Hospitality Expos - External Source Hotel News

Have you ever wondered if those reviews you read on Amazon, TripAdvisor and Yelp are for real? Well, I have and, according to a story in the New York Times, many of them are bought and paid for. The Times story says it found an ad on Craigslist that read: 'If you have an active Yelp account and would like to make very easy money please respond.'

53% of UK consumers research and buy holidays online, though many could be deterred by unclear pricing, according to a survey commissioned by Econsultancy. The Toluna survey of 2,004 UK consumers found that 29% of respondents don't find travel websites easy to use, and that unclear pricing is the most likely reason for abandoning purchases online.

So what's the outlook for 2011? Here are some of Forrester's key trends for this year: The mobile-social-local category will explode but generate little revenue. Social location services will attract growing audiences but face continuing privacy issues because of the difficulty engaging with customers in contexts that are innately personal and intimate. Many geo-targeted mobile campaigns will launch that won't lead to meaningful revenue in 2011.

Franchisees have filed class-action lawsuits against two major hotel brands, saying the companies are illegally taking loyalty fees for guests who, in some cases, don't even know they've been enrolled in frequent-stay programs. The suits, filed in U.S. District Court in Orlando last month, allege that Wyndham Worldwide Inc. and Choice Hotels International Inc. have inflated the ranks of their loyalty programs and are collecting fees from hotels when those guests stay at franchise properties.

Last year was a transitional year for most of the industry and now the traction of these changes are likely to take hold on the cold hard surface of consumer engagement. Not to foreshadow any impending doom, but many of us are likely to see elemental change happen faster in this coming year than ever. And though it appears I waited until after the year turned, I blame my iPhone alarm clock and its 2011 bug.

Last year, I created my first annual Social Media New Year’s Resolutions and am following it up, 2011 style! This list is meant to be a list of goals to accompany your social media plan – not serve as a standalone social media blueprint. Remember that there is no end-all-be-all social strategy for all companies, so make sure that you aren’t making your brand the square peg forcing itself into a round social hole. So, onto the social media resolutions for 2011!

A new year brings a new lineup of hotel openings. From precious boutiques to mega resorts, many of this season's most anticipated openings have the benefit of being planned post-recession, with sometimes scaled-down ambitions or room count to coincide with a reduced travel market.

Social unrest. The social network is making serious waves, and it's not just at the box office. Facebook reportedly has about 24 percent of display ads (albeit only 9.5 percent of ad spend) and is well positioned to reshuffle the display space as we know it. Facebook's media buying application programming interfaces (APIs) have spawned a foray of search engine marketing providers like Efficient Frontier, Marin Software, Kenshoo, and Adobe SearchCenter into display. What we need to be aware of is that Facebook's strict serving, tracking, and data-sharing policies are disrupting the status quo among marketers, third-party servers, and publishers. If you thought social display was an easy segment of the notoriously fickle social marketing category, think again.

Now that we are in the new year of planning, marketing teams everywhere are crafting and executing their plans for the next 12 months. It's going to be a busy and competitive year, and in looking back at 2010 there were plenty of big developments that point to a 2011 year filled with innovation, new business models, possibilities for new technologies like mobile and tablets and continued growth and attention on social media.

The travel industry is warming to the idea of showing you a price based on who you are. Or who it thinks you are. Last spring, a United Kingdom-based hotel site called VivaStay reportedly displayed slightly higher prices to visitors who came to the site through affiliate links than it showed to those who clicked directly on the VivaStay site. The company apologized, but said that it was unaware that price variations were frowned upon.