Fabrice asks What did the Internet REALLY change in the hotel industry? — and although i don’t have the inside stats that he’s looking for (my experience over the last 10 years has been as a supplier, not as a hotelier), i would hazard a guess that the biggest recipients of any benefits would be small independent hotels. Read the rest of this entry »
Posts Tagged ‘ecommerce’
Online hotel booking findings from the ITB World Travel Trends Report
In General on July 2, 2010 at 11:37
ITB is a huge endeavour, with 108,000 trade visitors, and over 10,000 exhibitors from 180 countries at its Berlin show (not including the ITB Asia show), and the participation of so many travel related companies gives it access to an impressive amount of data.
Looking through this, i was excited to see the continued growth in online bookings, especially in a difficult year for travel and tourism. Read the rest of this entry »
Who are booking hotels online, technically speaking?
In General on June 28, 2010 at 19:00
A new post on the Keen website looks at 66,000 bookings from 6 million visitors, making bookings at 45 hotel and resort properties in 8 countries in Asia Pacific, to work out which visitors are the best hotel customers from a technical viewpoint. Key takeaways are the importance of tracking visitors to your site, testing across browsers and operating systems, and why visitors with large screens are so important to you.
Anthony Green – June 2010
Hotel websites are all the same?
In General on June 18, 2010 at 09:54Read an interesting post on Hotel Blogs — Most hotel websites look the same, try to be different — which comments on Seth Godin’s assertion that hotel websites all look the same.
Interesting point. Leaving aside the bigger point that hotels are struggling to innovate in their core product and brand offerings, innovation with travel sites is hard. In the early years of the internet, it could be argued that innovation was high — when the marketing department controlled the sites, and looked for the Wow! factor, often through Flash and lots of graphics. The result was a bit of a mess, and sites that didn’t necessarily generate a lot of revenue. Read the rest of this entry »
Great mobile site from Mandarin Oriental
In General on June 16, 2010 at 08:01Saw this earlier today, a great implementation of a mobile site from Mandarin Oriental. They’ve moved beyond the standard, stripped-down mobile site, to give something that has a lot more branding, with a clean design and great images.
The home screen is simple, focusing on finding a hotel. Read the rest of this entry »
Flash – how we got here
In General on May 10, 2010 at 22:00Let’s go back to the end of last century, and look at how people accessed the web. Without a doubt, it was a desktop or laptop computer. However, that ignores the fact that there were many different competing browsers, and no established standards. Most famously, Microsoft and Netscape were engaged in an arms race to develop the best browser, with Internet Explorer and Navigator respectively. Each came out with new features to wow users. The downside of this was that the browsers displayed pages completely differently, and worse than that, pages written for one browser would often fail to work at all on a competing browser. JavaScript was still relatively immature, not capable of the fancy tricks that we expect from it these days. Many people turned it off due to the perceived security risk — remember that? Read the rest of this entry »
Email me
Linkedin
Follow Me
a.nthonygreen 