The Brand California has been steadily built over a period of decades, providing the foundation for a multi-billion destination year after year: $95.1 billion in revenues supporting 873,000 jobs and generating $6.1 billion in tax revenues in 2010.

So, with a flat annual budget of only $50 million, how does Visit California consistently construct such a valuable destination brand?

The long view + strategic thinking

As an organization dedicated to the long-term impact of in-destination tourism, Visit California has a distinct advantage: the ability to execute a long-term strategic plan for a brand that is more than just a place: it is a product in and of itself, to be packaged and sold.

By carefully constructing a brand paradigm that both reflects the state’s values and the aspirations of potential visitors, the brand has used strategy to become one of the most valuable in tourism.

The most recent 5-year plan shows how dozens of stakeholders were brought together to create a plan for Brand California. By bringing together a diverse group, the organization ensures buy-in and cohesion for the state’s marketing plan.

Within the 5-year plan, new ideas were catalyzed into a strategy outlining “the importance of going beyond brand building and inspiration and placing a heavier focus on engagement. Connecting with consumers across channels and over time to develop relationships that lead to higher affinity for the California product and ultimately increased lengths of stay and spend in the state.”

The sustained long-term approach has provided the organization with the opportunity to build a strong foundation for the brand.

The organization can provide a consistent perspetive long-term, and really evolve the brand to suit the changing market environment.

The organization must also be clever in leveraging resources and developing strong assets that can be employed across platforms and in different ways.

An example of the impact of stable funding from the VisitCalifornia team:

A few years ago, China was a small blip in overall visitation to California. But research revealed that China was exploding and would soon become the state’s No. 1 overseas visitor market.

Because we saw that on the horizon, we strategically positioned ourselves to take advantage of that. We’ve been able to establish a marketing presence in China, educate the travel industry on catering to Chinese consumers — all important steps to capturing as much of the China market as possible and maximizing the economic benefit to California. unexpected changes in the market, but that same research helps us be prepared for those shifts.

In addition, the mission of the organization moves beyond promoting California as a travel destination and into the means of accomplishing this mission via digital tools.

In a recent case study with Google (an obvious benefactor of this frontier), CEO Caroline Beteta speaks about how the place gets marketed as product:

As it happens, marketing a place has plenty in common with marketing a product, particularly when that place already has such a strong global identity to begin with. You need a compelling story, a healthy budget and committed stakeholders who share your vision.

Fortunately, Visit California has all three. Under Beteta’s watch, the destination brand has grown into an “investor-oriented, $50m-plus global platform” with over 6,000 companies on board. And we’re not just talking about about independently owned motels, here – we’re talking about some of the planet’s biggest brands, from Disney and Universal Studios to AEG and Marriott. “Whereas most tourism boards are political,” says Beteta, “we’re entrepreneurs.”

Nonetheless, it can sometimes be challenging to bring stakeholders in line with the long term view.  As the VisitCalifornia team points out, “businesses are driven by sales or more tangible immediate metrics so we have to work hard to get them to believe in a longer term vision and we do that by marketing California, the brand.”

Ultimately, a traveler must first pick California before patronizing its businesses, so the battle for walletshare in a consumer’s limited travel budget is truly the front line.

Focusing on consumers, and their changing habits, has been the cruz of VistiCalifornia’s strategic thinking.

Integrated, impactful ad campaigns

The limited budget is broken down as follows:

Brand advertising sits atop Cash Mountain, and drives the spirit of the entire brand.

The most recent campaign was a clever infusion of a brand powered by celebrity, sights and preconceived notions, and targeted to those “California dreaming.”

The team has been focused on “building a brand and connecting with consumers to create inspiration and keep California top of mind.” The core of this strategy has been wide-reaching television commercials that capture the spirit of California.

From Betty White to the Governator, the commercial leveraged some basic “misconceptions” of the state – and was distributed in multiple international markets.

Note how the second commercial points to a .co.uk domain – signifier of each campaign’s far reach.

The campaign extends all the way to Australia, showing the organization’s true international focus , as well as how each commercial is targeted to a particular cultural demographic.

While the TV commercials, given their celebrity starpower and natural wonder, are the most visible, the bulk of brand marketing spending is on magazines. Glossy one-pagers pepper issues from many outlets, showing that print is still popular.

Granted, these numbers are a couple of years old, but still indicate how the media mix trends for many large destination marketers.

A multi-screen focus

Beyond the media mix, the digital frontier continues to be a driver of success of Visit California’s growth in market- and mind-share.

By layering their activities across screens, the organization can increase reach, boost engagement and deliver a more efficient return on dollars spent.

Speaking of the multi-screen world, the Visit California team knows the importance of being everywhere consumers are.

The frequency of message, across channels and platforms is becoming increasingly critical to break through the cluttered content environment.

The ‘multi-screen’ environment is interesting and playing a large part in the fragmented media environment that is leading marketers down this path of strategy refinement.

We are working with our media agency to create programs that cross devices. Programs that once were just broadcast integrations now include integrated digital extensions and compelling calls to action to reach consumers across platforms.

Successes include pairing a microsite to a recent promotion with Entertainment Tonight, which added an interactive component to the on-air segment called “California Dreamers” that focused on celebrities’ favorite spots statewide.

Another is the co-branded iPad app with Sunset Magazine, which allowed a lean-back experience for consumers considering a California escape. After 6 months, the team saw that 60% of traffic to the app was international – again highlighting the strategic plan’s aim to focus on international markets.

Focus on the results

Finally, the Visit California team was incredibly results-focused. With only $50 million to spend each year, results must be carefully tracked and matched with spend to calculate a true ROI that can drive their conversation with stakeholders during the next cycle.

The organization has consistently tracked advertising effectiveness, thus delivering public benchmarks for performance measurement.

By proving results, the team has much more leverage going into meetings and partnerships.

Our success is measured by economic impact to the state of California. We assess this impact through incremental travel to and spend within the state as a result of our efforts.

Currently, we utilize a two-part tracking study in the markets where we are running advertising – U.S., Canada, U.K. & Australia – looking at intent to travel before and after our advertising flights. This is a conservative methodology as it primarily focuses on impact of our advertising and does not account for efforts in our owned and earned channels, or in the other international markets where we have a presence.

In 2012, Visit California reported the following ROI statistics:

Ultimately, regardless of whether it’s a public company, private entity or public/private partnership, the results are what counts. Visit California has been able to not only capitalize on the creative cachet of a widely-known brand, but also boost its profile beyond what it may have been without guidance.

Does an airline need to compete in comfort or cost? That seems to be the question brought on by the growth of Spirit Airlines. Last year, the Department of Transportation (DOT) logged more complaints about Spirit than any other airline. The airline also ranked at the bottom of a Consumer Reports customer service survey. At the same time, Spirit  planes are full and its load factor is actually the highest in the industry.

You might think of Spirit as the airline define by fees–there are fees for checked and carry-on bags, fees for booking on the phone and online, and even a $2 Department of Transportation Unintended Consequences fee. However, Spirit CEO Ben Baldanza is working to retrain the public to think of the airline in terms of efficiency of price. No only are Spirit airfares often the lowest in the industry, but they range between 20 to 25 percent below their closest competitor.

Peter joined Spirit CEO Ben Baldanza at the airport and on the plane to hear from the CEO about how the airline’s low-cost, no-frills business model is taking off.

Then, watch as Peter and Charlie Rose ask Baldanza the tough questions. Is it possible for a low-cost carrier to earn customer satisfaction? And do poor customer satisfaction rankings mean poor customer service?

Read the full transcript of Peter’s conversation with Spirit Airlines CEO Ben Baldanza with An Airline for the 99 Percent: Ben Baldanza Speaks Out.

For more information about Spirit, check out:

By Peter Greenberg for CBS News

Some interesting findings in this report from the World Economic Forum and the Boston Consulting Group on how travel and transport might look in 2025.

The Connected World report identifies four ways to transform travel and transport and while normally the tendency is to shy away from words and phrases such as revolutionise and game-changing, this is worthy of a fair showing not least because it’s ‘loosely’ based around technology that already exists.

The study tells us that all four have the potential for economic and social benefit so, what are they?

Fully-automated check-in, security and border control/smart visa (ACIS) – using technology to improve the journey through airports, stations etc assessing real-time risk classification of passengers, biometrics, luggage and body scanners and electronic visas

Tracking and transparency-based logistics optimiser (TATLO) – using RFID chips for the latest updates on products’ attributes, condition and environmenal impact to improve supply chain management

The only barriers to this high-tech vision of travel in the future is getting all the different parties involved to work together.

The report involved 50 travel and transport and information and communication technology companies and is part of the WEF’s Hyperconnectivity Initiative looking at the risks and opportunities of being always connected.

Without fanfare, Google has debuted two fresh tricks in search results: promoted destination travel advice and conversational search.

The top attractions at a destination are automatically highlighted in a promotional bar when you search Google for “top things to do” at your destination.

You can also now speak queries and get answers relevant to where you are and information Google knows about you.

The first innovation poses a challenge to destination marketers, while the second tweak posts a challenge to anyone designing interactive interfaces for travelers asking questions on the go.

Google’s own destination picks

Type “top things to do in Dublin” into Google’s main search box on desktop browsers in the US and Europe and you’ll see the following result:

A giant black carousel will pop up above the search results for “top things to do in Dublin.”

The box spotlights horizontal thumbnail images of the main attractions for that destination, generated with an editorially influenced algorithm.

In Dublin’s case, one of the first results to appear is “Dublin Castle,” despite the castle not being the most-visited attraction in the city. Click on the image, and your search will be automatically re-run for “facts about Dublin Castle.”

Pity the Dublin tourism organization, though. The website, Visit Dublin, ranks third in the search results, after Time Out’s and TripAdvisor’s listings for Dublin.

Given Google’s landgrab for screen real estate, that third result doesn’t appear on the screen when viewed on a 15inch MacBook Pro’s screen via Chrome. That’s bad news if users don’t bother to scroll vertically and instead take advantage of Google’s horizontal screen movement.

About 60 attractions are featured in the carousel, which can be scrolled by clicking. In our anecdotal search for various major cities in the US and Europe we were impressed by the quality of the attractions that Google chose to feature. On first glance, it doesn’t appear possible to game the results.

A side observation: Google is becoming increasingly fond of horizontally scrolled information, a design detail pioneered via its Google Now and Field Trip apps in their Android versions.

Talking back to Google

In other news, today Google began “conversational search” for users of its Chrome desktop browser.

Click on the microphone icon in the search box to speak your query using voice search. The surprise is that Google will now respond by speaking the answer back to you, and you can seamlessly ask a follow-up question, and Google will respond with an answer instantly, too.

No more typing or pauses. This back-and-forth can go on in an infinite loop, if you have the energy.

It’s even more powerful than it sounds. For a better description of “conversational search,” here’s the scoop from Danny Sullivan, founder of Search Engine Land:

Sometimes you can speak and get answers back from a single question that takes in more than what you explicitly said because Google knows where you’re at or you’ve given it access to some of your private information.

Weather is a good example. Here, I spoke, “Will it rain tomorrow?” and got back:

Google spoke to me, “No, rain is not expected tomorrow in Newport Beach. The forecast is 70 degrees and cloudy” and displayed the weather forecast. I hadn’t told it where I was, or that I wanted a weather forecast explicitly. But it knew my location, knew rain was related to weather and delivered up a great answer.

If you’ve enabled Google to access personal information through the Gmail Field Trial (a bad name since it now includes things beyond Gmail), speaking something like “what’s happening today” can bring back your agenda.

While still a novelty, the tool points the direction that Google is heading for how search queries are handled. By creating an industry benchmark, other company’s products will be judged accordingly.

While not practical in most desktop settings, voice-based queries could be quite useful on mobile devices, which is presumably Google’s next step for this technology.

Google Now already “surfaces” your personal information out of your calendars, apps, and records to tell you what you need during the day without you having to summon it. But a voice-based search could turn Google search on any platform into a true day-of-travel competitor for products like TripIt, GateGuru and the like.

Many user interfaces may have to be re-designed to accomodate a user expectation of true interactivity.

(To use the conversational search service, your Chrome browser must be up to date.

If the feature isn’t working for you, go to the Chrome menu bar, select “Preferences” from the drop-down menu, and then choose “settings” from the options inside the browser windwo screen. You’ll be prompted to see if your browser is automatically up to date or if you need to manually update it.

Alternatively, you can find settings by loading Google’s homepage and looking for the word “settings” in the bottom right-hand corner of the homepage.)

People are always willing to travel to see great art, so why not stay at a hotel that’s practically an art gallery in its own right?

Check out the Rosewood San Miguel de Allende in Mexico. This area is known as an artist haven, so it’s no surprise that a hotel would have its own gallery. The Otto Gallery is opening in the hotel this spring and will focus on works from Mexican and international artists.

Maybe you’ve heard of the 21C Museum Hotel in Louisville, Kentucky. Well, their art hotel concept is so successful they’ve opened two more: in Bentonville, Arkansas, and in Cincinnati.

Meanwhile, art is everywhere in the Conrad Indianapolis: The Long-Sharp Gallery has everything from Dali to Warhol, and contemporary artists are on display in the hotel’s second floor.

The Mandarin Oriental Hyde Park London has a partnership with Halcyon gallery, with works from the masters inside the Royal Suite that are actually for sale. But if that’s not in your budget, just ask to see the hotel’s meeting space, which has original masters on display from the National Maritime Museum.

For more information, visit the museum archives.

Keep reading for more travel tips.

NB: This is a viewpoint from Riley Gibson, CEO and co-founder of Napkin Labs.

A smarter use of information could help travel brands differentiate themselves more effectively, boosting their margins.

Loyalty programs are broken

As the market has become more price-driven, loyalty to brands has decreased. The travel and tourism industry must figure out how to reintroduce loyalty back into their relationship with guests.

Most people would instinctively think the way to do this is to use loyalty programs.

Yet Deloitte recently published a loyalty study that found that only 8% of survey respondents say they always stay at the same brand of hotel, while just 14% of survey respondents say they always fly on the same airline.

The same Deloitte study found ‘best-case scenario’ is that hotel loyalty programs (as they are constituted today) have either little or no impact on travelers purchase decisions, or, worst case, these programs drive undesirable “brand-switching behavior.”

Earn brand loyalty by effectively using information

Many industry insiders and experts have underestimated how the amount of information newly available to consumers has changed the marketing game.

Travelers are demanding and consuming more information than ever before. This demand has led to a reshaping of many industries — especially travel and hospitality.

The information demand is also leading to a change in how brands try to attract consumers.

Take a look at the airline industry. An entirely new business model — the low-cost airline carrier — has arisen to meet the demand for price transparency.

Many people draw the wrong lesson about the success of low-cost airlines. They think the lesson is that one should “price-cut” one’s way to popularity.

So they slash prices and strip services and other unique factors that truly differentiated their brands in the first place. This is often a mistake.

The success of low-cost airlines is as about something else. These airlines responded more effectively than traditional airlines to the information problem of the digital era.

Traditional carriers didn’t communicate prices in a transparent way, and low-cost carriers stepped into the breach and stole customers by being transparent with the information consumers wanted (price signaling).

Information is becoming a vital factor in the shaping of branding messages for many products and services. As more information is available to travelers, brands will have to fight to differentiate themselves within the marketplace by using information more effectively.

Why aren’t loyalty programs working?

Loyalty is more complex and driven by emotions and behavior. To reintroduce loyalty into the consumer relationship, brands needs to play on these emotions and behaviors.

With the rise of social media and networking, travel and hospitality brands have an opportunity to gain more intimate knowledge of who their guests are and what they desire. Brands need to establish a platform for communication giving their guests the opportunity to tell them what they want, hope for and wish for and then act on it.

British Airways began acting on this strategy with its “Know Me” program in 2012.

Joe Boswell, the head of British Airways‘ customer analysis, said on the VIP customer service improvement program:

“We are basically trying to recreate the feeling of recognition you can get at your favorite restaurant.”

By researching and tracking their guests they are able to provide a better experience to travelers that will keep them coming back because the brand knows their preferences.

Loyalty becomes less about offering afree hotel stay for every ten visits a customer makes and becomes something else, something more powerful — namely, an appeal to a customer’s emotions through personalization.

Use information to improve your branding

Travel brands need to take an extra step to pursue a new path to loyalty.

A classic example: Ritz-Carlton surpassed a guest’s expectations with a little gift of red pepper flakes.

A repeat guest ordered room-service pizza while on a business trip, but he forgot to ask for red pepper flakes. Unbeknownst to him, Ritz-Carlton had made a note in their system from the one other time he had ordered room-service pizza that he liked red pepper flakes.

The man was delighted with the thoughtfulness of the hotel and will remember their actions next time he is booking travel. These preferences were learned by tracking guests and by training employees to review those guest profiles systematically and to act on the information obtained.

Travel and tourism brands can begin the ‘getting-to-know-you’ phase at earlier stages, including during research and booking, by establishing an open line of communication for their guests.

Social networks and communities are a natural fit for this. But, the first step is always asking. It may seem like a cliche, but now more than ever, information is power.

NB: This is a viewpoint from Riley Gibson, CEO and co-founder of Napkin Labs. Portraits of people image via Shutterstock.

Love it or hate it, Spirit Airlines has built a well-established identity as a low-cost carrier. CEO Ben Baldanza speaks directly to Peter about the airline’s policies, its role in the industry and his overall strategy.

Peter Greenberg: The most important question of the day, Ben. Give us your full name and your title.

Ben Baldanza: My name’s Ben Baldanza. And I’m the Chief Executive Officer of Spirit Airlines.

PG: For those people who just woke up today and had no idea that you existed, can you describe Spirit Air?

BB: At Spirit Air, we are an airline that is focused first on the lowest-price way to get from A to B. So we’ve built our airline so we can have the lowest possible prices. And with that, we want to have an on-time flight, a really friendly travel experience, but at the lowest price possible, and to that end, we sorta create an option versus what the rest of the industry’s doing.

PG: Let’s talk about what the rest of the industry is doing. If you take a look at all the mergers and acquisitions, some failures out there, we’re getting fewer and fewer airlines out there, aren’t we?

BB: That’s a result of an industry that historically has been financially really unstable. And if you look at the industry really since deregulation in 1978, there have been years of boom and lots of years of bust. And part of that was because there were many different carriers all competing for a lot of the same space.

And what’s happened over the last few years is the consolidations have done two things. They’ve stabilized the industry financially in some ways. But the result of that has been higher fares and some fewer service options. Which is where Spirit comes in. Because we create, again, that alternative low-price option.

PG: Well, there’s that famous Richard Branson quote that if you want to be a millionaire, start with $1 billion and start an airline. So why would anybody want to start an airline, then?

BB: When I came to Spirit in 2005, we said, “Let’s look at the airlines that make money all the time and those that don’t.” And there were two buckets. One was Southwest, Ryanair, Emirates Air, Singapore Airlines– all really were extreme in what they did.

We looked at Southwest and Ryanair and Air Asia’s and we said, “So let’s be an airline that can make money in good times and in bad times, high-fuel prices, low-fuel prices– economic recession or economic boom.” And so we’re going to build our airline to look like Ryan in Europe.

PG: People might say you’re dreaming.

BB: Yes but since 2007, since we’ve turned the airline to that kind of airline, we’ve made money. When oil went to $147 in 2008, we still made money. In 2008, our CFO at the time used to joke that we outperformed the industry by $10.1 billion. Because the industry lost $10 billion and we made 1 cent.

The reality is through high fuel prices, through economic recession, through even some internal issues (the pilot strike in 2010 when didn’t run the airline for five days) we’ve made money in every year since then because we built a sustainable– resilient business model that a big chunk of customers really like.

Not every customer. We don’t cater to corporate business travelers. If somebody else is buying your ticket, you’re probably not going to buy a ticket on Spirit Airlines. But if you’re paying for the ticket, you have a good chance of seeing our value as what you’re looking for.

PG: Because you’re driven by price?

BB: That’s exactly right. Everything we do at the airline is to create a low entry price point or a low ticket price point. Sometimes we get called a no-frills airline. That’s wrong. We’re a very high-frills airline. We just charge incrementally for each of the frills. And the advantage of that to the consumer is they pay for what they care about and they save on what they don’t use. So they only pay for what they want.

more>>

In response to the EF4 tornado that ripped through the suburbs of Oklahoma City on May 20, leaving 24 dead–including nine children–and hundreds more injured, charitable organizations are asking for assistance in their relief efforts for victims.

First responders are in a race against time searching for survivors in Moore, Oklahoma, the hardest-hit area, where two elementary schools were in the path of this terror storm.  Aside from the tragic loss of life felt there and across southern Oklahoma City, thousands of families have lost their homes and everything they owned.

Many of us want to help and there are different ways in which we can. Below is a list (still growing) of organizations assisting in the relief efforts in Oklahoma as well as tools for more information.

Gov. Mary Fallin of Oklahoma is posting real-time updates on her Twitter page.  You can follow her @GovMaryFallin

Your Complete A-Z Guide of How to Help

AMERICARES

AmeriCares is a non-profit emergency response and global health organization. It is asking for monetary donations to aid in the delivery of medical and humanitarian aid as well as to help purchase supplies needed for relief efforts.

DONORSCHOOSE.ORG

Donors Choose is an online charity that sends supplies to teachers who’ve requested need for specific projects within their classrooms. Donors can contribute financial donations to specific projects and help supply a classroom with fundamental learning equipment.

From their website:

“When teachers in Moore are ready, we will help them create classroom recovery projects for everything from furniture to food to therapy resources. These teachers know best what their students need, and we can empower them to rebuild their classrooms.”

All donations will be sent to the teachers in Moore, Oklahoma.

FEED THE CHILDREN

Feed The Children, a Christian organization headquarted in Oklahoma City, is preparing emergency disaster relief supplies to aid victims of the Moore tornadoes and is accepting donations at a number of locations. Items that will be accepted are diapers, canned goods, non-perishable food and snack items, water and sports drinks.

Outside the state, you can also donate money by calling 800-627-4556, visiting the website, or by texting “DISASTER” to 80888.

RED CROSS

The Oklahoma Red Cross is asking people to make a $10 donation by texting Red Cross to 90999. The donations allow the Red Cross to purchase needed supplies.

If you are looking for a family member, you can visit www.safeandwell.org. Local Red Cross units will be dispatched throughout the damaged area.

REGIONAL FOOD BANK OF OKLAHOMA

The Regional Food Bank of Oklahoma, in partnership with Oklahoma Voluntary Organizations Active in Disaster, is asking that the public support all rescue, recovery and disaster relief efforts with donations of cash to your favorite responding charity.

To make a tax deductible donation to the Regional Food Bank of Oklahoma, go to their website or call 604-7111 or text FOOD to 32333 to give $10 to relief efforts.

OKLAHOMA BAPTIST RELIEF CENTER

The Oklahoma Bapist Relief Center is on the ground help. Those interested can make a tax-deductible donation to the BGCO’s Disaster Relief ministry, by visiting its website or BY calling 942-3800. All money goes toward disaster relief and helping victims.

For photos, information and updates, visit the Oklahoma Baptists’ blog.

OKLAHOMA BLOOD INSTITUTE

Donors to the Oklahoma Blood Institute provide every drop of blood needed by patients in all metro-Oklahoma City hospitals and 140 others across the state. Locations of donor centers and mobile blood drives can be found on its website.

OPERATION USA

Headquartered in Los Angeles, the relief agency Operation USA is dedicated to providing emergency aid where needed to community-based health organizations across Oklahoma. Donate online at www.opusa.org, or by phone at 1.800.678.7255

OU SOONERS AT THE UNIVERSITY OF OKLAHOMA

The University of Oklahoma is opening up spaces in housing for the displaced families. Call 405-325-2511

SALVATION ARMY

The Salvation Army Arkansas-Oklahoma Division has dispatched disaster response teams.

Donations can be made in the following ways:

• The Salvation Army Disaster Relief, P.O. Box 12600, Oklahoma City, OK 73157. Designate Oklahoma Tornado Relief on all checks.
• Donate by phone: (800) 725-2769
• Donate online: donate.salvationarmyusa.org/uss/eds

UNITED WAY OF CENTRAL OKLAHOMA

United Way of Central Oklahoma has activated its disaster relief fund, so individuals may give specifically to the May tornadoes relief and recovery efforts. Fund dollars will be distributed without administrative fees to United Way Partner Agencies working on the tornado relief efforts.

To donate, go to www.unitedwayokc.org or by mail to United Way of Central Oklahoma, P.O. Box 837, Oklahoma City, OK 73101 with notation for May Tornado Relief.

For more information, please contact Karla Bradshaw at (405) 235-3534.

Irene Moore for PeterGreenberg.com

SYSTEMS: Space, the final frontier – apparently. Forget the star-struck, Trekkie nature of space exploration  for a moment and note that there is a serious amount of jockeying for position going on up there. READ MORE on New York Magazine.

At dawn one morning last November – just as the edge of earth comprising Florida spun into the field of light bursting from roughly 93 million miles away – she emerged one last time from the Vehicle Assembly Building.

Who is “she”?

This was what had been billed as the final mission of the Space Shuttle Atlantis, a 9.8-mile journey to her final resting place at the Kennedy Space Center’s visitors’ complex.

That Atlantis’s journey would begin at the VAB—525 feet tall, the largest single-story structure in the world, having sprouted a half-century ago in the frenzy of the space race, as stupendous an achievement as each of the space-faring rockets that would be assembled inside it—multiplied the emotion.

But change is coming…

READ MORE on New York Magazine

NB: Earth orbit image via Sutterstock.

Extremely narrow gap at the top of the leading travel websites in Australia, with Wotif taking a fraction of a lead over rival online travel agency brand Webjet.

Just 0.13% market share separates the pair as third placed Expedia loses 1% of its own between March and April this year.

In the airline category, Virgin Australia continues to lose market share and is now some 10.5% behind market leader Qantas.

Most popular travel websites in Australia for April 2013:

Agency

Destinations and Accommodation

Airlines

Search Terms

NB: Data courtesy of Experian Hitwise

NB2: Uluru image via Shutterstock.

Last night, CBS affiliate WKMG Local 6 broke the story of what appeared to be a cover up of sexual misconduct committed by a staff member toward a young girl on board the Disney Dream cruise ship.

The incident occurred on August 5, 2012, when surveillance video captured an 11-year-old girl from Brazil being molested by a Disney employee in an elevator. The footage recorded the employee groping the child’s chest and forcibly kissing her.

The incident is not in dispute, but the now WKMG has been investigating the cruise line’s handling of the incident and the timing in question. At issue is a question of the country of jurisdiction and if Disney’s actions allowed one of its employees to escape U.S. prosecution.

Image Credit: WKMG

The incident occurred just before 3 pm while the ship was docked in Port Canaveral, Florida. The victim promptly reported it to ship authorities, but the ship pulled out of port at 5:02 pm if nothing criminal had occurred.

The incident was not officially handled by law enforcement until August 7, when the former Disney employees confessed to the crime to the police in Nassau, Bahamas. At this point in the timeline, the victim’s grandmother had decided that she did not want the crime investigated.

WKMG alleges that if the incident had been reported in Florida, the employee would have been arrested for felony regardless of the victim’s family’s wishes. Felony charges for molestation are punishable by 25 years to life in prison.

Instead, Disney removed the subject from the ship and in the hands of Bahamas law enforcement, Disney arranged for the employee in question to return to India, as per standard employee contract provisions.

Following the WKMG report, we reached out to Rebecca Peddie, manager, public affairs of Disney Cruise Line which who offered the following statement:

“We take matters of this nature very seriously as the safety and security of our guests is our top priority. We notified all of the authorities, including the Port Canaveral Police Department, the Royal Bahamian Police Force, the Coast Guard and the FBI and took proper action. When we arrived in Nassau, the Royal Bahamian Police Force came aboard the ship for an investigation. Ultimately, the family chose not to take further action.”

While it’s not clear why WKMG chose to pursue this story nearly a year after the incident took place, it does open the conversation about cruise safety and crime reporting at sea. Should you be concerned about personal safety while you’re on a ship?

The International Council of Cruise Lines (now part of CLIA) once noted that the rate of sexual assault on cruise ships is said to be 17.6 per 100,000 as compared to a U.S. rate of 32.2 per 100,000. According to Ross Klein, founder of CruiseJunkie.com, sexual assault on cruises is approx 50 percent higher than on land.

credit: Matt Stroshane

Accurate reporting is a key issue. In 2010, Congress passed a law that was originally designed to create a national database of crimes that occur on cruise ships. However, the bill was watered down upon signing and the new act requires cruise lines to report all serious crimes aboard ships to the FBI, and not to a public database.  The public database now only has records of crimes that are no longer under investigation. As an offshoot it appears that crime has been reduced more than it actually has been. The FBI had once had public record of more than 400 crimes, though now there are under a dozen in the public database.

In issues of jurisdiction as occurred with the Disney Dream, cruisers should be aware that of the law at sea is not necessarily U.S. law. Maritime law is complex but can best be understood by the 24-mile-rule. Within 24 miles of a port, a cruise ship is subject to the law of that land (i.e. U.S. or Bahamian law). On the open seas (aka high seas or international waters), the law of that ship is the law of the country whose flag the ship is flying. And the flag or nation of some popular cruise ships may surprise you.

Watch the full WKMG to see how the laws of jurisdiction impacted the incident onboard the Disney Dream.

video platformvideo managementvideo solutionsvideo player

Was this handled correctly by the law and by Disney? Sound off below!

For recent issues of cruise safety, check out:

• What Happens When a Cruise Passenger Goes Overboard?
• Is Carnival Cruise Cutting Corners: The Experts Weigh In
• Two Reasons to Buy Travel Insurance for Your Next Cruise
• Post Carnival Triumph: How Safe Is Your Cruise?

By Lily J. Kosner for PeterGreenberg.com

Some of the world’s best cities are worth a second or third visit. If you’re headed over to Europe this summer, contributor Lilit Marcus shows how to escape the rookie crowds and find a more authentic side of Paris on your second (or third) trip.

Congratulations! You’re lucky enough to visit Paris, one of the greatest cities in the world, not once but twice. Odds are pretty good that you already went to the top of the Eiffel Tower, gaped in awe at Notre Dame, and got a photo of yourself smiling next to the Mona Lisa. Good news, though – there’s still plenty more to see and do in the City of Light, and you certainly won’t have as many other tourists waiting in line in front of you.

Pick a different neighborhood to stay in so that you can experience a new angle of French local cool, then prepare to see a whole new part of this incredible city.

Now that you’ve hit all the highlights, spend a little time focusing in on just what makes Paris so great. Already been to the Pantheon? If you haven’t, it’s definitely worth the visit, but make sure you stop at the nearby Eglise de St.Etienne, which is beautiful, almost always empty, and just around the corner. From there, you can partake in a particularly Parisian pastime – the flaner, or nice long walk with no specific destination, by strolling through the Latin Quarter. If you’ve already been to the Louvre and the Musee d’Orsay, invest in a smaller but just as beloved museum.

Focus on the work of one artist at the Rodin Museum (which has a gorgeous sculpture garden worth spending time in on a sunny afternoon) or the Picasso Museum in the super-bobo 3rd arrondissement.  Prefer a variety of styles and subjects? Check out the Museum of the Orangerie or the Luxembourg Museum, both of which are just next to the Jardins de Luxembourg in the 6^th arrondissement. The totally-free Museum of the Romantic Life (which is more about the literary style than the daily practice of love, btw) in the 9^th arrondissement is gorgeous and has a tea room that’s divine during the afternoon. Though most people associate Paris with classical or romantic art, there is a very good Modern Art Museum not far from the Champs-Elysees.

If you didn’t make it on your first trip, check out the Pere Lachaise cemetery, which is considered the most famous cemetery in the world. Among the people buried there are Edith Piaf, Oscar Wilde, Maria Callas, Sarah Bernhardt, Marcel Marceau, and (probably the most famous with tourists) Jim Morrison. To make the best of your visit, do some research ahead of time. The cemetery is huge and the provided (posted, not printed out) maps are not terribly helpful. If there are a few specific graves you’d like to see, download maps on your phone ahead of time or use an app to help you find them.

There’s one more important thing to do on your second visit to Paris: get out of town. Even lifelong lovers of Paris need to see the country sometimes. There are great and relatively easy day trips from Paris, including Versailles, Disneyland Paris (What? Kids really like it), and Monet’s house at Giverny. If you want to take a pre-arranged guided tour (and not have to deal with navigating mass transit), the Paris City Vision company comes highly recommended. If you’re slightly more ambitious and want to do a whole weekend outside of Paris, the city of Reims (in the Champagne region), the beaches of Normandy (hugely popular with World War II buffs), and the wine country of Burgundy are also excellent places to see more of the country.

Before heading home, there’s one final thing to work on – your French, of course. Give yourself one afternoon to relax in a café or coffee shop – Telescope, near the Louvre, and Merci, not far from Place de la Republique, are both too cool to be believed – and while the afternoon away reading a French newspaper and enjoying some of the best coffee in the city. Merci is also a used bookstore, so if you’re feeling ambitious, pick up quelque chose a lire on the flight home.

Next thing you know, it’ll be time for a third visit.

For more adventures in Paris, check out:

• Foodie Round-Up: The Complete Guide to Macarons in Paris
• Ask the Locals: City Guide to Paris France
• A Single Woman Finds Love in Paris Cooking School
• Suzy Gershman’s Postcard from Paris

By Lilit Marcus for PeterGreenberg.com. Lilit is a freelance writer who lives on the Lower East Side and tries to get out of Manhattan as much as possible. Her work has also appeared in Glamour, The Daily, and Jaunted.com. Follow her on twitter at @LilitMarcus.

Like so many trip planning sites, Tripshare grew out of a desire to apply some modern technology to offline itinerary planning and sharing.

The company was founded in 2011 but only emerged from beta last week with the launch of an enhanced application for iPad.

Founder and CEO Bob Dana, who formerly headed up finance at Virgin America, is joined by Eric Kapke as vice president of engineering and acting chief technology officer. Kapke replaces the original CTO Ken Goto.

To date the company has received $1.47m in funding from three external rounds and it plans to raise additional funding in the third quarter of this year.

Here’s Tripshare’s take on the size of its potential market:

OTA commissions are roughly $15-20 billion, dominated by hotel bookings. If just 10% of such bookings are for trips that would benefit from the use of draft itinerary creation and sharing, then Tripshare’s total addressable market is $1.5-2.0 billion. As an affiliate, our share of this market opportunity is 40-50%. The market opportunity is further reduced because Tripshare’s booking capability is presently limited to the iPad, though the company expects to add booking from the web in Q3 2013.

Competition is just about everyone from OTAs, meta-search engines and flash deal sites to travel supplier direct websites and applications although they don’t tend to offer itinerary creation and sharing tools.

Further competition lies in social travel sites and applications including Igougo, Gogobot (TLabs here), Wanderfly (acquired by Tripadvisor in October), Trippy (TLabs here)and the list goes on although Tripshare sees these as more focused on the inspiration phase with heavy emphasis on sharing.

A third category of rivals is the companies focused on creating real, multi-category itineraries with dates and times such as Tripomatic (TLabs here), Triporama, Yahoo’s Goplanit, Utrip (TLabs here), Plnnr (TLabs here)and Traverik (TLabs here) although Tripshare says none have the ability to store and update price and availability.

When it comes to making money, Tripshare gets a share of revenue from affiliate distribution agreements in place with content partners including Expedia Affiliate Network, Fly.com, Viator and HomeAway. The hope is to attract users and become profitable via features and functionality.

Describe what your start-up does, what problem it solves (differently to what is already out there) and for whom?

Tripshare is the first travel planning app to let users create bookable itineraries with actual dates, prices and availability for flights, hotels, vacation rentals and tours. Tripshare trips are more than wish lists. They are real and actionable.

It is ideal for complex trips or for people who plan travel meticulously. Tripshare is also a good fit for small groups traveling together to attend weddings, family reunions, or sports events. The team also sees interest from professionals including travel agents, tour guides and B&B and vacation rental owners who seek a better form of communicating itinerary information to, and getting feedback from, customers.

Why should people or companies use your startup?

Online travel offers many services for inspiration and for booking, but between them is a gap – the need to collect, organize, and share specific information before committing. For complex trips or to collaborate with others, travel planners create draft itineraries. Tripshare’s research shows that 55% of US adults have made itineraries, overwhelmingly for leisure travel. Yet modern tools are lacking; over half of these itineraries are still created with pencil and paper.

Tripshare aims to bring the draft itinerary into the 21st century with multi-category map-based search, a drag-n-drop trip editor, and trip “meta data” (photos, descriptions, reviews and pricing) that is not only stored with the itinerary but update-able in real time and available to anyone with whom the trip is shared.

Other than going viral and receiving mountains of positive PR, what is the strategy for raising awareness and getting customers/users?

As an iPad app, initially we will benefit from positioning within Apple’s iTunes App Store, eg on May 16th their editorial staff designated us as a “New & Noteworthy” app in the travel category. Tripshare also hopes to gain traction by focusing on early adopters who actively create and share trips for other people to use. Consumers may see Tripshare as a “tool for self expression”, creating and sharing trips much the same way they create and share music playlists.

With the introduction of trip creation on our website, Tripshare expects to broaden its appeal to professionals including travel agents, tour guides and B&B and vacation rental owners. We hope professionals will use our product for “B2C trip sharing” as a way to convert leads into customers. In the second half of 2013 we expect to introduce features that address this market specifically via a Pro account. Each trip shared exposes us to a new potential user.

How did your initial idea evolve? Were there changes/any pivots along the way? What other options have you considered for the business if the original vision fails?

We have remained true to the concept of trip creation, sharing and booking in a single experience. What we learned through our soft launch and feedback from our first 20,000 downloads is that users wanted (i) more browse-able featured content prior to the exercise of creating a new trip, and (ii) a simpler, more intuitive interface. Our new release, Tripshare v2.0 for the iPad, addresses these issues.

If retail consumer adoption proves more difficult than expected, then we will focus more of our resources on the professional community, especially traditional travel agents. Tripshare can replace existing back-end supplier sources with content that is commission-able to travel agents, optimizing our product for that market. If consumers like our product but we find it too time consuming or expensive to build the Tripshare brand, we can pursue white label opportunities as well.

Where do you see yourselves in 3 years time, what specific challenges do you hope to have overcome?

Tripshare’s product strategy is based on making continual advances in four core areas:

• Content
• Features
• Platforms
• Community

2013 will be about bringing Tripshare to the web and adding one or two new content partners that add new categories of content, e.g. car rentals. With incremental funding we will also bring Tripshare to the iPhone. 2014 will be all about creating a community.

In three years, we hope to have at least a million active users and to be profitable. We will be delighted if we are seen as “Tripit for before you book.”

What is wrong with the travel, tourism and hospitality industry that requires another startup to help it out?

We are first and foremost a technology company and we are tackling one of online travel’s hardest problems – the draft itinerary. People already create draft itineraries for complex trips, to gain consensus on travel decisions, or to persuade others to join them. Our research shows that over half of such trips are still made with pencil/pen and paper.

Our challenge lies in combining multi-category search, cloud-based itinerary storage, real-time synchronization and price/availability updating, and booking into a simple, intuitive interface that consumers can use without a 50-page operating manual. Others have tried and come up short. We hope our winning combination will be based on deep experience, strong technical capability, focus on our core mission, and above all the courage of our convictions.

Tnooz view:

When Tnooz and its team of nodes set out predictions for 2013, mobile apps and B2B startups were tipped by many. Tripshare has both these elements and perhaps it will be those that see it through these first difficult years. And, so far, it’s funded.

However, with just about everyone, old and new as your competitor, you’ve got to wonder how another trip planning service will gain traction. Only last week social travel app Twigmore decided to call it a day, in November Gtrot pivoted to become a gift service while a year ago travel inspiration startup Joobili closed.

All of that said, Tripshare has lots going for it, established affiliate distribution partnerships, an improved user interface after months of feedback and a nifty trip editor tool to name just a few.

Up next will be a bookable website and more funding and if B2C and building a community proves too difficult, time-consuming and expensive the startup will explore further B2B and white-label options.

Tripshare seems to be setting out its store based on the ability to store and update itineraries with the latest pricing and availability and only time will tell if the technology is good enough to alleviate the pain of trip planning (and booking) once and for all.

Just another startup with ‘trip’ in its name or something more?

Video:

NB: TLabs Showcase is part of the wider TLabs project from Tnooz.

No big news here…airlines fees keep going up. And every time one airline raises a fee, others follow.

United Airlines started the latest trend by raising the change fee for nonrefundable domestic tickets. It used to be $150, and now it’s $200. Planning to fly to South America? Better be sure because changing it will cost you $300. US Airways followed suit by upping its change fee on domestic flights by $50. The good news is the cost to change international flights is still the same.

Other airlines are raising checked-bag fees, and Frontier Airlines will now charge $25 to $100 for the overhead bin if you book a ticket anywhere other than their website.

A study from TravelNerd found that U.S. airlines have changed 52 different fees since the beginning of 2012. The only good news…most of those increases are nominal, about $5 to $10.

But it’s a profit center for the airlines: while they have to pay state and federal taxes on airfare, those ancillary fees only get hit by a much more moderate sales tax. And so the airlines win and you…lose.

For more information, visit the Airport & Airline archives.

Keep reading for more travel tips.

Tomorrow, a startup called Bustripping officially launches with a party on the rooftop of the Manhattan headquarters of Gawker Media.

It enters a race to become the Kayak of bus ticketing metasearch that is currently being led by Wanderu and Bus Catchers.

After users punch in their destination and travel dates, each website pulls a list of long-haul buses that serve the itinerary. A user can sort the results by cost, trip duration, and operator.

Technological challenges

Most bus companies do not provide anyone with APIs of schedules and fares, which makes it difficult to build a metasearch site.

Startups need to create proprietary systems to collect data, ensure the data is accurate, and enable customers to be redirected into the check-out pages of these bus companies websites in simple and fast ways.

US ticketing boom

The US is a growth market for inter-city buses. In 2011 and 2012, passenger volume for curb-side, long-distance bus operators like Megabus and BoltBus grew by 30%, according to a study released in January by DePaul University.

Europe and Asia are also seeing strong growth in bus ticketing, and a dire need for metasearch–especially on mobile-optimized websites. There’s no true mobile bus websites. Usablenet conversions is as close as it gets currently.

Here’s the lowdown on the latest news from each startup.

Best placed to become the next Kayak
Wanderu
The pitch: In private beta. Since Tnooz profiled Wanderu last November, this Boston startup has seen the most growth in traffic, sales, funding interest and marketing coups. Examples: It won the award for “Most Innovative Technology” at SXSW Interactive in March (the same award that Hipmunk and Siri received in previous years).
Coverage, as of today: The main US corridors. Includes Boltbus.
Biggest flaw today: Still in beta, 15,000 users signed up but hardly anyone has actually booked a ticket through the site yet.
Funding situation: It closed a fresh funding round in April (amount undisclosed). Investors include Jeff Clarke, chairman of Travelport.
Next move: Public launch in the summer. Site is fully mobile optimized, but even so, it is planning to release mobile optimized checkout soon. The company is hiring for four positions, including full-stack software architect and a dev ops engineer.

Launching this week with buzz
Bustripping
The pitch: The first website and mobile app for Kayak-style comparison bus shopping in North America.
Coverage, as of today: Focusing on routes in the Northeast (mainly NYC, Boston, Philadelphia, and D.C.), as well as L.A. to Vegas, San Diego and other southern California routes.
Biggest flaw today: No coverage of Boltbus or Megabus, the largest discount players.
Funding situation: Seeking $2 million by end of the year. Debuting with $30,000 in loans and cash.
Next move: The company is talking with companies in Chicago to deepen its coverage of the Midwest. An iPhone app is on track to be available for free download from iTunes by the end of June.

The dark horse of bus metasearch
Bus Catchers
The pitch: Metasearch for US that works and has super-fast response times. Its seamless integration with Megabus and Boltbus is impressive.
Coverage, as of today: Northeastern US, half-dozen most popular destinations, with the largest operators included (such as Megabus and Boltbus).
Biggest flaw today: Single-person operation. Can it scale?
Funding situation: Sweat equity.
Next move: The site is run by Nico Jimenez, who will be starting a PhD at Stanford in the autumn. So the site’s next moves are to add air travel, Amtrak, CO2 consumption estimates, and more locations. Jimenez says he has developed a framework for automatic web-browsing click by click and html parsing that will allow the site to function maintenance-free, using a assortment of Python scripts that pull data from the various bus websites twice a day.

Who can become the Kayak of bus travel?

It will be a long while before any one of these startups breaks out of the pack and gains significant consumer traction in their geographic market. The reason is best summarized by Polina Raygorodskaya, CEO of Wanderu:

The reason behind it is two fold: the difficulty of building the technology like this (you need to be both the middle layer data provider like Sabre and the consumer facing site) which requires you to have direct partnerships with carriers and a brilliant engineering team to solve the complex data problem.

If you look at the bus space, it is a very decentralized system with un-standardized technology and no data feeds and there are tens of thousands of possible routes and stops across the U.S. alone.

This is far more than you see in the airline space so it is a very complicated problem to solve.

For that reason, Wanderu seems to be doing the best job of positioning itself to become the Kayak of bus metasearch in North America. Its CTO/Co-founder has over 15 years of senior level programming/engineering, and the company has five additional full-time engineers, creating an excellent engineer-to-biz-dev ratio of two to one. The startup now belongs to PayPal incubator space.

Brutal business

Pombai, a Bangkok-based startup that Tnooz previously profiled, couldn’t get the funding necessary to keep going so it is shutting down.

Previously, Bus Junction attempted to do bus ticketing for the northeastern US, but it shut down in 2010. Catapulter, which strove for multi-modal search for the northeastern US, has been inactive since 2011.

NB: Image courtesy of didbygraham via Flickr/Creative Commons.

NB: This is a viewpoint from Michelle Wohl, vice president of marketing at Revinate.

The popularity of online reviews and the importance of social media are changing the way that hotels are approaching how to gather customer feedback.

Historically, hotels have relied on extensive post-stay surveys and mystery shoppers to ascertain service levels, customer satisfaction, and areas for improvement.

Today, online reviews are providing hoteliers with rich data about guest satisfaction to help them please customers. In addition, online reviews provide a social currency that drives new bookings and trust in hotels.

We can learn a lot from the growth of online reviews to determine better ways to administer and use survey data.

First, and perhaps most obvious, online reviews are useful to both hoteliers and consumers because of their free-form structure that allows guests to talk only about the services and amenities that impacted their stays.

With traditional surveys, primarily closed-ended questions such as “please rate your satisfaction with your room from one to ten” will not yield rich data about what a customer liked or disliked about, for example, his room, or who at the hotel made his hotel special.

Rather, traditional surveys are formulated by hotels to focus on areas that they feel need to be measured, rather than what is most important and top of mind to customers.

The highly structured nature of traditional surveys used to be critical for accurately measuring and reporting on guest satisfaction but today new sentiment analysis technology makes it possible to easily analyze and report on unstructured data in just as reliable a way, with a much richer data-set.

Through reports that show which topics, from ontology specific to hospitality, are trending positively or negatively, management doesn’t have to know what to ask in advance to find hot-button issues or get detailed feedback about any service or amenity on property.

With reliable reporting comes the ability to fully operationalize the data, even basing compensation plans on the results. Equally important, it allows you to bring voice of the customer data into your discussions around capital improvements, training programs and operational changes.

The second reason why many hoteliers are rethinking traditional guest satisfaction survey methods is because they recognize the value that public guest feedback has on new bookings.

The TripBarometer Survey states that 93% of travellers worldwide say online reviews have an impact on their booking decisions.

This trend, in addition to SEO benefits and the fact that TripAdvisor’s Popularity Index takes review frequency in mind, makes it clear that hoteliers should focus on driving guests to share feedback publicly, through social channels, to reap the best rewards.

For hoteliers that worry what will happen when survey feedback can be shared publicly, it’s time to accept the reality that your guests are already writing and reading online reviews, tweets and posts about your hotel at an increasing rate.

Embrace the transparency as it drives consumer trust, allows you to connect with guests and access data not only about your hotel, but your competition. This competitive data can be easily mined to understand where you are winning and losing in guests’ eyes.

In April, 2012, the largest hospitality company in the world, Wyndham Hotels & Resorts replaced its traditional guest survey system with a solution that collects review style feedback directly from guests.

The decision was based on extensive research and testing, and this bold move has successfully unleashed the power of feedback to drive marketing exposure and bookings, in addition to providing even richer intelligence.

As a result, the hotels are benefiting from powerful insights about their guests that they can easily analyze with sentiment analysis technology, along with more public reviews, which is helping drive awareness of the hotels, in addition to popularity index scores.

NB: This is a viewpoint from Michelle Wohl, vice president of marketing at Revinate.

NB2: Survey image via Shutterstock.

Predictive analysis and affinity matching is common to countless digital services, such as Netflix and Pandora, and have been used in different ways in travel, such as Wanderfly or Gogobot.

Zofari is a new Android city guide that offers recommendations not on time, type of vacation or general interests, but based on actual neighborhoods, bars and restaurants.

The user inputs a favorite spot, and the app makes similar recommendations in a different city/neighborhood based on the input.

Like many co-founders in the travel space, Nate Weinstein came up with the idea while on a journey:

The initial idea was born on a vacation to Colombia, where the guidebook was woefully inadequate.

In 2 days, we’d tapped all the “decent” Bogota recommendations, and ended up in the hotel watching bad TV.  What I really wanted was to go find the Bogota equivalent of my favourite hometown neighbourhood, the East Village in New York.

This seemed like a natural evolution in location discovery, and after five great years at Google, I was ready for a new challenge. If you’ve ever been caught in a tourist trap, stuck in a hotel watching a crappy movie, or just at a general loss on where to go, Zofari was built for you.

A visit to the website offers a chance to explore the app in detail.

The team of two, Nate Weinstein (CEO) and Jason Kobilka (CTO), took a moment to answer Tnooz’s questions regarding their startup.

What is your estimation of market size?

At Zofari, our focus is on mobile advertising for accommodations. Based on current trends in m-commerce and hotel advertising space, we believe the potential current market to be between $600M and $1B, with a user base of ~50M (approximately 40% of smart phone users). As the mobile advertising ecosystem continues to mature, we expect these numbers to grow significantly.

What is the competitive landscape of your market?

The travel and local markets are obviously fiercely competitive, which our focus on mobile narrows marginally.  Yelp, Trip Advisor and increasingly Google, with its recent forays into content ownership, are serious incumbents.

In the middle-sized and start-up realm, Lonely Planet, Triposo and m-Guide have all established themselves as strong, talented players. We also expect big things from Hopper when they launch.

What is your revenue model and strategy for profitability?

While we know that price tends to be the top factor in a hotel-seeker’s decision tree, location is a close second. Our strategy is to become the premiere service at answering the question, “where should a person like me stay in City X?”  In terms of revenue model, we’re currently experimenting with both affiliate-based lead generation and CPC advertising.

Describe what your start-up does, what problem it solves (differently to what is already out there) and for whom?

Zofari is a new kind of personalized city guide. You tell us your favourite neighborhood, restaurant or bar and we find its best match in the destination of your choice. This is a local experience that just isn’t out there right now.

In reality, the best local recommendations come from a good friend who knows the city, knows you, and can tell you the places you’ll love. We know we can’t replace that friend (yet), but we can be there for the times when he or she doesn’t exist.

Why should people or companies use your startup?

If you’re someone who likes to get off the beaten path, who loves to explore, and wants to see places like a local sees them, Zofari is for you.

If you’ve ever been caught in a tourist trap, stuck in a hotel watching a crappy movie, or just at a general loss on where to go, Zofari was built for you.  We think of it as a new kind of city guide, that shimmies and adjusts based on your favorite places.

Of course, there are a number of companies that attempt to do this by leveraging your social graph, but we weren’t convinced that your friend network was necessarily the most effective proxy here as this will always tend to index towards over-sharers, which actually make up a very small portion of the population.

Our idea was to see if we couldn’t start by building something a little more canonical, and pull in other social signals and co-incidence down the road.

Other than going viral and receiving mountains of positive PR, what is the strategy for raising awareness and getting customers/users?

We use traditional marketing channels, including display and cpc keyword advertising, but we’ve also focused significant effort on SEO.

While apps have certainly dominated mobile travel usage, there’s still a huge amount of traffic originating from search.  Having launched and led with a mobile web product, we’re betting that we can start winning a good number of these organic searches, especially in the long tail.

How did your initial idea evolve? Were there changes/any pivots along the way? What other options have you considered for the business if the original vision fails?

We’re still in the finding-market-fit stage for the initial vision, which has been validated to a certain degree by very high levels of on-site engagement. That said, we understand how volatile the start-up landscape is, especially one with as many incumbents as travel/local.

We think the data set and methodologies we’ve built (and continue to build) could be applied to a number of other potential businesses, both B2C and B2B.

Where do you see yourselves in 3 years time, what specific challenges do you hope to have overcome?

In 3 years, we hope to have become one of the web’s premiere services at answering 2 questions: a) where should I stay and b) what should I do right now?  The key here, of course, is “I”.

In the near term, the vision and goal is to see if we can build an audience around answering the question ‘where should I go right now?’  So that means launching on native iPhone, refining our Android app, and continuing to develop search as a valid channel.  We’ll also work on building out higher degrees of personalization – as we get better at processing our data, our results can become more specific and tailored to the individual person, allowing specific preferences to weight our matches.

We’re also investigating a number of potential revenue channels — our early focus had been on hotel lead gen, but we’ve received interest from groups who have vested interests in building foot traffic to specific neighborhoods and districts, such as universities, neighborhood associations and commercial developers, so we’re having those conversations and seeing where they lead.

Our goal is to make our service completely personalized, so that when you tell us you love the Lower East Side, we know that you’re looking for a place with punk music venues and cool history, and aren’t particularly interested in the great bagels.  From a revenue perspective, the goal would certainly be to have enough quality traffic to justify our own ad auction.  That said, if we’re alive and kicking, we’ll be happy campers.

What is wrong with the travel, tourism and hospitality industry that requires another startup to help it out?

I think that when it comes to highly personalized recommendations, especially in short-lead and on-the-ground travel planning, travel guides have lagged where other content producers have flourished.

In the music, entertainment, news and even DIY verticals, you see high degrees of personalization.  Pandora, Netflix, Twitter, YouTube – these are platforms that are dedicated to delivering you a platter of content tailored to you.  As far as I know, there’s no major player in travel who’s cracked this nut.

I also think that folks like Airbnb, Yelp and Anthony Bourdain have shown that there’s a huge audience out there for anyone who can move people away from the traditional tourist traps and towards a more authentic local experience.  This is a great trend for everyone, and we hope to play a part in it.

Tnooz view:

This is an interesting idea – what makes it different than the myriad other travel planning products out there is that it actually focuses on finding places similar to places the user already knows and loves. Rather than starting from some cerebral concept of “hip” or “romantic,” which can mean different things to different people, Zofari promises to deliver on like-minded places for travelers seeking a direct connection to currently existing affinities.

The proof will be in the pudding. Will users find the recommendations useful? Will they find a bit more of a fun jumping off point into trip research? Will locals also find utility in the app, as they look to discover new places and establishments in their hometowns?

There are mom ‘n’ pop B&Bs, there are small, family-run hotels, and then there’s Bluefields Bay Villas.  Yes, it’s an amazing setting, with a caring and attentive staff and a marine sanctuary…but it’s also a great entryway to the real Jamaica away from the tourist crowds of Montego Bay, Ocho Rios and Negril.

Listen to Peter’s most recent show to hear from all the people who make Bluefields and Jamaica so special.  Check out the complete guest list, listen to the latest all-local podcast and stream the complete show below.

In a position paper, the Society of Consumer Affairs Professionals shows how vital it is for the travel industry to effectively manage the millions of records about travel behavior that the industry generates each day.

Defining Big Data

Context is always murky when it comes to the nebulous concept of Big Data – it doesn’t always mean the same thing to different people.

SOCAP defines Big Data as “the productive use of data in units of measure that far exceed megabytes and gigabytes.” While this is a broad definition, the idea behind Big Data is crystal clear: use the information that customers are already generating to provide them with better, more targeted – and ultimately more profitable – services and products.

Travel is ripe for that sort of use. Startups and incumbents alike are attempting to leverage this data into a useful, consumer-centric stream.

However, beyond simply managing and leveraging owned data streams, travel brands need to consider how to use other indications of consumer preferences and lifestyles:

If intelligent networks hold the key to next generation travel, Internet companies enjoy a bounty of data pouring in from cookies, log files, and other sources.

Take the photos being posted on Facebook or Instagram. Would the traveler sharing snaps from a trip to Ireland be interested in information about Scotland? If shown on a mountain bike, would that individual want to know more about local biking destinations or biking clubs? If shown standing in front of a car with a bicycle roof rack, wouldn’t a trunk rack be easier to use and avoid back problems down the road?

Big data and data analytics suggest that the future may belong to those firms best able to shape and deliver the consumer travel experience.

Personalization

In a series of interviews within the travel industry, the study authors are intent to show how Big Data can be used to increase impact and reduce friction across disciplines, both within a company and the industry.

Personalization is a key tenant of Big Data. With so much available information about a particular consumer, transaction or destination, the reality is one of detailed, accurate personalization.

In order to most effectively win at true personalization, large travel companies must work across silos to gather the myriad data points created by a consumer at different points, as the study emphasizes:

Information systems can be quite fragmented and even territorial, with records pertaining to a single customer showing up in reservation, post sales complaint, survey, loyalty and other systems, with little or no ability to weave together and form a complete customer profile.

Combining data from different in-house systems can help companies achieve new insights.

Call centers must interface with online consumer reviews; loyalty programs must link with booking histories; on-property preferences need to be combined with social media chatter. It’s a giant firehose that first must be segmented and then packaged in a useful way for employees at each stage of the consumer lifecycle.

Michelle Mitchell, the Operations Manager for Customer Care at InterContinental Hotels Group, identifies just how vital some of this “lost” information can be. The company is working to combine survey data with actual call center metrics:

It will let us more specifically see if a particular agent is receiving negative guest comments and if there’s the possibility of a trend. Maybe that agent is in a bad mood after lunch. Are the calls coming in on a Saturday versus Friday? What time do they occur? What’s the takeaway?

By combining data clusters, organizations can actually deliver on Big Data’s big promises by extracting business intelligence ripe for action.

Customer-centric experience

The customer should be at the center of all Big Data efforts. If the data gathering is seen as creepy or invasive, the consumer will not be pleased and loyalty will be lost. However, all signs point to consumers willing to accept vast intrusions into their behaviors if the resulting product is more targeted and able to anticipate their needs throughout.

SOCAP names the following distinct areas that companies need to master in order to succeed at a Big Data-fueled consumer experience:

1. Align company offerings and customer needs.
2. Build internal consensus.
3. Collapse data silos.
4. Create unified, logical data views.
5. Elevate the customer care role in customer experiences.
6. Collect and use data responsibly.

You’re getting ready to travel.  You’ve googled your heart out and still aren’t sure your if the choices are authentic, interesting or the overall best places based on your time and budget. You have a list, but it’s becoming overwhelming.

Sound familiar?

Meeting with someone, like a local tour guide, who has extensive knowledge of the area, the people and the history can be a great advantage to learning about a foreign land when traveling. They can offer you an insider’s perspective on the local culture.

How you go about hiring a guide will be based on a few factors: what you hope to gain out of your trip, your budget and how much time you’ll have while traveling.

When is it Right For You to Hire a Tour Guide?

When you have very little time and still want a meaningful experience

Sometimes we get overambitious and try to pack in too many stops in one small trip. Cities on a little map can look so close together when in fact it will often take a lot of moving, carrying bags, and waiting around to get from point  A to B. When you arrive in one city and realize you’re leaving in mere hours with so much to see, a tour guide comes in handy.  He or she can show you exactly what you wanted without the fuss of getting lost and confusing destinations (although these are sometimes the joy of traveling for some of us).

When the language barrier is, simply put, a barrier

A guide can be the liaison between you and local market places, street vendors, the local people and everything else wonderful you’ll want to experience during your trip.  Knowing the language can help move you along in so many places and help rid the frustration of confusion that often comes when traveling overseas.

When you are visiting a dangerous and chaotic place

Knowing the local language, roads, transportation, customs and cultures in some places can mean the difference between life or death.  A local tour guide can help guide you through places that otherwise would be a trap for a naive tourist.

When you are on a long stay somewhere 

Often times to get the lay of the land early on in your trip, a travel guide is a helpful accessory to show you around so you can make notes of the places you want to visit, or not for that matter, at a later time on your own.

When you are on an adventure trip

Tour guides can often offer life-saving advice on adventure trips, especially if they are indigenous to the area. Find out if Although there has been recent controversy lately over the Sherpas around Mt. Everest, these expert travel guides are required by the Nepalese government and ensure safety for climbers during their trek up the mountain.

When visiting a popular destination 

When visiting Athens, you may have the same idea as the millions of other travelers and want to step foot on the Acropolis or the Temple of Zeus.  A travel guide will know how to get around the crowds in these areas and the rights times of day to visit certain attractions.

When you’re on vacation and want to relax the entire time

 If you don’t feel like putting in the effort and time it takes to plan all the places you’ll want to see, hiring a local guide can alleviate the time and stress it would take to otherwise do so.

When Does a Tour Guide Become a Liability?

A good guide is an irreplaceable travel asset, a bad guide is a preventable liability. When you give over your trip to a tour guide, you have to trust that you’re in the right hands. However, there are plenty of cases of guides who are taking in kickbacks from the places they steer you. In some cases, a dishonest guide can steer you to overpriced restaurants, shops and vendors than can double or even triple the cost of your trip. Don’t second guess every selection, but know that you have every right to decide that you don’t want to go somewhere, or ask for an alternative. If a guide is overly insistent that you go to a particular place, consider that a red flag.

How to Hire A Guide

There are many things to consider before you hire a professional guide. For one, your tour guide should be someone who is local to the area, who truly enjoys living there. So how do you find such a person?

Hotels often have a working selection of guides that they recommend. Hotels also often plan guided group tours for travelers and arrange for safe travels. If you’re looking for a guide with specific skills–trekking, art history, scuba diving–a specialized travel agent usually has a complete resource of guides.

But don’t rush to sign on the dotted line. Staffer and globetrotter Courtney Crockett suggests if the opportunity is available to meet with your tour guide ahead of time. Once you’ve arrived at your destination offer to meet with the guide for coffee and conduct a brief interview.

Here are her tips about topics to ask about:

• Know the rate of the tour before going, make sure it includes mileage and gas
• Set the schedule with the guide and let them know ahead of time you are not interested in visiting places outside of the agreed upon areas
• Ask them if they will be alone or if anyone else will be joining them for the tour (this is especially important for solo travelers)
• If you don’t have the time to meet up with the person beforehand, do as much research as possible online and asking around.  As an added precaution, pair up with someone else you trust on the guided tour.

Last, but not least, check around with friends and family, social media and other online resources for recommendations. Word-of-mouth, great experiences are things you will want to look for ahead of time.

By Irene Moore for PeterGreenberg.com

MapQuest continues to bolster their brand with a refreshed and reinvigorated product offering. The latest update to the mobile experience is an integrated social sharing feature for places.

Similar to a pin drop on iOS, users can now share a specific place with a contact on their mobile phones, facilitating place-based sharing for friends, family, groups and social networks.

Groups trying to meet up at particular places, families heading to sports games at different fields, and friends meeting up at new restaurants will all find this new feature useful.

Another use case is for users who’d like to share a recent discovery with their friends and networks online – a secret spot or a beloved shop, for example.

MapQuest’s Brian Serton spoke to Tnooz about the importance of sharing in this context:

Sharing is core to consumer behavior on mobile devices as people look to stay in touch with family and friends in real-time.

The ability to easily share a location directly from MapQuest allows users to do just that – keep connected on and offline with those most important to them along travels, near and far

MapQuest has been on a tear lately, as they strive to improve the positioning and utility of what is actually one of the most popular websites on the internet.

Recently-added features also include a traffic reroute, which automatically takes mobile users around traffic pain points.

The automation of this feature is the most intelligent aspect – a “duh” moment that shows a clear understanding about mobile navigation use cases.

Our traffic-based routing is based on INRIX data. INRIX collects more real-time traffic info from more sources than anyone else in the industry, including crowd-sourced data from commercial fleet and consumer vehicles as well as GPS-enabled mobile devices. MapQuest’s real-time traffic coverage includes over 200,000 miles of roads in North America, which is essentially all major roads in medium-to-large cities. And the coverage is even better during rush hour.

The updated app is available on both iPhone and Android.

TripAdvisor might have a strong position in the list of leading travel sites in the US but Booking.com is slowly catching up.

Priceline-owned Booking.com is less than 5% market share behind the user review site after adding another 0.25% to its tally between March and April this year.

It is now over 1% ahead of Hotels.com, which lost 0.25% of its own over the same period.

Most popular travel websites in the US for April 2013:

Agency

Destinations and Accommodation

Airlines

Travel search terms

NB: Data couresy of Experian Hitwise

As summer approaches, it’s time to think about how to keep the kids entertained. And some of the big theme parks are coming up with creative ways to get your attention.

Colonial Williamsburg isn’t just about reenacting the old days. They’ve actually created an experience that requires a cell phone. You’ll explore Revolutionary City as an undercover agent, solving clues and cracking codes sent through text messages.

SeaWorld in Orlando has a new penguin exhibit opening this spring—and we’re not just talking about a few penguins walking around. This is a huge undertaking and it’s a totally immersive experience—getting you deep into the Antarctic habitat and up close and personal with a penguin colony

Now talk about crazy…and inventive: Luna Park on Coney Island was bought out by an Italian company a couple of years ago, and now they’re installing a ride based on Leonardo Da Vinci’s flying bikes.

And if you’re one of those people who only care about the high-octane thrill rides, then head to Cedar Point in Sandusky, Ohio. The new GateKeeper coaster is breaking records all over the place—including the longest track and the longest drop.

For more information, visit the Theme Park archives.

Keep reading for more travel tips.

NB: This is a viewpoint by Parag Vohra, general manager for hotels at Sojern.

Hotel marketers may come to look over the previous century as a time of simplicity and certainty.

Their job was, and still is, to create a brand that resonated, but unlike today, they did not have to worry about getting their hands dirty with tiresome issues like attribution and conversion metrics.

I was overcome by this bout of nostalgia as I watched the season premier of Mad Men, where Don Draper and the Sheraton executives discussed the appropriate imagery for the resort in Hawaii.

Dilemma

Nowadays, the conversation would probably shift to spreadsheets instead of sketches, and clicks and impressions rather than philosophical discussions around creative.

Naturally, the question arises on whether this shift occurred holistically, and more importantly, whether the adoption of digital channels has lead to an improvement in marketing effectiveness.

The first question is perhaps the easier to answer based on an analysis of current marketing behavior. There is an interesting parallel between the perception of the digital world as a utility and with hotel marketers who view their hotels as providers of a utility as well.

When it comes to tactical messaging, be it about value, convenience or promotions, digital marketing is the channel of choice. The advent of search enabled the intersection of providers with intent, and digital outreach evolved towards demand fulfillment rather than demand generation.

An interesting aside is that even as hotel advertisers look to digital outreach as a pure performance play, a substantial percentage ends up holding the channel to the worst of both worlds.

They expect the attribution and ROI of a cost of sale model but with the budget limitations of a traditional marketing model. However, that is a discussion for another time.

Even as search has become saturated with advertisers, and the lower CPCs of the long tail have gone the way of the dinosaurs, developments in the display advertising world — such as programmatic buying and access to intent data — have advertisers and hotel marketers taking another look at a medium they have long ignored.

Expectations

There is now a renewed focus on measuring lift based on views as well as clicks, with a frenetic focus on the best attribution model. For a change, digital marketers for hotel suppliers are just as much on the cutting edge of experimentation as their cousins on the online travel agency side of the fence.

Even as all of this intellectual ferment is welcome, the second question of utilizing the most effective channels for marketing comes in to play. Digital outreach is still considered more appropriate for demand fulfillment than brand building.

A conversation with some senior members of an Indian luxury hotel chain was revelatory; 100% of their brand marketing budget was devoted to print, with absolutely no tracking mechanism to help determine success or failure.

Lest those in North America be self-congratulatory, anecdotal insights from those in brand marketing departments reveal that contextual print advertising is still the single largest recipient of brand marketing dollars.

Why is this so?

To a large extent, preconceived notions about digital advertising from the infant days of the net create a binary of either text based ads or the ubiquitous 300×250 display unit.

There is a definite shift towards media consumption being more digital than print oriented and that shift becomes much more pronounced in a generational sense.

The shift in content consumption is accompanied by a shift in advertising content and creative as well, be it aesthetically pleasing, interactive flash advertising or other forms of rich media or digital video.

This evolution in digital content, when matched with the appropriate audience, can reduce dependence on indirect contextual placement and enable communication with your target audience.

A world where hotel marketers can do away with segments and tell their story to individuals based on interest and aptitude is at hand. After all, individualized outreach includes the benefit of more granular measurement models to track advertising impact and effectiveness beyond the simple act of conversions.

Airlines have traditionally been seen to do a better job than hotels at hard skills such as revenue management and reducing distribution costs.

However, hotels have done a far superior job on the soft marketing skills of brand building and selling experiential rather than commoditized value.

Hotel marketers should ensure that they continue to build and market that mystique across all channels, and not take comfort in the familiar cloak of channels that provide anonymity from the metrics of success and failure.

NB: This is a viewpoint by Parag Vohra, general manager for hotels at Sojern.

NB2: Device graph image via Shutterstock.

While two-thirds of hotels in Europe now offer free wifi, much to the relief of many travellers, their counterparts in India and Singapore have a vastly different opinion when it comes in-flight connections.

A survey conducted by Skyscanner amongst 1,000 Indian travellers reveals that 72% are willing to pay for wifi services in-flight.

The survey was conducted at a time when the Indian government approved unbundling services for Indian carriers, allowing airlines to charge for extra services like check-in baggages, special seats in flight.

When the Indian low cost carriers were resorting to cost cutting measures to strengthen their bottom line, the survey reveals several psychographic changes in the way Indians were willing to spend on their flights.

Key highlights from the survey:

• 89% of Indian travellers would be willing to pay for their in-flight meal within a price range of INR. 250 – 500 ($5-10) whilst 71% said they would pay for extra leg room
• 79% of Indian men were more likely to pay for their beverages as compared to 76% of women passengers
• 64% said they would be willing to pay for live TV in-flight
• 67% of Indian women would be willing to pay for movies as opposed to 65% of their male counterparts
• 77% of elderly travellers in the age group 55+ were not in favour of paying for entertainment such as ‘Games’, whilst more than 50% travellers within this age group were willing to pay for Wi-Fi services
• 83% of travellers within the age group 18-24 years were more likely to pay for Wi-Fi in contrast to paying for ‘Games’

Kavitha Gnanamurthy, market development manager for India, says,

“Our Indian travel consumer is fast evolving towards international habits and purchase behaviour.

“The survey amplifies that Indian travellers are in tune with international travel trends such as requiring wifi services to suit their personal communication devices such as smart phones and tablets.

“In line with international trends, Indian travellers have now accepted that they would have to spend extra on food and drinks to enjoy their in-flight experience.”

The company also surveyed 1,000 Singaporean travellers where 42% of passengeres expressed interest to pay to access internet.

When the Singapore travellers were asked about the various add-ons that they would pay extra for, less than 19% preferred to pay for newspapers or magazines.

Other points to note from Singapore study:

• 28% would pay to access live TV, but movies prove to be even more popular with 35% stating they would part with cash to watch their favourite movie
• Video games also proved popular with 25% of passengers prepared to pay extra
• 60% would pay for extra legroom while about 50% would pay to sit in a two-person row of seats
• Women are prepared to pay more in almost every category – except food.
• Younger travellers were keener to pay for additional items across the board than their older counterparts, with 60% of 18-24 year-olds prepared to pay for Wi-Fi and 40% for movies

NB: In-flight image via Shutterstock.

SOCIAL: Google might be a behemoth in search but it continues to lag behind arch rival Facebook when it comes to social media and communities. If 2013 is a big year for the Google+ service, then perhaps going back to basics with the software behind it and enhancing the user experience will help. READ MORE on The Verge.

Google versus Facebook – a fascinating battle between between two giants of the web, not least because Google’s Plus network hasn’t really hit Facebook too hard yet.

But even if Google+ doesn’t yet have all your friends, it does have one of the world’s most powerful data centers at its disposal.

Starting last week, the network will start leveraging that power, focusing on winning users’ photos by making them look better than they do straight out of your camera.

Images have become the most compelling part of Google+, and that’s by design: Google is betting that if it can get your photos, it can eventually get your friends.

Data-center muscle is coming to Google’s social network in three ways: powerful processing that automates photo selection and image editing; a redesigned news feed that creates automated hashtags to encourage exploration; and a unified messaging service aimed at making Google your central communications hub.

READ MORE on The Verge

The seed for Roomixer was planted a year ago – a marketplace for hotels and vacation rentals to trade business they are turning away.

The B2B service was conceived in Tel Aviv, initially for small properties but after a pilot, Delilah Dagmi joined founders Liran Jakob Rosenfeld (CEO) and Salick Cogan (CTO), bringing hotel chain experience with her and the concept was expanded to all types of accommodation.

Following a seed round of $500,000 earlier this year from angel investors, the plan is to launch in Amsterdam in July although a pilot is ongoing in Israel.

Revenue will be drawn from commissions as well as fees charged on the money made by hotels from buying and selling rooms via the platform.

Q&A with co-founder and CTO Salick Cogan

Describe what your start-up does, what problem it solves (differently to what is already out there) and for whom?

As an act of good service, accommodation often refers guests for whom they don’t have a room to a different accommodation.

Roomixer offers a way to solve the turnaways market pain:

When a guest contacts a hotel to make a booking, the hotel can ask them if they would like a nearby hotel to contact him/her in case of a vacancy. If the guest approves, the hotel can publish the guest reservation request on Roomixer’s marketplace. Other accommodation can see the newly published guest reservation request and pursue it.

Once the reservation has materialized, a commission is earned by the referring hotel.

Why should people or companies use your startup?

Our startup is a B2B business and it is aimed for use by any type of accommodation.

We bring a new revenue stream for hotels. As sellers, they can publish their turnaways at no cost and earn a commission if the referral turns into a booking. As buyers, they get access to a new marketing channel, buying referrals for no cost and paying a small commission (lower than OTAs) only if they manage to convert the referral into a booking. No guaranteed reservation – no cost.

Another big advantage is that unlike marketing campaigns, in Roomixer you have access to certified referrals. You have all the information of what the guest is looking for (when, where, special requirements, etc), so you can offer them the best for their specific needs.

Other than going viral and receiving mountains of positive PR, what is the strategy for raising awareness and getting customers/users?

We are about to launch our product in Amsterdam. Amsterdam has been chosen as the pilot city due to its high occupancy rates, small geographical size, logistical advantages and the connections we already made with the hotel chains there.

Since our product is location oriented, we plan to take over the biggest and busiest cities in the world with the help of hotel chains and local partners.

How did your initial idea evolve? Were there changes/any pivots along the way? What other options have you considered for the business if the original vision fails?

The idea came from our CEO, Liran Jakob Rosenfeld. He was previously an owner/operator of a boutique hotel in South America and a guest house, which he built from scratch and sold two years later. In 2007, he founded MiniHostels – an online booking portal serving over 3,500 hotels and hostels worldwide, with a strong footprint in South America.

During these years, Liran visited over a thousand receptions all over the world and witnessed the same scenario happen everywhere he went – people would call or email the hotel to make a booking, but wouldn’t be able to.

When we first started, our idea was to create a kind of “receptionist marketplace”, where front desk managers would get rewarded for selling turnaways. This idea pivoted to our current pure B2B model. Roomixer’s mission is to provide a new revenue stream for hotels.

Where do you see yourselves in 3 years time, what specific challenges do you hope to have overcome?

Both Liran and I have experience with building companies and entrepreneurship. We want to build a nice company and expand it to different busy cities around the world. We both try to enjoy our work as much as possible, so having the chance to travel a lot is very exciting for us. That’s also one of our biggest challenges. Since we are a location oriented startup and not a viral one (in the common sense of the word), we need to launch our product with high touch marketing.

What is wrong with the travel, tourism and hospitality industry that requires another startup to help it out?

I think that the travel tech industry is in a bit of a hold right now. We hope to change this and bring innovation and creativity.

Tnooz view:

This sounds like a great idea, it’s hard to assess the scale of turnaways but Roomixer says that in some cities, such as Amsterdam, it’s more than 100 a day per hotel.

The process of offering the customer the service and turning it round will need to be fast so that customers trust the fact that they are going to be able to book an equivalent room. It also sounds as if hotels will have to devote resources to it.

One potential challenge that springs to mind is if a customer is referred and ends up having a bad experience, do they blame the original hotel?

Also, although it’s providing a service to customers and a good will gesture to neighbouring properties, will hotel owners/managers get their heads around sending guests to a competitor?

There’s lots of positives about the startup – it has an API in place, it says the technology links directly to the hotel’s property management system and has applied for a patent.

All of these elements will hopefully give Roomixer a headstart.

Video:

NB: TLabs Showcase is part of the wider TLabs project from Tnooz.

The gap between EasyJet and Ryanair has narrowed at the top of leading airline websites in the UK, but the pair have also stretched their respective leads over British Airways.

Ryanair is now just over 1.5% market share behind EasyJet, but British Airways in third spot lost 0.5% of its own between March and April, putting it 3.5% behind the top-runners.

In the agency category, Thomas Cook overtook Expedia to secure second place behind rival brand Thomson.

Most popular travel websites in the UK for April 2013:

Agencies

Destinations and Accommodation

Airlines

Travel search terms

NB: Data courtesy of Experian Hitwise

NB2: London image via Shutterstock.