Travel Trends – 2-D Barcodes, TripIt, Ricoh 500SE

Smartpox – Create a ‘pox’ (2-d barcode, see the image above) with any information you like…restaurant review, link to a song, scavenger hunt clue…and stick it on a sign, wall, anywhere. Then, when users see your barcode, they can take a picture of it with their cell phone and download the review or song. [...]

Travel Trends – VibeAgent, Boo.com, YouTube, Twitter

VibeAgent – Still in private beta (not open to the public), VibeAgent is hotel search / booking engine site where members can create a network of trusted friends and groups that share similar interests, locations, destinations or opinions. (If you want to take a look at the site, let me know…I have 5 invitations to [...]

Read Those Review Sites Carefully

TripAdvisor is the biggest player, but many other travel sites offer consumer-based opinions and reviews about hotels and destinations. Deciding which comments to trust isn’t always easy:
Consider the source: Anonymous reviews may still be the norm, but reading a poster’s previous critiques, travel interests, and biographical details can help weed out phony, overly flattering comments [...]

Will Internet Access on Planes Really Fly?

E-mail and instant messaging — coming soon to a plane near you.
In the top floor of a low-slung office building in suburban Chicago, just a few miles from O’Hare Airport, a group of Aircell’s 130 employees is working on tapping into one of the last internet-free zones: the mile-high, in-flight experience. And a key member [...]

YellowstonePark.com, Wikitravel Win Webby Awards

The Webby Awards, an international award ceremony honoring the best of the Internet, was held in New York City from June 3-5. What have been called the “Oscars of the Internet,” the Webbys are presented by the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences. The body is made up of 550 members, including leading Web [...]

Travel Trends – iloho.com, Delta SiteSeer Challenge, Royal Caribbean

iloho.com – Launched this week, this ‘TripAdvisor meets Digg’ travel site allows travelers to add user-generated news and reviews, which are then ranked by popularity.http://www.iloho.com/Delta SiteSeer Challenge – Another major airline trying the (semi) user-created video contest (Southwest being the latter). Send in your video on why you should be in the contest, compete [...]

Delta Launches ‘SiteSeer’ Video Section

Delta Air Lines has launched SiteSeer Travelcast, a series of free, downloadable travel shows that aim to connect with passengers and highlight the travel experience of the airline’s employees.
At launch, the travel videos, located at http://www.delta.com/siteseer, featured seven cities, including New York; Seoul, South Korea; and Mumbai, India, as of press time. Delta planned to [...]

TripAdvisor Trots Out Social Network

TripAdvisor, that sea of au courant and sometimes complaint-driven posts about hotels, is making it easier to find like-minded travelers. The subsidiary of Expedia plans to roll out a social-networking component Friday that should help you avoid those less-than-helpful “no ice in the water” comments about foreign hotels.
While you may roll your eyes at the [...]

Word of the Week – Creative Commons

A San Francisco nonprofit group chaired by Stanford law Professor Lawrence Lessig, Creative Commons also describes a new type of copyright — one with “some rights reserved,” enabling artists, authors and others to share their works freely with the world at large. The organization has released several copyright licenses [...]

Travel Trends – TripWiser, Tripbase, Photosynth, Everyscape

TripBase – Another travel recommendation site, TripBase takes advantage of some new technologies to allow users to select what features they want in a vacation and then makes recommendations based on what has been chosen. A great interface and a good site, however booking your vacation takes you to another site (Kayak.com).http://tripbase.com/
Tripwiser – Get [...]