Weekly Roundup: Travel, Tech and Social Media
Happy Friday! Missed out on this week's top travel and hospitality headlines? Don't worry, we've got you covered! Check out our latest roundup for a breakdown of the latest industry news and trends.
Happy reading and don’t forget to come back next week for more!
Industry News
Interview: Lola's CEO Wants to Hack Mobile Trip Planning With Travel Agents
Paul English, the Kayak co-founder who now leads the newly christened travel startup Lola, thinks he can reinvent the trip-planning and booking experience in the digital era by weaving travel agents at every turn into a mobile app for consumers.
Airbnb's Data Reveals Impact of the Sharing Economy
More than a third of UK hosts earn below the median household income, and almost half rely on the income they make by sharing their homes to make ends meet, according to Airbnb.
Booking.com Rate Widget Threat Worked (A Little Bit)
Some hotels have accepted a threat by Booking.com last week to alter how the online travel agency is displayed in a controversial rate comparison widget. A letter sent to hoteliers which have installed the Price Check widget provided by Triptease were told they have until the end of last week (November 27) to remove the feature or ensure Booking.com’s branding and rates do not appear.
Trends and Insights
Interactive Advent Calendar Provides Hotels with Top Travel Trends and Best Practices
In Munich, the home of our European Headquarters, Christmas markets have opened, and the holiday season is in full swing. To share the spirit, we’ve created an interactive digital ‘advent calendar’ that is packed with all new best practice guides and industry trends. The tips are available for daily download here. Come back daily to unlock new content, or sign up to receive a daily email reminder when new content is unlocked!
What's the True Impact of Bad (or Great) Services?
Travel reviews are essential to a hotel’s prosperity. Reviews can have a cascading effect: positive reviews bring travelers and their positive reviews bring more travelers. Negative reviews, obviously, discourage travelers, and when problems aren’t fixed, those travelers who were undeterred by negative comments, write more negative reviews. But how do hotels know which repairs to make? What will really effect change when it comes to guest service and improving reviews?
How Big Hotel Chains Manage and React to Online Reviews
Tourismus Partner, an Austria-based hospitality and reputation management agency, surveyed asked executives from major hotel chains in Germany, Switzerland and its home country to try and understand how hoteliers evaluate and respond to online reviews that are left by travellers on websites. There were three interesting elements that came out of the research which may or may not be mirrored elsewhere, but they still give an important overview of how those at the sharp end of dealing with online reviews are doing.
Business Travelers Should Expect More Expensive Flights and Hotels
A forecast of next year's travel trends from American Express Global Business Travel suggests that global airfares and hotel rates will rise in 2016, inflating costs for business travelers.
Google Turns Image Search into Pinterest with New "Collections" Feature
Watch out, Pinterest, you’ve got new competition. Google has now rolled out a new feature on its search engine that offers users an easy way to save to save images they find to collections they can reference at a later time.
Chat Apps Taking Off for Large Hotel Chains
Starwood Hotels has been using Whatsapp and other chat apps since earlier this year to enable guests to make requests during their stay. The company says the chat app is used to message a hotel before, during and after a stay and accounts 85% of the messages it is getting.
Is Your Booking Flow Ready for the Millennials?
Businesses must begin to put themselves in the high top sneakers of Generation Y in order to stay relevant and responsive. Firms which are ignorant of this growth market, unwilling or unable to tweak traditional approaches in their business, may well be left at the starting gate. So, are you ready?
The Ultimate Cheat Sheet for Facebook Admins
As any Facebook admin will know, getting your graphics correct for Facebook can be a bit of a nightmare. Cover photos, profile pictures, images for adverts, images for promoted posts, thumbnails for videos – the list is endless. Check out this updated infographic from TechWyse for Facebook specs every admin needs to know about.
