travel

Brussels Airport: Human Beings and Technology Complement One Another to Deliver A Good Experience

On Wednesday night, I arrived at the Hilton Doubletree in Washington DC after an intense day of meetings ready to do a few more hours of work. When I got to the desk, the clerk told me that the hotel was oversold. I raised my eyebrows. The news worsened. Not only were all nearby hotels fully booked, but so too were all hotels in the District. He was going to have to send me out to Virginia to a hotel that would be 30 minutes away in zero traffic and, well, DC never has zero traffic. My response was simple: “You’ve got to be f*ing kidding me!?!?”

Guest Post by: Jo Stratmann

Hotels, tour operators and travel providers looking to cash in on winter sun and summer breaks for 2012 would do well to pay attention to the effectiveness of their social media strategy and how social media is having an impact on how their customers choose holidays.

Ever wanted to travel back in time to your favorite city and imagine how it actually existed hundreds of years ago? Or hear the stories of a city's residents in their own words while going for a stroll through historical neighborhoods? The new age of augmented travel, which integrates geo-location technologies with historical maps and rich multimedia content into a sort of geo-temporal human Web, promises the global traveler (as well as the armchair historian) the opportunity to interact with the physical surroundings of cities around the world in fundamentally new ways.

I am about to embark on a trip alone across Europe overland – mainly by train. It’s almost 15 years since I last made a similar trip. Many things have changes over this period – I’m older, have travelled a lot more and am now more likely to stay in hotels than camp rough – but the biggest change is the way that social media is helping me do things I could never do back then. On that first trip, I had no mobile phone and not even an email address. Now I have many tools at my disposal to help plan and do more.

Guest Post by: Jo Stratmann

According to a recent report in Travel Mole, the travel and tourism industry is facing a social media revolution.

The Social Travel Report, carried out by independent media agency Total Media, has found that almost 70% of consumers surveyed use the internet to book their holidays, compared to 23% by phone and just 8% in-store with travel agents.

Like many people I will be travelling later today. Taking one of the last trains on Christmas Eve from London to the north of England. And like many people I have spent the last few days checking the weather and the news, hoping that my train will run and I will make it on time.

Elderhostel is a US travel and educational organisation for older adults – you might have guessed the travel part from the name.

The organisation is going through a massive upheaval, caused by falling numbers of customers. As the graphics shows, numbers of people signing up for courses have been falling and the average age of travellers has been rising. It is now 73 years old up from 68 a decade ago.

by: Alain Thys

by: Dominic Basulto

With all the gloom and doom surrounding the economy these days, it seems like the consumer-facing companies that are going to do well during an economic downturn are those that actively address customer "pain points." Over the past two weeks, both Amazon.com and FedEx have shown that they are attuned to customer needs with new moves designed to alleviate two big customer pain points.