Exciting Twitterday at Travolution’s #travsummit

There was a really hilarious video about airline surcharges, but now it’s taken away from Youtube [ed July 2010]

Originally I was planning to attend the Travolution Travel Summit in London today. However, some wonderful guests from Down Under had booked in my hotel, so I couldn’t afford to hop over to London, but in between I could have a look into the stream and sometimes throw in a thought or question.

As Twitter is the trend in conferences nowadays – you see rows and rows of people with laptops, blackberries and Iphones Twittering away- you almost don’t have to attend them in Real life.

Just sift through under 1,000 tweets at Search.Twitter.com/#travsummit and you know almost all.Note my clever little trick in altering the number of Tweets in the search url from 50 to 100. So you have only to scroll through 10 pages of Tweets. Also remind that after a certain period Twitter seems to flush its search caches.

Some notes from the #travsummit stream some of which I have to check out more in depth:

  • On a personal note, if I would have attended, I would have been torn between Looking and listening, posting Tweets and making photos. At the next conference I will attend, I will be making photos only. I missed catching the faces today.
  • The word boring is becoming Cool. “Just keep your eyes on the ball” as Bill Marriott says it in an recent interview with startup Hoteliers Magazine and do what you are good at is a wise advice in the present economic circumstances
  • Everybody points to USG (User Generated Content), but it is my experience that only 40% of my guests produce USG in the form of writing into my guest book and only 5% write a review online.
  • Google top 5 tips for conversion: -No doubt. -Simple check-out. -Limit steps. -Limit warnings. -Quarantine check-out (thinking about redesigning my hotel website).
  • Travellers typically make 12 searches on 22 websites over 29 days before making their first booking says Google.
  • Home Away vacation rentals is growing very fast.
  • MS demonstrated an interesting huge new touchscreen Surface. Go see the Demo video taken at Sheraton Hotels and Resorts. European price approx UK PND 11,000.
  • Together with Photosynth (also from MS) Surface has some cool features

Other Travel Bloggers:

  1. Jeremy Head is one of the first posting about the summit at his Blog Travel Blather Travolution Summit: 7 things I learned today
  2. Worldreviewer is a good second who posts about the summit.
  3. Stephan Ekbergh posted about it
  4. Ben Colclough of Trailbeater posted about it
  5. I almost forgot Hotelblogs who devoted several blog posts on the summit:Business Leaders on Stage, Update from Ailines, Innovators in Digital and online Travel and some more

Latest Update April 22, 2009 17,00 hr … It took me almost 12 hours to find the video back. And at Travolution you will find more coverage. Rest my post further:-)

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