Farecast Adds Prediction Tools For Hotels

Farecast, the airfare price prediction site, has expanded its coverage and price prediction tools to a new beta service for hotels. For the launch the new hotel price predictions work in the top 30 U.S. destinations and pull in data from partner sites like Orbitz, Cheaptickets, and ReserveTravel, as well as Farecast’s own information.
The results [...]

Hyatt Rolls Out Ultimate Adventure Challenge

The latest installment of Hyatt Resorts’ “Ultimate Adventure Challenge” goes live today. Curium Studios developed the Web-based reality series for Global Hyatt, a project aimed at building brand awareness and affinity for the Hyatt Resorts group of family-focused “adventure” vacation properties.
Hosted at www.HyattAdventureChallenge.com, the Webisodes follow five families as they compete in activities like kayak [...]

Your Momma…

…uses search to shop online. DoubleClick Performics recently released data resulting from a usage study targeting “moms,” and completed in cooperation with Microsoft and ROI Research, which showed that of the nearly 1,000 moms surveyed, 89 percent use the Internet at least twice/day, and 90 percent have been using it for more than seven [...]

Word of the Week – Mahalo.

No….we’re not on vacation in Hawaii! Developed by a start up led by famed tech tycoon Jason Calacanis, Mahalo is billed as a “human-powered search engine that creates organized, comprehensive, and spam free search results for the most popular search terms. Our search results only include great links.”
For those of you that have been [...]

Behavioral Targeting Gets Social

Social-networking Web site Facebook Inc. is quietly working on a new advertising system that would let marketers target users with ads based on the massive amounts of information people reveal on the site about themselves.
Eventually, it hopes to refine the system to allow it to predict what products and services users might be interested in [...]

Content Replaces Communications As Primary Web Use

According to the Online Publishers Association, Internet users are spending nearly half their online time visiting content, a 37% increase in share of time from four years ago. The Internet Activity Index, conducted by Nielsen//NetRatings, shows that communications accounted for 46% of consumers’ time online in 2003. A dramatic shift has taken place since then, [...]

New Orleans CVB Launches 24NOLA.com

With the second anniversary of Hurricane Katrina next week and tourism a vital resource needed for New Orleans’ recovery, the New Orleans Convention & Visitors Bureau launched an online component to its “Forever New Orleans” international branding campaign.
24NOLA.com, an itinerary-planning tool for visitors who want to see New Orleans as local residents do. Visitors can [...]

Travel Trends – YouTube, Statistics

YouTube Ad Plan Shuns Pre-Rolls – YouTube, via Google, announced today that it has decided not to use pre-roll advertising on YouTube for part of it’s ad model. The plan was due in part to the terrible response during testing, with a 15 second pre-roll spot having an abandonment rate of 75 percent. [...]

Second Life: Boom or Bust?

Current issues of Newsweek and Wired offer two opposite views of the Second Life virtual world.
Newsweek’s article, “Alternate Universe,” is overwhelmingly positive, claiming that “Second Life is emerging as a powerful new medium for social interactions of all sorts, from romance to making money. It may be the Internet’s next big thing.”
Wired’s article, “How Madison [...]

Who Needs a Travel Agent?

When it comes to travel, perhaps more so than any other industry, word-of-mouth is king. Travelers make decisions on where to stay, where to eat, and what to do based on recommendations from friends.
No surprise, then, that many of today’s niche social networking sites are built around travel: WAYN, TravelPod, TripAdvisor, IGoUGo, SideStep (thanks to [...]