Lodging Interactive Blog

The travel industry goes social

2010-09-02T09:00:00-04:00

"Welcome to Facebook — population 500 million. That’s about as many users as there are females in India.
So it's not surprising that companies would get around to exploiting the house that Mark Zuckerberg built sooner or later. That goes triple for travel-related industries, whose clientele tend to be extremely active on social networks.
Portland-based Second Porch — an online vacation rental site that lists 4,000 properties in more than 100 countries — existed wholly as a Facebook app until it launched its own base of operations, secondporch.com, in June. Browse its listings, and you’re able to navigate between Facebook profiles of owners and past renters, or see which properties your current Facebook friends recommend. And likewise, if you make an inquiry, owners are able to sniff around your profile"

Link2Brand Empowers Branded Hotels To Manage Their Own Marketing Campaigns – No Website Needed

2010-09-01T07:00:00-04:00

Lodging Interactive, an award winning interactive and social media marketing agency servicing the hospitality industry, today announced Link2Brand an innovative marketing solution for branded hotels. With Link2Brand hotels can launch their own marketing campaigns without the need of a dedicated hotel website; Link2Brand links directly to the brand's website.

“Our innovative Link2Brand marketing tool solves a long standing issue for branded hotels – how to create short, personalized and descriptive promotional links that seamlessly pass through brand SRP booking codes,” said Mr. DJ Vallauri, Lodging Interactive’s Founder and President. “Link2Brand empowers hotels to provide their own local web marketing for events and groups such as soccer tournaments, military reunions and to offer local businesses their own branded links to easily make online reservations. Link2Brand enables hotels to deep link into the hotel brand’s booking engine.”

For example this SHORT link with the hotel’s name:

http://myhotelpackages.com/SheratonBirmingham/Midweek

Sends visitors to this LONG link, deep into the brand’s booking engine and passes through the SRP code “DAYBAR”:

http://www.starwoodhotels.com/sheraton/search/pre_decider_all.html?propertyID=115&ratePlanName=DAYBAR&IM=SOP_TITLE_179WD_SI_115_ATL

Complete ROI Tracking – With Link2Brand every link counts. All clicks are recorded in real time, and the hotel can simply log into its online dashboard to view click results. Monthly brand website referral reports will detail the number of Link2Brand referrals and revenue.

“We’ve made using Link2Brand so easy to use, hotels and marketers can create their personalized links in less than 60 seconds. Link2Brand can be used on Twitter, Facebook and blogs or micro-sites to drive business,” added Richard Walsh, V.P. Business Development for Lodging Interactive. “Additionally each hotel account can have up to 10 sub-users who can create and track their own unique links.”

Try Link2Brand Free For Ten Days

Facebook Unveils a Service to Announce Where Users Are

2010-08-30T09:00:00-04:00

Facebook introduced a long-anticipated service called Places on Wednesday that could help the company tap local and small-business advertisers and sharpen its competition with Google.
Facebook’s Places borrows heavily from location-based social networks like Foursquare and Gowalla, which allow users to check in at places and broadcast their location to friends. But those companies, as well as others like Yelp, said they saw Facebook’s Places as a complement to their own services and as an opportunity to gain additional distribution.
Read more via www.nytimes.com

SEO and Integration With Social Media

2010-08-27T08:00:00-04:00

"Social media has forced its way into the world of marketing, and it's here to stay. Social networks and blogs are among the most popular online activities, and their popularity will continue to grow as more businesses utilize them to directly engage customers.

Facebook currently has over 500 million users - more than the combined populations of the United States, Germany, and Japan.

There are currently 133 million blogs that average 900,000 posts a day, according to Technorati.

YouTube will serve 75 billion video streams to 375 million unique visitors this year. Users now upload more than 24 hours of content every minute, according to YouTube.

Social media is big - and getting bigger. Use the power of social media to support your search engine optimization (SEO) strategy by integrating basic SEO best practices and using the same keywords you know work in SEO, in those environments to engage a wider audience and improve your online presence."

Social Media Is Not Free: Here's Why

2010-08-26T08:00:00-04:00

"Twitter is free. Facebook is free. Foursquare is free. TweetDeck is (still) free. Google Alerts is free. So, social media is free, right? Wrong. Beyond even the obvious costs - designing and building a Foursquare application, or stepping up to a fee-based listening platform like Alterian, Collective Intellect, Cymfony, BuzzMetrics, or Lithium's Scout Labs, social media is far from free.
In fact, social media-based marketing costs real money. While it may not be millions of dollars for 30 seconds of air time, making sense of the social Web and really getting it right takes planning, creative insight, product management, and other internal resources, all of which have costs associated with them that you may not see at the outset."

Yahoo Switches to Bing for Organic Search Results | ClickZ

2010-08-25T09:58:07-04:00

Following the search alliance it formed with Microsoft last year, Yahoo has announced that Bing is now officially powering all of its organic search results in the U.S. and Canada, meaning webmasters and search-engine optimization professionals need only focus their efforts on one major engine besides market leader Google.

via www.clickz.com

Google's Set to Launch Google Me: Should Facebook Be Worried?

2010-08-25T08:00:00-04:00

There has long been talk that Google is ready to give Facebook a run for its money in terms of the social network space. Now, ZDnet reports that Google is just about ready to launch its "Google Me" social network - should Facebook be worried?
Read more via www.tmcnet.com

Guest Satisfaction - July 2010 Chatter Guard Benchmark Report Is Released

2010-08-23T08:00:00-04:00

PARSIPPANY, NJ , August 23, 2010 - Lodging Interactive, a leading interactive marketing agency servicing the hospitality industry and the publisher of the free Chatter Guard Monthly Benchmark Monitor Report has released its July 2010 report.

To receive the full report, sign up for our newsletter at LodgingInteractive.com.

July was a lackluster month for the hospitality industry, with sluggish consumer ratings in almost every segment and category. While the losses were generally mild, the lack of gains was particularly evident across the board. Perhaps the hot weather is affecting the customers’ moods? On a scale of 1-5, 5 being “fantastic” and 1 being “poor,” the only positive category for the average hotel lodger was in Dining, which rose a scant 0.71% (from 3.27 to 3.26). The rest of the average hotel performances were single digit losses: July saw a 2.73% drop in Resultant Quality Score (3.39 to 3.28), a 2.30% decrease in Facilities ratings (3.74 to 3.64), a 7.49% loss in Housekeeping (3.53 to 3.16). Room satisfaction saw a 1.35% decline (3.21 to 3.15), a 1.63% decrease in Staff reviews (3.49 to 3.42), and a 2.31% dip in Value (3.13 to 3.06).

To receive the full report, sign up for our newsletter at LodgingInteractive.com.

Welcome to the future, where hotel operations and marketing are one

2010-08-19T09:00:00-04:00

It is official; the walls on every hotel worldwide are now made of glass and are completely transparent; the outside world can now see into your hotel lobby and witness how real guest are treated in the real-world daily. For those who thought that TripAdvisor had revolutionized the hospitality industry, be assured that we have so far only seen just the beginning.
Read more via www.hotelmarketing.com

CoMMingle Offers Free Social Media Engagement Report To Hotels

2010-08-17T07:00:00-04:00

PARSIPPANY, NJ , August 17, 2010 - CoMMingle by Lodging Interactive, an award winning leading interactive and social media marketing agency servicing the hospitality industry, today announced that it is offering its Social Media Engagement Report at no cost to the first 200 hotels that sign up on its website. The CoMMingle Social Media Engagement Report captures a hotel’s social engagement on Facebook and Twitter and is delivered bi-weekly via email.

“We’re offering our CoMMingle Social Media Engagement Report to hotels in an effort to encourage hoteliers to advance their social media marketing activities on Facebook and Twitter to the next level and drive more business,” stated Mr. DJ Vallauri, Lodging Interactive’s Founder & President. “The report pulls in all the Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s) of the hotel’s Facebook and Twitter accounts and presents them in an informative engagement level report.”

Below are the KPI’s measured in the CoMMingle Social Media Engagement Report which also compares KPI’s month-over-month:

Hotel properties can request their own CoMMingle Social Media Engagement Report online at:

http://commingle.me/free_social_engagement_report.shtml.

The first 200 hotels can receive the report at no cost for 1 year.