Category Archives: Social Media

Perhaps you have plenty of bookings during the high season, but what can you do to ensure bookings flow all year, through shoulder and low season? Here are five proven tactics that will keep your bookings rolling in every season.

1. Responsive site

To ensure year-round bookings, first you must get the basics right. According to eMarketer’s latest estimates of travel research in 2016, 51.8% of all travellers who book trips online will do so using a mobile device.

That means your accommodation, whether you’re a small two-room B&B or a large resort, must have a responsive website site that can be viewed on any size device.

2. Powerful Booking Engine

Another fundamental key to increasing your online booking lies in the system you use – namely, your booking...

The Twitter community is buzzing this morning with ground-breaking news - a new set-up for the timeline has rolled out to a limited audience.

This change is to a relevancy-based feed, as opposed to the time-based feed that we’re used to. An algorithm determines this on the back end of the platform. The “instant” feed made Twitter unique, gave voices equal weight (visibility) and helped establish the platform as a premier news source.

An algorithm feed will prioritise tweets with higher reactions and “better” content, similar to Facebook. This is good news for advertisers, allowing brands to compete for relevancy and followers. It may be a problem for small businesses to have a voice however, in an increasingly noisy space, when timely posts may no longer be visible to the...

Gina's November presentation to the Tourism Industry Association New Zealand delves into the Big Question - will virtual reality help or hinder tourism business?

Virtual reality is the biggest game-changer in our lives since the launch of the iPhone.

The seemingly simple ability to see an image or video in 360 degrees is about to revolutionise the way we live.

Imagine being able to virtually travel anywhere in the world from the comfort of your own home. Fly over the Grand Canyon looking up, down and all around you as if you were really there, or “dive” underwater at the Great Barrier Reef and watch as a turtle swims past you.

Jaunt, a VR technology and content company, claims “You will feel transported directly into the middle of the action. Look anywhere. See...

Part III in our Halloween 2015 blog series.

As the world’s number-one tourism website, TripAdvisor is an audacious and powerful beast. For travellers sharing a review or researching a trip, it works a treat. For tourism operators it can prove a powerful marketing and distribution tool. But for all of these treats, this powerful beast can serve up a trick or two.

Handling Reviews

Since anyone can post a review on TripAdvisor, it can create some scary situations for a tourism operator. Travellers threatening a negative review as an attempt to get a discount, competitors purchasing fake reviews to boost their rankings, or a sinister traveller who is simply miserable about life and uses the platform to constantly complain.

Some operators believe fake or venomous reviews are...

Part I in our Halloween 2015 blog series.

Handling social media customer care may seem frightening - public posts with angry comments about your business are hard to control and can feel like a personal attack. Consider this - those customers will be online complaining about you, no matter what you do or whether you have a social media page on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, etc. What matters is how you respond to change their experience and perception of your business.

5 Steps of Customer Care

1. Check In

Do this once daily during office hours. Set a time when you drink your morning coffee to check for any new messages or notifications. Make your goal to respond within 24 hours of a business day. If you make a habit of morning responses, this will be easy!  Facebook...

We’re just a few short months away from professional virtual reality (VR) headsets to hit the consumer market in a storm of holiday promotions, and the future is here.

Google Cardboard  - Free Consumer VR

Google Cardboard, an approximately $20 box frame with plastic lenses, went on sale this year as a proving ground for this new technology and it’s been a wild success. Google brings the concept to anyone who wants to explore the new tech, with free designs for the cardboard headset also available on their website. Reminiscent of the red plastic View-Masters of the late 1980’s, these cardboard boxes have a simple slot for a cell phone. All you have to do is download a VR app to a smartphone and the world of virtual reality is in your hands.