Alaska Air E-Newsletter

“There’s never been a better time to get away to Mexico with these low fares to your choice of nine great destinations,” said Joe Sprague, Alaska Airlines’ vice president of marketing. “Chose from the classic beach resorts of Mazatlan, Puerto Vallarta/Riviera Nayarit, Los Cabos, Ixtapa/Zihuatanejo and Manzanillo, to the quieter Baja villages of La Paz and Loreto, to the colonial cities of Guadalajara and Mexico City.”

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Scottsdale, Ariz. (October 27^th, 2010):  Travika, a leading sales, marketing and representation service provider for travel related companies announced that it has been selected by Passport Online to assist in the marketing and sales of its ResortPort product line. ResortPort provides online marketing tools for hotels and resorts reaching leading retail agencies, consortia and professional home based networks.

Passport Online has been in operation for 15 years and assists agencies with a suite of emarketing and ecommerce solutions for leisure travel.  Passport Online’s reach via travel agent extranets and travel agency consumer websites includes more than 25,000 agents and 4,000 unique consumer-facing travel agency websites. Consortia partnerships include Vacation.com, American Express Representative Network, Travel Leaders, Ensemble Travel Group, TRAVELSAVERS, NEST, MAST, and others. Among its agency clients, Passport touts top-100 travel agencies including: Altour, Montrose Travel, SatoTravel, TravelStore, Garber Travel, All About Travel, and several highly successful AAA clubs. Leading host agency relationships include:  Nexion, Travel Planners International, Prestige Travel, Global Travel International, MTravel, and more. Email marketing reach includes an additional 7,000 participating travel agents, reaching 3 million travelers.

“We are very excited to have Travika supporting our ResortPort marketing efforts,” said Greg Kott, President and CEO of Passport Online, Inc.  “ResortPort is the most cost effective solution providing hotels and resorts access to the leading leisure travel agency internal and client facing websites. Over 4,000 unique travel agency websites use Passport Online content and marketing tools to promote leisure travel to millions of travelers. Over the years we have built an impressive distribution channel that today includes more than 25,000 individual travel agents and programs that can engage with millions of unique agency consumers a month.”

Bob Gilbert, CEO of Travika said, “Professional travel agents continue to be the high valued producers of exceptional ADR for the hotel community. Agents provide the highest rated business from any intermediary distribution channel. ResortPort uniquely provides hotels and resorts with a variety of marketing options to place rich media content directly in front of front line agents and their clientele. In addition, ResortPort has a portfolio of value added services that offer hotel brand marketing, detailed hotel information, pricing, hotel and tour operator packages with pricing and booking links plus the option to reach out to millions of clients with agency branded email promotions. Not only is there a direct call to action for the property but we can analyse the activity generated by a specific agency.”

About Travika

Travika is a specialized sales and marketing representation group providing travel industry clients with services and distribution in North America and in over 25 countries. Travika was created in 2001 (previously branded as TravelPIE) by travel, tourism and hospitality executives to create a successful performance based relationship with its clients. Travika develops effective plans to generate incremental business where it can be profitably found. The executives of Travika have all successfully worked in major travel brands and understand leveraging every investment to drive measurable ROI. Travika is a privately held company based in Scottsdale, AZ. For more information please visit www.travika.com

About Passport Online

Passport Online is a leading supplier of emarketing and ecommerce solutions for the leisure travel industry, helping leisure travel suppliers connect with the leading consortia, retail agencies, professional home-based agent networks, and their clients.  Millions of travel agency consumers use Passport Online’s shopping engine on travel agency websites to search for their next vacation experience. Millions more travel agency consumers receive agency-branded email campaigns sent by Passport Online. Passport Online helps resort properties drive their rich media content and promotions through all of these electronic marketing channels.

Passport Online’s key products are VacationPort, NexCite and ResortPort. For more information please contact www.passportonlineinc.com

As we ponder the real cost of doing business with OTA’s we have to address the bigger challenges of guest acquisition, guest loyalty and guest retention. The OTA channel is only one of many channels. It is a short term fix. It’s a “lazy” channel. Lazy, in as far as you offer a deep discounted rate, hope you are competitive and you can pack up shop and go to the beach.

As my old Choice Hotels boss, and segmentation champion, Bob Hazard used to quip..there is not an over supply of rooms there is an under supply of guests! So how do we do that today.

As hoteliers, the longer term goal is more significant. Longer term is about brand building and everything that goes with that. Longer term is about developing a guest acquisition strategy, a strong and innovative guest loyalty program and monitoring your high valued guests to make sure they don’t jump ship.

There is an interesting article in Hotel Interactive by Kristi White, who is Director of Revenue Optimization at TRAVELCLICK, where she lays out the dollars (and perhaps lack of sense) involved in working with OTA’s.

We both reach the same conclusion albeit from different starting points. Who do you want to end up owning the customer? OTA’s or you, the hotelier?

Developing the framework for, and the refining of, an integrated relationship marketing program is essential to successfully owning the customer. (That is, if we can actually use the word “own” anymore). Getting close to your guest, knowing everything about your guest, engaging your guest in a personalized manner, providing them with relevant information in a timely fashion, listening very well to what they are telling you (including Social Media), flagging triggers that may signal you are about to lose a valuable guest…all of these elements today are considered Marketing 101.

It requires smarts, experience, determination, imagination and the guts to stay the course. Getting the customer on your side means knowing your customer better than anybody else. Do you understand and have you mapped out the life cycle of your customer? Do you know the cost of guest acquisition? Do you know the cost of losing a guest? Do you know the costs of winning them back? Hard questions to answer but information you need to know. Or just lower your rates and throw them out there to the OTA’s. They will be very happy…and sometimes that may be the right thing to do….sometimes.

Final thought…..Over the years I have learnt that it’s better to avoid getting in to a hole than having to claw your way out of it.

2009 statistics just released from the US Department of Commerce, Office of Travel & Tourism Industries show a (not surprising) drop in international trips and a drop in spending. The total outbound number totaled 61.5 million which was a drop of 2% from the previous year. Travel to Mexico dropped 4% and travel to Canada dropped 7%. Related spending dropped 12%, meaning travelers that did venture overseas spent less. We are however seeing signs of early recovery especially in Mexico for 2010, (sources tell this blogger), as confidence gets a little stronger in certain parts of the USA. I predict the trend of thrifty travel will continue and become a fad.

Corinthia Hotel London is being built within an imposing Victorian building, on a city block location between Whitehall Place, Northumberland Avenue and Great Scotland Yard, overlooking Trafalgar Square and the River Thames.

The grand Victorian exterior houses fully-reconstructed elegant and contemporary interiors set around an inner foyer and garden, two restaurants, a luxury spa, a concept cocktail bar, boardroom meeting facilities and a beautifully refurbished grand ballroom. There will be 294 intricately designed guest accommodations, including 45 luxurious suites – some of which are located on duplex floors, inside historic turrets, and feature private lifts and terraces. The two-bedroom Royal Suite, at more than 470m², will be the largest in London, and can be connected to adjacent rooms to provide additional accommodation. From these suites and their private terraces, Corinthia guests will enjoy unmatched views across some of London’s most recognised landmarks, including the Thames, the London Eye, Trafalgar Square and Whitehall. The Corinthia’s individual bedrooms, averaging 45m² in size, are also amongst the largest in their category in London’s luxury hotel market.

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The sale by the sister carriers covers travel from Sept. 8 through Dec. 15 to destinations in the United States and Canada and from Sept. 8 through Oct. 5 to Mexico. Tickets must be bought by Aug. 31 and at least 14 days before departure except for Hawaii and Mexico.

The airlines said seats at sale prices are limited, although they didn’t say how many were available.

The sale prices are only available for trips on Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Saturdays except for travel to Mexico and Hawaii and within Alaska. Eleven days around Thanksgiving are blacked out.

The airlines said sample fares included $69 one-way between Seattle and San Francisco, $79 between Phoenix and Portland, Ore.; and $119 between Los Angeles and Washington, D.C.

The US Department of Commerce announced that international visitors spent an estimated $11.1 billion on travel to, and tourism related activities within, the USA during June. This represented a 15% increase in spend generating $1.4 billion more than June 2009. This is the sixth month of consecutive growth.

• Travel Receipts: Purchases of travel and tourism-related goods and services by international visitors traveling in the United States totaled $8.6 billion during June, an increase of nearly 14 percent when compared to last year. These goods and services include food, lodging, recreation, gifts, entertainment, local transportation in the United States, and other items incidental to foreign travel.

• Passenger Fare Receipts: Fares received by U.S. carriers (and U.S. vessel operators) from international visitors increased by nearly 17 percent to $2.5 billion for the month, an increase of $362 million when compared to June 2009.

International visitors have spent an estimated $64.6 billion on U.S. travel and tourism-related goods and services year to date (January through June), an increase of 7 percent compared to the same period last year.
International visitor spending in the USA has increased, on average, $732 million a month in 2010. Let Travika assist you in getting in to the international arena. We are in 25 countries and are very well credentialed in growing international business. Contact us today !

The Corinthia group said today that its subsidiary CHI Hotels and Resorts is to operate a second hotel at the highly popular Red Sea resort of Sharm El Sheikh in Egypt as from October 1st.  The new hotel under CHI management will be the Ramada Plaza -Naama Bay.

CHI signed a 15-year technical services and management agreement with the owning El Salam Company for Tourism Development for the operation of the converted and partly refurbished 254 bedroom hotel.

Previously known as the Royal Plaza Hotel since its opening in 2004, the Ramada Plaza – Naama Bay is located on a vast tract of land measuring some 11,000 square metres, just three minutes from the town centre and 300 metres from the seafront promenade. It also has its own private beach 500 metres away at Sharm El Maya, which can be reached by hotel minibus…

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The Award was presented to the hotel by Mr. Joseph Cinque, President and CEO of the Academy in the presence of St Petersburg’s Head of Tourism Ms. Marianna Ordzhonikidze. Also present at the ceremony were some 100 journalists, representatives of the travel industry and dignitaries from the cultural community of the Northern Capital of Russia.
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