Due to an outbreak of Human Swine Influenza in Mexico City, Air Canada is providing the following information for customers with plans to travel to/from the area. For customers with reservations for travel to/from Mexico City up to April 30, Air Canada is waiving change fees in order to facilitate changes to travel plans and allow for travel at a later date.

Customers may rebook their travel without penalty, through Air Canada Reservations at 1-888-247-2262; TTY hearing impaired: 1-800-361-8071, or through their travel agent. Air Canada continues to monitor the situation closely and will provide further travel updates as developments occur. (Source: TravelCourier.travel)


For further information on Swine Influenza or any other travel emergencies, visit www.SOS.travel

As a fellow blogger I have become rather versed in the ways of social media. The Internet community has become so vast and grown so strong, that a set of rules seems to have been established to promote this "cohesive social living." The times clearly are a' changing when the traditions of hand written thank you letters and curtsying are being replaced with tweet backs and hoops & yoyo e-cards. Here are just a few basic ground rules for being well received on some of today's most popular social media outlets:

If you blog it they will come: If you're blogging about someones site or product be sure to link back to them. Not only does it make your blog heavier, but it will increase traffic to both sites. If you read a blog that you like, be sure to pass it along. Linking a blog to StumbleUpon, Google Reader, or Friendfeed are good places to start. Also, if you read a great post and want to comment try to say something more than "nice job!" Bloggers always appreciate it when comments provide constructive feedback.

Do not use Facebook to "over promote": There is nothing more annoying than having a Facebook inbox that is constantly flooded with invites to the same type of party, at the same club, by the same promoter day in and day out. If you start up a Facebook group for promotional purposes, do not bombard your members with constant messaging. Try to keep most of that stuff on the group wall or message board. And be sure to use good judgement when tagging your friends in pictures, incriminating or otherwise unpleasant photos should be kept private.

Follows is as follows does: The Internet community has gone afire with twitter, the social site built for microblogging and keeping in instant contact with your friends and followers. While you do not have to follow everyone that follows you, if one of your followers is in a similar industry it is typically common courtesy to follow them back. And while its fine to use twitter as a marketing tool, its nice to promote others from time to time just to change things up a bit.

Click on the link below for more tips on SEO for your website!

10 Easy Ways to Get Top Search Engine Optimization Rankings

In today's internet world, it is imperative to have a website for your business. How do you get on the web?

The first step is to purchase a domain name (the website address) from a registrar such as Moniker or Go Daddy. A registrar is an authorized reseller of domain names from a registry. Your domain name needs to communicate to others what you are selling or offering. Since there are so many websites on the Internet, you need to stick out. A .travel domain is a great way of doing this if you are in the travel or tourism industry. Unlike .com, there are still many great .travel names available that will be able to convey the message of your business clear and concisely.

Next, your website needs content. This is the text, pictures, banners, and so on that will appear on the site. The next thing you need is a design layout. Once your site is set up you will also need marketing in order to get visitors!

Finally, your site will need web hosting. This includes somewhere for your site's data to be stored and a way for it to be accessed (transferred from this location to your site visitors' computers). These two things are called storage and bandwidth. So that is why a website host (or web hosting company) is needed. You cannot simply store your site on your own computer, unless you have a dedicated web server (this is a special computer with a super high speed internet connection). This would cost you thousands upon thousands of dollars to purchase and maintain. Spending all that money on hosting your site yourself is impractical. Thus, you need a web hosting company to take care of this for you. (WebHostDirectory)

With a number of webhosting companies on the internet, it is sometimes hard to find the one that offers true cheap and quality webhosting. Before, you began to search for companies that offer cheap webhosting, it is important to know what exactly you are looking for. This includes your site features, internet programming languages, database connectivity features, email addresses, domain name, traffic you expect and many other considerations. (MyContentBuilder)

April Fools Day was yesterday and many jokes ensued on the internet. Call me gullible, but I fell for most of them.

The first one that I caught was that the social media tool Twitter was applying for the top level domain (TLD) ".tweet"

Recently, a new TLD (top level domain) was launched to the internet, .tel. .tel addresses are the newest way to store all of your personal or business contact information in one, easily accessible, place on the web.

Forget Web 1.0 and 2.0, Web 3.0 is the next generation of the internet.

Think of Web 1.0 as a library. You can use it as a source of information, but you can't contribute to or change the information in any way. Web 2.0 is more like a big group of friends and acquaintances. You can still use it to receive information, but you also contribute to the conversation and make it a richer experience.

Web 3.0 is your own personal assistant. Web 3.0 will make tasks like your search for movies and food faster and easier. Instead of multiple searches, you might type a complex sentence or two in your Web 3.0 browser, and the Web will do the rest. For example, you could type "I want to see a funny movie and then eat at a good Mexican restaurant. What are my options?" The Web 3.0 browser will analyze your response, search the Internet for all possible answers, and then organize the results for you. (How Stuff Works).

Web 3.0 is the clearly the future of the web. While it is filled with numerous uncertainties, when it arrives there is going to be major change in the internet.

My last post listed top social media trends for travel and tourism. One of the suggestions, made by Klaus Hidebrandt was to get your CEO or top executive involved in social media. The most current trend to introduce this idea? ExecTweet.

ExecTweet is Twitter spinoff site that just displays tweets from select executives, making it easier to track the big shots on Twitter. It is published by ad firm Federated Media, and sponsored by Microsoft. The site "collects" tweets from various executives and puts them in one stream. Some of the best known company leaders that are currently using this service include Craigslist's Craig Newmark, Virgin's Richard Branson, and former AOL head Steve Case.

ExecTweet may be one path to cash for the famously revenue-free messaging service, as according to All Things Digital, Twitter is taking a fee for powering this new Microsoft-sponsored service.

Will ExecTweet be the new trend for the head honchos? Check out http://www.exectweets.com/ and decide for yourself.

Last week, I attended the PhoCusWright Blogger's Summit Workshop held at the ITB conference in Berlin, Germany.

The workshop was entitled "The Top Social Media Trends for Travel & Tourism" and featured a panel of 5 major bloggers. Each member of the panel was asked to provide his 3-5 top Social Media Trends for 2009:

Darren Cronian

• Mobile
  
• Twitter: companies are going to have to become more social and interact with the consumer
  
• Travel companies will start using more social media
  

Klaus Hidebrandt

• Social Media 2.0 is all about communication with the consumer. Companies need to know, understand, and execute social media at a top level.
  
• Get your CEO or top executive involved. Employees love it. Customers love it. There is no more powerful way to humanize your brand.
  
• The future lies in companies that adopt EVERYTHING: one brand and one media is best.
  

Kevin May

• Twitter: 974% of traffic in UK in 2008
  
• PR: people are thinking more cleverly in terms of PR. They are using different forms of media both online and offline for campaigns.
  
• Crowd-sourcing: making sure you know what is happening in a network digitally.
  
• Hyperlocal: creating niche services for a localized community
  

Martin Schobert

• Feedback 2.0: a lot of comments, learning how to communicate with a social internet
  
• Maps will be the new interface.
  
• More CONTEXT: the right content offered to the right person at the right time
  
• Do your homework. Define goals clearly with social web and have B2B conversations
  

Vasco Sommer-Nunes

• Volume of mentions will become part of a greater measurement metrix, such as "share of voice", to determine success in social media.
  
• Personal publishing on the web will continue to increase, thereby increasing the share of user generated content.
• Companies will react and hire a social media guy to listen, help and educate users
  
• Cross publishing will become stronger, i.e. publishing into several communities from one web site or mobile phone.
  
• The travel industry will embrace social media even more than other industries, because people love to talk about their vacation and show others where they´ve been!
  

After the panelists presented their trends, the audience was asked to interactively text in their picks to have a final list of 3. Although the majority of the panel's trends focused on social media sites, especially Twitter, the audience's choices end up being strategies.

Audiences Choices of Top 3 Social Media Trends with the greatest impact in the next year:

Twitter, the social networking and micro-blogging service, seems to be sweeping the nation. Twitter allows users to send and view others updates (called tweets) which are 140 characters in length. Like Facebook, Twitter originally started for others to be updated on the happenings of their friend's daily lives. The main difference between Twitter and Facebook is that Twitter encourages a dialogue, allowing opportunities to be built with people which would not have otherwise occurred. It has quickly shifted directions as now many celebrities have adopted Twitter, as well as businesses. Twitter is quickly becoming a communication medium of choice between companies in a variety of industries and their customers.

Twitter allows people to connect with your business on an up-to-date basis. The social media site can be used to increase your brand visibility and converse with your customers as up to the minute deals and information is posted. You can even make online Twitter coupons at twtqpon.

JetBlue, Crystal Cruises, Carnival, British Airways, and Virgin America are great examples of businesses that are using Twitter to keep customers in the know. Their Twitter posts feature sales and deals, travel tips, and current flight delays and cancellations, although Virgin America seems to be setting the bar in the Travel industry sector.

Want more travel industry Twitters? Click here for "50 great travel tweeters." (telegraph.co.uk)

The future of travel and destination marketing is online. Discussion boards, customer review sites, blogs, and social network sites dominate the internet today. They also play an integral part in the planning of travel.

"This year, 40% of all leisure and 35% of business travel bookings will be done online. By 2010 over 50% of leisure bookings are expected to be online. The percentage of meeting planners researching and booking online is also growing at a rapid pace. An estimated 89% of planners are researching event locations on the web, and by 2008, 41% of all groups and meetings travel revenues will come from the Internet." (HotelMarketing.com)

Facebook, a social media site originally for students attending Ivy League schools, has quickly evolved over the years and taken over the internet. Today, Facebook is used by all ages to get in touch with old friends and even make some new ones. From a marketing perspective, Facebook offers a way for businesses to reach more customers through groups, fan pages, notes, applications, and more. Facebook business pages are a form of social media marketing that allows a business to "create more targeted messages to individual niche groups and to leverage personal recommendations from your customers in order to create word of mouth marketing." (Creative Fusion Media)

Building a Facebook business page will attract customers of all ages and demographics. A Facebook business page offers a number of features to bring customers to your business. You can even build multiple pages to appeal to different groups of people, such as teens.

With a Facebook business page you can:

• Supply basic business information such as a website, company overview and physical address. You are also able to place a logo of your business on the page.
  
• Easily upload photos and videos. Your clients and fans can add photos as well.
  
• Engage clients in conversation using the discussion board or the "wall"
  
• Add notes (similar to a blog post) and post upcoming events or promotions that you may be hosting
  
• Have users become a fan of your company

Happy Fat Tuesday! This past weekend I visited one of my favorite U.S. cities, New Orleans, for the start of the Mardi Gras celebrations. If you want to celebrate and are unable to make the trip to the Big Easy, the internet has some great ways to make it feel like you are there.

Throw on some party beads and watch the parades!
Click here for a live webcam of various shots of New Orleans, as well as the parades broadcasted live. There is also a live blog that will update you on the happenings of the day.

Bon Apetite! Mardi Gras is not complete without the delicious cuisine that New Orleans has to offer. My top favorites:

Café Du Monde's café Au Lait and beignets.

You can buy beignet mix and a can of coffee on their website.

Central Grocery muffaletta.

A typical muffuletta consists of one muffuletta loaf, split horizontally. The loaf is then covered with a marinated olive salad, then layers of capicola, salami, mortadella, emmentaler, and provolone. Click here for a fellow bloggers recipe.

Tropical Isle Hand Grenades. Known as "New Orleans' Most Powerful Drink," the cocktail has a sweet melon taste, is colored light-green, and comes in a plastic half-yard glass shaped like a hand grenade at the bottom, with small plastic grenades inside the container. The home mix can be purchased from their website.

And of course, no Mardi Gras is complete without king cake. A Lousiana-style king cake is a cinnamon-roll like cake inside with sugary icing with traditional Mardi Gras colored (green, yellow, purple) sprinkles on the outside. The cakes have a small plastic baby trinket inside, and the person who gets the piece of cake with it is King or Queen for the day. The top 15 places to order king cakes can be found here, although Party Palace is my personal favorite.

For more information on visiting New Orleans, visit www.NewOrleans.travel

In the current economic downturn, the travel industry has taken a hard hit. The challenge of getting people to spend their hard-earned money on leisure travel is rising by the day. Convincing people to travel has now come down the strategic marketing plans set forth by industry leaders. To me, airline marketing has always been interesting to observe. Each company takes their own individual approach to grab the consumer and convince them that they need to fly a specific airline. Two airlines have launched marketing campaigns geared toward the recession.








JetBlue has recently launched a program that refunds plane tickets to those who are laid off from their jobs before the flight. “JetBlue launched the program not because customers were asking for refunds, but because the airline has noticed that passengers are waiting to the last minute to buy tickets, a sign of nervousness about their finances.” (Wall Street Journal)

Under its new Promise Program, customers who book flights between Feb. 1 and June 1, 2009, and lose their job on or after Feb. 17 may be eligible for the refund. JetBlue’s fares are usually nonrefundable, but with the Promise Program the traveler listed on the itinerary can request a refund for up to nine customers traveling on one reservation.

"JetBlue is committed to helping customer’s book stress-free travel plans, and based on their feedback we made adjustments to our refund policy to allow them to book with confidence," Robin Hayes, executive vice president and chief commercial officer for JetBlue said in a statement. "This price promise allows them to book early and take advantage of our low fares without worrying they will lose their money if they need to cancel their trip due to job loss."

JetBlue’s latest marketing effort is also a great idea for businesses that are cutting back on business travel. With the Promise Program, customers will be able to feel comfortable about making travel arrangements even with rumors flying around the office about layoffs.



On the other hand, Allegiant Air is taking an opposite tactic from JetBlue by expanding their service and targeting a niche market of smaller cities throughout the country. The airline was the most profitable domestic carrier in 2008, and wants to continue to grow. Allegiant believes that small-town Americans will continue to buy getaways to escape from the daily grind.

So in the end, which marketing plan will win? The one that promises financial security or the one that offers a chance to leave all worries behind for a few days? Only time will tell.

Yesterday, while listening to my favorite online radio station (usually commercial-free), I was bombarded with an ad that played after every single song for ProFlowers, an online plant, flower and gift store. It was then that I realized that Valentine’s Day has quickly shifted from a greeting card holiday, to the largest e-commerce holiday out of the year.

Looking to use the internet to celebrate Valentine’s Day? Here are some ideas:

· Buy your flowers, gifts and chocolate online. The top websites are 1800flowers.com, ftd.com, and ProFlowers.com.

· Send an e-card. Hallmark.com offers free cards you can send to your sweetie online.

· For a unique gift idea, give a romantic website name such as WorldsBestValentine.com, ILoveYou.net, or ValentinesDay.travel. You can even populate the website with some surprise content.

Businesses can use the holiday to promote themselves. An entertaining Valentine’s themed YouTube video or a Facebook fan page offering valentine promotions are great ways of getting the word out to potential and current customers about the holiday.

Using E-mail, Cross-Marketing and Special Promotions are more great internet marketing tools. According to retailemailblog.com, two-thirds of Valentine’s Day-related emails were sent during February. The biggest days were Thursday, Feb. 8, followed by Tuesday, Feb. 6, and then Monday, Feb. 12.

Happy (e)Valentines Day!