I love the idea of POP-UP, once-off, travel experiences. Unlocks a world of opportunity! - Wilna 

Pop-up hotels and bespoke travel experiences
by Alex Carter in Travel

Pop-up hotels, bespoke itineraries, once-in-a-lifetime travel experiences and ‘braincations’ are among some of the travel trends predicted to shape 2013. According to analysts at Hotels.com’s trendspotting spring report, “experiential travel” will be top of mind among globetrotters this year, as consumers seek out itineraries that follow the roads less traveled.

For example, consumers are being increasingly drawn to the idea of unique and exclusive accommodations such as mobile, pop-up hotel experiences that can’t be replicated by brick and mortar properties. Instead of checking into a hotel room, travelers now have a range of options that include glamping tents, mobile shipping containers and pods.

Belgium-based company Sleeping Around, for instance, converts 6-meter sea containers into self-contained luxury hotel rooms complete with a box-spring bed, rain shower, iPod docking station and air conditioning. The pods travel around Antwerp.

Similarly, travelers are also predicted to bypass commercial cruise lines in favor of smaller river boat options that sail along less predictable waterways, such as the Mekong River in Cambodia and Vietnam, or the Danube Riverbetween Prague and Istanbul, says Hotels.com.

Hotels are also responding to consumer demand for bespoke travel itineraries that go above and beyond concierge service.

The Four Seasons Hotels & Resorts’ Imagination Initiative is built to indulge guests’ wildest fantasies with add-on experiences that include elephant rides through the jungles of Thailand, or a VIP on-field meet-and-greet with the International Polo Club at Palm Beach.

And in response to the pressures and stress associated with staying connected 24/7, the Marriott and Renaissance Caribbean & Mexico Resorts has begun to offer tech-free zones for those craving a ‘braincation.’

The collection of the chain’s nine resorts across the Caribbean and Mexico began offering tech-free zones last December where cell phones and electronic devices are banned. Instead, guests are encouraged to disconnect, read, or pursue other “tech-free” activities.

Staggering figures, shows the luxury market is alive and flourishing! - Wilna 

Ultra-Luxury Segment Is Projected to Keep Soaring 
By Russ Alan Prince

The sales of ultra-luxury services and goods are booming. This trend is likely to continue because the number of exceptionally wealthy individuals is increasing arithmetically. More telling is that their levels of wealth are magnifying at an even greater rate.

In Paris, The Suite Shangri-la at Shangri-la Hotel goes for $26,400 per night. Slightly less expensive is the Royal Suite at Hotel Plaza Athenee, which only costs $26,234 per night. Meanwhile, the Presidential Suite 541 at Raffles Royal Monceau is available for $26,183 per night, while the Four Seasons Hotel George V Penthouse goes for $25,760 per night.

The strong demand for the highest quality hotel rooms is a clear indication of the appeal of extreme luxury. According to Stacy Small, President of Elite Travel International, "As our clients' net worth increases, so too does their desire to reward their hard work with ultra-luxury travel experiences, often in private-yet-posh settings with their extended family and friends. We are seeing a continued increase in demand for multi-room, high-dollar suites as well as spacious villas."

It's not just high-end travel that is pointing to the breathtaking future of ultra-luxury; it's the array of extraordinarily high caliber products being purchased. Let's consider some of the finest timepieces in the world. A watch from Romain Gauthier runs $176,925 while Richard Milles' RM 036 Tourbilillon G-Sensor Jean Todt Limited Edition costs $490,000. A little more expensive is the Audemars Piguet Grand Complication Royal Oak Offshore costing $710,000 in titanium, and $756,000 in rose gold. A little higher up the scale we have Greubel Forseys' Art Piece 1 going for $1,650,000 and The Grand Complication by A. Lange & Sohne at $2,452,710.

"High five figure watch sales are growing, and so are watches in the high six figures into the low seven figures," notes John Simonian, founder and CEO of Westime, "There are several factors driving the demand. People who are watch customers now have more disposable income. In some cases, clients view the purchase of very expensive watches as a good investment today."

"Last year the combined wealth of ultra-high-net-worth families increased by $566 billion, enough to buy every Swiss made watch exported for the next 28 years or every luxury hotel room and suite at every luxury hotel and resort in the world for the next decade," explains Douglas Gollan, Editor-in-Chief and Group President of Elite Traveler Media Group, "Their population is projected to increase by 50% in the next decade. The ability of luxury companies to provide more products and services to these consumers is only limited by how much effort they put into it. There is a lot of demand, but there is even more untapped demand."

Without question, the future of ultra-luxury is extremely bright. And, it's only going to become brighter.

Source: Forbes 

The Facebook generation is fed up with Facebook.

That's according to a report released Tuesday by the Pew Research Center, which surveyed 802 teens between the ages of 12 and 17 last September to produce a 107-page report on their online habits.

Pew's findings suggest teens' enthusiasm for Facebook is waning, lending credence to concerns, raised by the company's investors and others that the social network may be losing a crucial demographic that has long fueled its success.

Facebook has become a "social burden" for teens, write the authors of the Pew report. "While Facebook is still deeply integrated in teens’ everyday lives, it is sometimes seen as a utility and an obligation rather than an exciting new platform that teens can claim as their own."

Teen's aren't abandoning Facebook -- deactivating their accounts would mean missing out on the crucial social intrigues that transpire online -- and 94 percent of teenage social media users still have profiles on the site, Pew's report notes. But they're simultaneously migrating to Twitter and Instagram, which teens say offer a parent-free place where they can better express themselves. Eleven percent of teens surveyed had Instagram accounts, while the number of teen Twitter users climbed from 16 percent in 2011 to 24 percent in 2012. Five percent of teens have accounts on Tumblr, which was just purchased by Yahoo for $1.1 billion, while 7 percent have accounts on Myspace.

Facebook, teens say, has been overrun by parents, fuels unnecessary social "drama" and gives a mouthpiece to annoying oversharers who drone on about inane events in their lives.

“Honestly, Facebook at this point, I'm on it constantly but I hate it so much,” one 15 year-old girl told Pew during a focus group.

"I got mine [Facebook account] around sixth grade. And I was really obsessed with it for a while," another 14 year-old said. "Then towards eighth grade, I kind of just -- once you get into Twitter, if you make a Twitter and an Instagram, then you'll just kind of forget about Facebook, is what I did.”

On the whole, teens' usage of social media seems to have plateaued, and the fraction of those who check social sites "several times a day" has stayed steady at around 40 percent since 2011.

Asked about teens' Facebook habits during a recent earnings call with investors, Facebook's chief financial officer answered that the company “remain[s] really pleased with the high level of engagement on Facebook by people of all ages around the world" and called younger users "among the most active and engaged users that we have on Facebook."

Here's what that "high level of engagement" really looks like, according to Pew:

They’re deleting, lying and blocking: As the chart below shows, some three-quarters of Facebook users have purged friends on Facebook, 58 percent have edited or deleted content they’ve shared and 26 percent have tried to protect their privacy by sharing false information. Among all teens online (not just Facebook users), 39 percent have lied about their age. The report also notes, "Girls are more likely than boys to delete friends from their network (82 percent vs. 66 percent) and block people (67 percent vs. 48 percent)."

Superusers on Facebook are superusers on other social sites: Teens with large friend networks on Facebook are more likely than their peers to have profiles on other social media sites: 46 percent of teens with over 600 Facebook friends have a Twitter profile, and 12 percent of such users have an Instagram account. By comparison, just 21 percent and 11 percent of teens who have 150 to 300 friends have Twitter and Instagram accounts, respectively.

Teens have hundreds of friends, but they haven’t met them all: The typical Facebook-using teen has 300 friends, though girls are more likely to have more friends (the median is 350) than boys (300). Seventy percent of teens are friends with their parents, 30 percent are friends with teachers or coaches, and 33 percent are friends with people they’ve never met in person.

It turns out parents actually do see what their kids are posting: Just 5 percent of teens tweak their privacy to limit what their parents see.

They’re watching out for their privacy: Sixty percent of teens on Facebook say they’ve checked their privacy settings in the past month -- a third of them within the past seven days. The majority (60 percent) of teens have their profiles set to private, while 14 percent have profiles that are completely public.

But yes, they are sharing personal details: Teens with more Facebook friends are more likely to share a greater variety of personal details about themselves online. Among all teens on Facebook, 21 percent share their cell phone number, 63 percent share their relationship status and 54 perent share their email address.

Seventeen percent of teens on Facebook will automatically share their location in their posts, and 18 percent say they’ve shared something they later regret posting.

They’re enjoying themselves, but they’ve been contacted by creeps: Among all teens surveyed by Pew, 17 percent have been contacted by strangers in a way that made them “scared or uncomfortable.” However, 57 percent of social media-using teens said they’ve had an experience online that “made them feel good about themselves,” and 37 percent say social media has made them feel more connected to someone else.

Mobile and TripAdvisor still the two key trend drivers for bookings in 2013 - Wilna 

Trends shaping the hotel booking experiences

Hotel companies are increasingly making smartphones an intricate part of the guest experience. Even at the time of check-in there is talk of giving the customer the ability to choose their room of preference using a smart phone.

EyeforTravel’s Ritesh Gupta hears from Salvador about how digital technology and tools are shaping the travel shopping experience what hotel companies can learn from the retail sector.

EFT: What new trends are emerging in the digital travel retail experience?

PS: All the new trends are related to mobility. Mobility is changing the way customers behave when they book (lead time is reducing and voice bookings are increasing), searches (now social media and social reputation matter) and the way they experience a property.

Lots of examples are available. Let’s consider just two. First consider hotel and airfare search site Hipmunk. It combines TripAdvisor and social media into the booking process and allows search featuring what people care about: cool places to be in the city, restaurants and so on. Second is HotelTonight; it is the first online booking engine for last-minute trips featuring last-minute deals only on mobile devices. Consumer can book last minute deals via mobile. 

EFT: How can technology lend a new dimension to the whole travel shopping experience today?

PS: Technology is improving the overall travel shopping experience and at the same time is bringing new challenges for the industry on the whole. Technology helps hotel to carve new paths to find a direct relationship with guests but rapidly everyday new intermediaries arrive that inflate the cost of distribution. Technology for hospitality is really about balancing opportunities and threats. I always say that individual hotels can no longer manage this balance alone. Unless the hotel has really a unique USP there is no possibility of remaining competitive without joining a network (a hotel group) that can help a hotel company to leverage new technologies in their favour. Today independent hotels have many choices to increase their competitiveness by joining hotel chains that offer not only technology and connectivity but also training and international sales. Only if the hotel belongs to a network of hotels it will remain competitive.

EFT: What sort of digital tools have the power to dramatically increase consumer engagement today?

PS: Rather than digital tools, I would prefer to mention digital challenges that need to completely change the management behaviour of hotel companies. The most revolutionary site ever in the travel history to empower the customer engagement is TripAdvisor. Nowadays a hotel can destroy its years and decades of good image and positioning if it ends up having recurrent bad feedback on TripAdvisor. Hoteliers need to have a clear understanding of how to manage social reputation and how to strengthen their reputation particularly when it comes to TripAdvisor.

The tip of the iceberg has just been visible with TripAdvisor. There is a lot more to come when Facebook moves toward travelling.

Get the full story at EyeForTravel

Wanna know what the newest trend is online - check out these up an coming websites that are keeping TripAdvisor on it's toes. - Wilna 

Ten Travel Websites To Watch
By James Ellis

The battle lines are being drawn by companies vying to be the new TripAdvisor, including two new British start-ups that are trying to knock the user-generated review site off the top spot.

Triptease.com and Thisisyourkingdom.co.uk are two of the new start-ups that have joined an increasingly noisy online travel space - where peer reviews (or user-generated content - UGC) are king.

According to Google, the average holiday decision involves a whopping 50 searches on the internet over 2.5 hours. Here in the UK, four out of five of travel purchases are made online - the highest figure for any country in the world.

With TripAdvisor now worth an estimated £2.5bn, it's not hard to see why companies are clamouring for its crown.

"Consumers like to read what other consumers think about somewhere they have visited," says Kevin May of travel-tech website Tnooz (tnooz.com). "It is called 'the wisdom of the crowd' - and TripAdvisor uses that very well."

The main problem for those vying to be TripAdvisor 2.0 is the battle for online visitors - managing to survive as a new website until a critical mass of reviews has been achieved, and enough social buzz to make them successful.

"TripAdvisor's omnipresence is key when it comes to its success," says online marketing specialist Adam Davidson. "Wherever you are planning to stay or eat, you know and expect TripAdvisor, will have it covered - many other sites can't match that."

Those that currently do tend to be owned by or part of the big travel firms: "A lot of big holiday companies such as Thomson and Booking.com have their own user-review systems now," says May. "With Booking.com an email arrives in your inbox as you land on the way home saying: 'Hi. What did you think of the hotel?' By asking for the review after the booking is made, they are also verifying it's authentic."

Differentiation could be the key to a new site's success, according to Davidson. "While it is difficult to get the ball rolling, once they reach a meaningful breadth of reviews, perhaps in a niche market to start off with, something could take off," he says. "The habit of contributing reviews is infectious after all."

Holiday Watchdog: HolidayWatchdog.com
Marketeers Chris Brown and Chris Clarkson launched Holiday Watchdog in 2004 as a hotel-review site that caters for British package holidaymakers; key destinations include Spain, Portugal, Turkey, Greece and Cyprus. They were bought out by TripAdvisor in 2007.

Gogobot: Gogobot.com
Travis Katz took his experience as head of international operations at MySpace into the launch of Gogobot in 2010 - and in just three years the site has rocketed. It contains destination content married to user reviews and great images. Users can plan an itinerary to a destination - and pick up recommendations from Facebook and Twitter friends, as well as the whole Gogobot community.

Skytrax: Airlinequality.com
Skytrax gets people to opine on everything related to flying, from airlines and their punctuality to airports and business-class lounges. There are seat maps and reviews for more than 250 airlines so you can actually check how comfy (or not) your seat is.

IgoUgo: IgoUgo.com
Launched at the turn of the Millennium, IgoUgo went great guns in its first few years, winning a Webby award for best travel site in the US in 2004. The award attracted much attention and it was purchased in 2007 by Sabre Holdings, parent company of Travelocity.com. Its homepage is now more commercially driven, with a number of price-comparison search options.

This Is Your Kingdom: ThisIsYourKingdom.co.uk
Hannah Needham quit her job as a lawyer last year to co-launch This Is Your Kingdom with school pal Rebecca Gaunt after finding there were no sites that fulfilled their curiosity about the British Isles. Not strictly user-generated, the pair pick bloggers who are "tastemakers" to contribute "lovely things to see and do in the UK". They also promise that their contributors have no commercial links with the companies they recommend.

HolidayCheck: HolidayCheck.com
Founded in Switzerland in 2004, HolidayCheck features destination information, allied to a huge user-generated hotel reviews database. Submitting a review is a pretty simple five-step process and submissions are verified by return email to check authenticity. The site teamed up with Lufthansa's Miles & More loyalty programme last month and new reviews are rewarded with 100 air miles.

GeckoGo: GeckoGo.com
A trip planner, review site and community combined, GeckoGo is aimed at the independent traveller. It claims to have more than 1.8m members and to host almost 300,000 reviews - which can be searched in a unique way, with a world map showing how good a time posters had in a certain number of categories (beach, wildlife etc) and in which month. Users can also edit the site's content Wikipedia-style.

Wander: OnWander.com
Wander created a social-media buzz last year by getting people to Tweet and Facebook a landing page for a travel website that hadn't even launched - giving them points on an "Utterly Pointless Leaderboard" for their efforts. Twelve months on and it seems no closer to going live but you can get a "boarding pass" if you wish to join the journey when it does - which makes it a little like one of those mystery hotels you can book where you pay in advance of finding out where you are staying.

Easy Voyage: EasyVoyage.co.uk
Easy Voyage claims to have "all the tips for your trips" and it certainly throws the kitchen sink at travel and tourism. There's news, pictures, videos and reviews submitted by both an in-house team of 23 journalists as well as readers. The professionally written content is incredibly detailed - 2,000-plus words on some hotels - which can make amateur submissions look poor by comparison.

Triptease: Triptease.com
Aimed at the luxury travel market and with a glossy design to match, Triptease is the month-old brainchild of UK entrepreneur Charlie Osmond. The site relies more on great images than in-depth reviews, and new contributors must get at least five "likes" for their first entry before they are allowed to write more. Some of the reviews we checked, however, were by people linked to travel agents. When we queried this, the site promised it is about to start tagging people who work in the industry to improve transparency.

Source: The Independent