or in pans shared in the kitchen. This is a hard concept to understand for all the places that are embracing the gluten free hype nowadays. It is not a trend for celiac people, it is a health issue.

I am not celiac, but I often travel with a friend with celiac disease. She has a very high intolerance to gluten. We visited the Hudson River Valley a few weeks ago. Before leaving, we did lots of research to find some reliable places where to eat and saw that Gigi Trattoria in Rhinebeck, NY was trained by the Gluten Intolerance Group (GIG). This reassured her. The staff was very welcoming and knowledgeable. They made her feel at ease.We ordered a salad and a skizza (skinny piazza – pictured above) for dinner. The next day we wanted to visit their marketplace in Red Hook, but the hotel messed up with the wake up call and we could not visited it.

Gigi Trattoria really made the difference in my friend’s travel experience, and mine too (I have seen how badly she gets sick from gluten). I wish more restaurants would take celiac disease seriously. A good start would be not to improvise gluten free dishes and menus and contact the Gluten Intolerance Group (GIG) to have a serious understanding of what the implications are. Celiac people are not following any trend, they are just trying to lead a normal life and not to get sick.

The State of Travel Blogging 2013 – An infographic by FHR

As cheap air travel and the package tour (as well as the devaluation of the Spanish Peseta and the abolition of currency controls in the UK) helped jump start international travel in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, the world was still a fairly predictable place and countries were, on the whole inhabited mainly by citizens of that country and not by the multicultural citizens living in most cities today.

Moreover, due to the social and economic structure of Western countries, consumers were only just beginning to have disposable income that allowed them to experience the concept of leisure time.

At the same time, mass media was becoming increasingly influential as consumers purchased more and more TVs and radios.

So, with more disposable income, more leisure time and the establishment of commercial television, it was now possible to reach large swathes of a population reasonably quickly and relatively inexpensively.

In this environment countries put their faith in creativity to build brands, hoping that an exotic image, tagline or promotion would resonate with prospects and increase visitor arrivals.

And generally, because of the cultural and social predictability of countries, the same message could be used to communicate with everyone.

Moreover, with few conduits to increasingly wealthy consumers who had more disposable income than ever before and with limited competition in the market place, this type of creative driven branding often raised the profile of countries enough to attract visitors.

Countries and destinations such as Spain, the UK, Kenya, Florida, Greece, The Algarve, Singapore and Italy as well as many other destinations used this approach. And in this mass market economy, mass media – TV, Print, Outdoor, with its huge reach, was the logical vehicle to enhance the impact of creative-driven branding with reach and repetition.

Read more at brandconsultantasia.com

PRESS 1 FOR ENGLISH
PRESS 2 FOR DEPORTATION

THIS IS AMERICA

WHEN ORDERING, PLEASE SPEAK ENGLISH

Down below

I AM MAD AS HELL
I WANT MY COUNTRY BACK

From what, whom? Is your country only yours?

Sorry, I was not aware that the controversy already happened in 2006. To have the sign still there is freedom of speech – I guess…

Apps aren’t always the answer to engaging with consumers on mobile devices—especially when it comes to m-commerce. According to research from rich media company Zmags, very few Americans prefer to use mobile apps for shopping activities. Instead, consumers strongly prefer purchasing through web and mobile browsers.

For more information, please visit www.emarketer.com

Download the report below.

Photo credits - KLM

The next day I checked my frequent miles on my Alitalia MilleMiglia account and the flight New York JFK – Amsterdam did not collect any mile. About 3,600 miles were missing: weird! I contacted Alitalia by phone and they gave me an email address to send my request to, no reply. I contacted Alitalia via Twitter, no reply.

I bought the ticket at www.klm.com, but the flight from New York to Amsterdam was operated by Delta. I am pretty sure that Delta messed up at the check-in. I had to tell them that the code of their Sky Team partner airline is AZ several times.

So I decided to tweet @KLM and they replied almost right away with courtesy and professionalism asking for my Flying Blue number to see if they could add my missing miles. At the end, they realized they could do little: since I am a MilleMiglia member, only Alitalia can solve this issue. At that point, I did not care much anymore. They were nice and gave me an answer almost instantaneously. In the meantime, I had also faxed Alitalia with my e-ticket and MilleMiglia  number, but still no reply from Alitalia.

Only a few days later, Alitalia calls me and asks for my boarding pass: without boarding pass, no miles. Guess what? I did not keep my boarding pass. Lesson learned: we still need to keep our boarding pass in our digital era for Alitalia , even if we can do online check-in. @KLM delivered a great customer experience though!

Google+ circles let me organize my contacts in a flawless way and Google+ always asks who I want to share with. So, when I want to post about a travel industry topic and get an opinion from my fellow colleagues, I select my professional circles. If I have a funny photo of me while on vacation that I want to share only with friends and family, I can. I also love that I can edit my comments after they are posted. Lately, I have hit the enter button on Facebook too many times when I just wanted a break line.Even though I have compared Google+ to Facebook up to here, I believe that Google+ is more of a threat to blogging and Twitter. I do not blog regularly, but I am a heavy Twitter user. I have blogged even less and have not used Twitter that much since Google+ is around. Google+ lets me keep all the interactions in the same place. If I ask for an opinion on the fly as I would do on Twitter, all the related answers stay under the same post.

Now ComScore is saying that Google+ reached 20 million users in the first three weeks since its launch. Not bad at all if we also take into account that access is by invitation only. The graph gives a better idea of what Google+ has accomplished in such a little time. User acquisition is going to be essential to the success of Google+. I might like Google+ a great deal, but how do I convince all my contacts to move to another spot? In the meantime, I convinced my sister to open an account on Google+, she took years before joining Facebook. Google might really be into something with this Google+. Next step will be to figure out how Google+ can help my DMO to promote the destination. I do not want to build a clone of a Facebook fan page or just publish a stream of photos, let’s create something fun and useful.

If you would like to join me on Google+, I am at https://plus.google.com/117358455056916203405#117358455056916203405/posts

To keep up with the controversy, Eataly – an Italian gourmet mega-market with stores in Milan, Bologna, Genoa, Asti and New York – published another ad with two women holding hands on the daily La Stampa. The ad says “We at Eataly are open to all families too”.

The travel industry did not wait to join the fray with Easyjet, which ironically asks in the ad below “We hope that Giovanardi [the Secretary] likes this family”.

In the past years, Italy has been going through strong reactionary politics and this explains the tone and attitude of the political confrontation today, but it does not justify it. Stupidity is stupidity and narrow mindedness should be called for what it is. If I were a marketer in Italy, I would not hesitate to use this theme and do also some social good. The Minister of tourism should also focus on this neglected travel segment and not only on her “Four-Leg Tourists” campaign or  the Prime Minister’s promotional videos for Italy, but this is another story.

Will they be so successful as for the previous campaign? More at http://www.milliondollarmemo.com/

Passengers Traffic for the first 10 Italian airports:

Roma Fiumicino 35,956.295
Milano Malpensa 18,714.187
Milano Linate con 8,295.436
Bergamo 7.661.061
Venice 6,801.941
Catania 6,301.832
Napoli con 5,535.984
Bologna con 5,432.248
Roma Ciampino con 4,563.852
Palermo 4,341.696

Recently DMAI came up with these findings:

• 96% of respondents have a Facebook Fan Page. Of these, 94% measure ‘likes’, 65% measure active users, and 65% measure page interactions.
• 89% are on Twitter. 95% of tweeting destinations measure followers, and 60% measure retweets.
• 3% have a presence on Myspace, an unsurprising find due to the platform’s diminishing user base.
• Of the 73% of YouTube using DMOs 86% track total views, but only 43% monitor their subscribers.
• Just over half of DMO respondents blog and noting total blog visits as the single most important metric.

I just got this in the mail from Aruba’s Minister of Tourism, Otma Oduber. It includes an impersonal letter and two big stickers (see photo above). Not sure how I made into their database… Certainly an effective way to introduce a new logo, but not sure if I’d use a direct mailing campaign these days.

By the way, do you like the logo and tagline? I think I had already seen both in the NYC subway.

According to the Economist, the answer is yes! France seems to be on the top list of Chinese travelers visiting Europe, but the Grand Tour of the continent covers also some unusual stops such as Cambridge, Benelux, Verona… They spend a third of the travel budget on shopping rather than accommodation and/or fine dining, but are not cheap.

This is definitely an interesting guide to tap a market that is still in its infancy: the rewards might be tangible on a long term.

A sketch map of the Chinese grand tour must begin in France, the country seen as offering all the essential European virtues: history, romance, luxury and quality. Paris shops such as Louis Vuitton are essential stops: witness their Mandarin-speaking staff. In 2009 Chinese tourists passed Russians as the highest-spending non-European visitors to France, according to a survey of duty-free shops. The south of the country is also popular, thanks in part to widely available translations of Peter Mayle’s book “A Year in Provence” and in part to a slushy Chinese television mini-series, “Dreams Link”, which was filmed amid the lavender fields and walled citadels of the Midi.

China’s freshly minted millionaires and billionaires are particularly obsessed with the wine country of Bordeaux, as red wine has taken over from expensive brandy as the business lubricant of choice. At the very pinnacle of desire is a visit to (or just a glimpse of) Château Lafite Rothschild, home of the claret which has become a favoured show-off brand for Chinese plutocrats. Visits to Château Lafite itself are reserved for invited guests, but China’s would-be tycoons are not put off. Jean-François Zhou of Ansel Travel, a Paris-based firm that brings 15,000 Chinese visitors to Europe each year, recently sent a group down to Bordeaux by bus. After an express tour, one of the coach party snapped up two cases of wine at €600 ($790) a bottle.

From France, Chinese groups typically travel south towards Italy via the casinos in Nice or Monaco (gambling is discouraged in China, but wildly popular). Venice and Rome are stops for every nation’s tourists, but the Chinese grand tour also demands a visit to Verona. One site draws them: a 13th-century mansion linked, a bit spuriously, to “Romeo and Juliet”. That play is doubly admired in China. It was one of the first of Shakespeare’s works to be translated into Mandarin, and its storyline is hailed as matching that of a popular Chinese folk tale, the “Butterfly Lovers”. Chinese tourists have their pictures taken below an ancient balcony said to be Juliet’s, and next to a bronze statue of the tragic heroine. Then it is back on the bus, and northward.

In Germany cities such as Bonn and Trier are as important as more obvious sites like Cologne and Frankfurt (a hub for lots of China flights). Bonn means Beethoven: his birthplace there is a coveted stop for educated Chinese, who are avid fans of classical music. In Trier it is not the city or its Roman ruins that attracts the tourists. They come to see the Karl-Marx-Haus, birthplace of the revolutionary. The Marx museum estimates that 13,000 Chinese tramp around the house each year. Mandarin inscriptions fill the museum’s guest books. In the early morning and evening, large crowds of Chinese have their pictures taken outside the house before heading to their next destination.

A stop in Metzingen involves a tribute to another German, the suitmaker Hugo Boss. A short drive from Frankfurt, Metzingen is home to several factory outlets, where Chinese shoppers vie with Russians and Indians as the biggest spenders. It is a standing joke among Chinese travellers that many products snapped up abroad bear “Made in China” labels. But there is some sense to this seeming madness. Thanks to hefty taxes and customs duties, European brands are routinely 40% more expensive back home. In China they are also quite likely to be fakes.

Source the Economist