It’s clearly the kind of feedback/information people that work for Online Travel Agencies or Hotel Portals would love to gather from their visitors. That’s why I have decided to add my 2 cent and make my own list of things that really annoy me while booking online. Hopefully other bloggers will continue the discussion and post their own list on their blog! That would be VERY interesting!

Here goes my list:

• Being obligated to create a member account before I can get all the details of a (potential) booking.
• Searching for hours for the cancellation fees of a hotel before I complete a booking.
• Not knowing the total price of a booking before I filled out any personal information.
• Not being able to use a booking engine with Firefox!
• Promotions that never match my holidays periods.
• Getting an expired sessions of a search when being idle for a short period of time.
• Chosing to book a flight, filling out ALL the personal information asked (including credit card number) and getting an error message saying it’s not available anymore (but still offered and listed on-site and on all travel meta search engines).
• Browsing a little deeper to know the services a hotel is offering, and not being able to get back to the result page I came from.
• Picking an available hotel room, and discovering that was not a real time displayed availability and that an email that has been sent to the hotelier, who replies room is not available anymore for this period of the year.
• Having to query availability/rates twice. Once for displaying the system cache of available hotels of the site, and another time for confirming the hotel is really available at that rate!

That’s my list, I hope travel bloggers will follow that “10 annoying things” thread and add their personal opinions. If you do so please add a trackback to this post so we can follow you.

Professionals are, of course, invited to comment my list.

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There is no need to install Google Talk as your chat client is your browser (firefox, opera, internet explorer, safari). If we are signed in to our Google talk account, the badge will show a green icon. Clicking on the badge will launch a real time chat window. It generally takes a few seconds for us to accept the chat then it goes like this:

The conversations are private and only one-to-one, so other visitors won’t be able to read them. Do not hesitate to say hello if I’m available.

- For those who want to add this free feature to their own blog (or website!), first they need to register to Google Talk and then they need to create a Google Talk chatback badge. Copy the script and paste it to the page of your choice. You’re done. Enjoy.

 PS: Blackberry owners (some of my friends and readers) might be interested in downloading the Google Talk app that blackberry released.

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I am an early adopter of Netvibes, and I think it’s the best RSS readers available; I have enjoyed a lot the new features Ginger Beta has added and apparently I am now able to share my excitement with Blog on travel’s readers before they release the new version officially:

Indeed, as a reward to my loyalty toward Netvibes, today I received this email:

• Thank you for making the Netvibes Ginger beta program such
  a success!We are about to open Ginger to every Netvibes user and want to let
  you know so you can be one of the first to invite your friends.

Drop a nice comment on this article with your email to receive an invite for Netvibes Ginger; and please give your feedback concerning those (great) new features once you have been invited.

PS: Click here to to add Blog On Travel to Ginger.

PS2: Tip: Click here to add Netvibes as a default engine to the built-in Web feed reader of Firefox 2

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Actually I know quite a lot of people that work in the Real Estate industry (basically intermediaries between owners and renters), and I am often amazed to see that while everything goes 2.0, real estate is no exception. My online research for the right property made me discover Domegos, which is a vacation rentals directory that aims to connect owners and renters. It is an alpha version as they just launched but it is very promising.

Curiously what first grabbed my attention were all the advantages for vacation rental owners (not real estate agencies!) to list their properties for free on this Real Estate 2.0 platform. Each property gets six pages, 14 photos (that’s quite a lot), an interactive map (via a Google Maps mash-up), customer feedback form, offer management, and an availability calendar. Not bad, isn’t it? Apparently most vacation rentals listing sites don’t have quite that breadth of tools and features.

Seeing that benifiting from all those features was free of charge for owners, my second thought was: there must be some type of hidden commissions that the renters would pay (me in this case!). Again, I was nicely surprised to see there are no fees whatsoever for the renters, no commission charges for mediated booking, nothing, nada!

All in all, Domegos is clearly not an intermediary in the selling process but more of a facilitator helping owners and renters to do business easily. A skilfully free vacation rentals directory. I recommend it for my (lucky) owner friends and for renters as well (try the email alert system that warn you when system matches your needs).

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The user-generated reviews’ giant Tripavisor (part of the Expedia, Inc. family of travel companies), decided to “create a new and easier to use” site. Kristen Nicole from Mashable previously published an article saying that people have complained about the cluttered homepage of the (curent) site.

Look at those “before-after” screenshots I took and make your own opinion:

A typical WEB 2.0 launch for this new version: As it has been said by Tripadvisor: It is a beta site! “Beta” means [Tripadvisor] is still polishing a few things! This beta version was first launched on the co.uk site of TA a few days ago, and it is now for everyone to REVIEW!

I have noticed myself a few mistakes in the list of countries/cities of the Europe section, like Lisbon listed under Romania(!), Rome in Latvia (!), Venice in Luxembourg (!) etc. Travolution commenters spotted those mistakes and considered that even if “it will be sorted soon” still “it reflects poorly”.

Tim Hughes thinks the beta version of Tripadvisor looks like a retail travel site. Did Tripadvisor hide the business side of their “free review site” on purpose? It’s hard to believe, as ads were everywhere in the previous version (text ad links called sponsored links and flash ads). Does Tripadvisor think it will convert better if it has the “look and feel” of a retail website (now that they are famous for being review website)? I guess so!

Take a look at a full review of this new design written by Alex (Travel UCD).

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Minube.com referred itself as being a web 2.0 site. A simple, clean and original design with green, red and orange clouds! It uses features that made Web 2.0 sites so convenient such as the suggestion search box; as you type in a query it will display the available cities/countries/airports dynamically via some AJAX. Pretty useful when you don’t know how to spell those Spanish cities or when you don’t know the airport name of your destination.

Of course it also integrates maps from Google maps (I did not manage to see the mapping of all hotels of the first page of result on one map), and reviews (reviews are not moderated yet). The good thing is there are no reviews on the system yet, it starts from scratch. One of the problems of Tripadvisor is that they are still showing client reviews that are very old, totally outdated although the owner/management team of the hotel has changed or the hotel has been fully renovated.

As a traditional travel aggregator, Minube compares the prices of a lot of different travel agencies (Atrapalo, eDreams, TerminalA, MuchoViaje etc.), airlines (low cost airline such as Vueling, Clickair) or hotel portals, and shows the best price found (with no additional fees).

The page of results of a hotel search is very similar to SideStep results page, as there is a slider control to determine the “price range” that you can adjust according to your budget/needs. I did a comparison between Sidestep and Minube for the same date (last minute booking) in Barcelona and I was pretty happy of the results; specially because Minube found many more hotels with cheap rates. This is no surprise as they already work with a lot of local providers (see paragraph below).

Here is an extensive list of the hotel providers, airlines, and online travel agencies that Minube partnered with:

All in all, after I spent 15 minutes playing with this new aggregator, I felt pretty impressed by this beta version of Minube. They start with a good design, a lot of partners (even though some are missing), and good web 2.0 functionalities and features (recent searches, travel fair, filters of travel agencies, event calendar). It definitely has its place among its Spanish competitors, HotelAdicto, Trabber, Tsales (any other I missed?). I believe they will be launching a version for the french market soon called MonNuage.fr according to what I read on their blog. Congratulations!

PS: I havent had time to try the “alert engine” but I already like the idea. I believe it is similar to what Orbitz does, by keeping searching for the price and dates you have requested and sending you an alert by email once it has been found! I’ll try this tomorrow but I needed first to share this with you.

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The US Government threatened Hola Airlines via Boeing to end the service of maintenance of the Boeing aircraft belonging to the carrier. As its fleet is entirely composed of Boeing aircrafts, Hola Airlines has been forced to give up its operation in the Carribean Island overnight.

The US government applies the 1996 Helms-Burton Act that prevent non north-American countries from trading with Cuba by penalizing foreign companies.

The Helms-Burton Act was condemned by the Council of Europe, the European Union, Canada, Mexico, Argentina and other U.S. allies that enjoy normal trade relations with Cuba.

Mario Hidalgo made it clear that this decision goes totally against the company’s will: “This decision is unfair, specially for Cuban people” and added he was “against US politics towards Cuba.”

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Yesterday I stumbled upon an incredible amateur video that made it to the top #20 of the most watched video of Youtube. The statistics speak for themselves:

Views: 76,062
Comments: 468
Favorited: 175

Robert McKee took a Delta flight (n°6499) and got stuck on tarmac during 7 hours straight.

Fortunately, he had a video recording device (a lot of batteries) and enough know-how to edit and post this video to the Consumerist Blog.

The same way, I thought of blogging my last trip to Barcelona (with a connection in Rome); it was an Alitalia flight planned at 7pm from Nice. The flight was delayed, re-scheduled at 11:45pm, then delayed again to finally be cancelled around 1h20am. My flight finally got scheduled 24 hours later. It got cancelled twice! After the first cancellation, a voice quickly came out of the airport speakers saying:

“We will try to repair the airplane with the help of Air France’ staff; Alitalia technicians will be sending instructions by phone from Rome to the technicians located at Nice airport, so they can repair the airplane.”

Priceless! I twittered it but unfortunately I did not have any good audio or video recording devices to record this.

We all have our own stories of bad luck while traveling, but thanks to the Web 2.0 user generated content, customers are now capable of getting a worldwide audience to denounce bad (or excellent) comercial practices. Airlines too, should care about what they say to their customers and how they treat them as information is spreading fast, otherwise it will be published on hundreds of blogs (including the famous blog of Robert Scoble) …

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I am pretty happy to announce that Blog on travel finally passed the psychological barrier of 500 subscribers to its RSS feed today (via feedburner). It has been quite a long way to achieve this, you can see this in the graph below that shows the RSS Subscribers of this blog from the very beginning:

Thank you very much for all readers of this blog for adding our RSS feed to their favorite blog reader! If you aren’t subscribed yet, please do it now by clicking this RSS link or by submitting your email on the right sidebar of this blog (you will receive a confirmation link by email that you have to click).

Here is another graph that shows the RSS audience of Blog on travel; 53% of the audience comes from the great RSS reader Netvibes (which I highly recommend), then 15% of the RSS audience comes from Google Feedfetcher. Google Feedfetcher represents all users that have added Blogontravel on their Google homepage or on Google Reader!

Note: Feedburner has just been bought by … Google!

SEO achievements:

I am also pretty happy to see that the Search Engine Optimization work I have performed for the last 6 months helped the blog to make it to the TOP 10 results of Google.com for the keywords “travel blog”; Blog on travel is now ranking 9th on the first page of results for those words.

PS: By the way thank you Google for updating the Page Rank to 4/10.

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Trivop.com is a very good example of a good use of web 2.0 in the travel industry. It is a platform of video reviews of hotels (located in Europe and then in the future in the US).Like I said in the past, the future of hotel reviews is strongly connected to the future of online video; we previously saw the impact of a simple video uploaded on youtube to report a poor hotel room in Madrid. We also saw Tripadvisor launched a video uploading feature on their website to follow this (hotel) trend.

Now we have a dedicated website only for hotels which combined a mashup of Google maps, Tripadvisor text reviews and videos generated by hoteliers and guests.In the video Thomas says that it will be focused on hotels for the first 3 years, Trivop does not have a real competitor since there is no other 100% similar site. However it might somehow compete with videos of websites like Youtube, Google Video, DailyMotions etc. and also with sites like www.travelistic.com that have a wider approach and publish video content for everything related to travel.

When Trivop has been launched at the beginning of April 2007, it already had filmed and uploaded about 170 videos of hotels. Trivop will also intend to create a marketplace community where video producers could meet the demand for video of hoteliers.

During the interview Thomas says that not only the hotelier can upload a video but also the guest. As of today I have not been able to find a video generated by a guest, but only video “ordered” by hoteliers, with a very good editing by the way. The only negative comment I would make is that there is no way you can control the playback of the video other than using the pause button. Videos are played sequentially (divided into segments: lobby/standard room/suite etc) just as if you were watching plain old television. When deciding what hotel I want to book, I have a limited available time for making my choice. I need to compare hotel prices, hotels reviews and so on; watching each segment (of about 50sec to 1min40) without having the choice to fast forward the video is time consuming.

In my opinion the challenge for Trivop will be to generate revenue by proposing their services as filmmakers for hoteliers while they offer a free platform for guests to upload their “videos reviews” that could criticize and hurt their own clients.

Anyway I found that the concept of Trivop is innovative and useful for travellers and I wish them the best of success.

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