Monthly Archives: September 2009
EcoTourism New Zealand
New Zealand would have to be one of the best destinations globally for not only being eco-concious, but also taking advantage of a growing demand for ectotourism. Having a population of around 4,000,000 Million living on about 270,000 square km’s allows NZ to control the industry with fairly strict conditions. To get a sense of scale, [...]
Red Balloon: In your face!
I got a bit of a surprise tonight while taking part in the time honoured tradition of late night shopping: Red Balloon had set up a kiosk on the 3rd floor (Mens section) of the Pitt Street Myer. Am I the only one that finds an online brand selling directly to the public a bit [...]
AAMI attacks the travel industry, calls agents thieves
It’s not often we see one business take a direct shot at another in open forum. It’s even more rare that they go so far as to claim their competitors are thieves stealing from their customers but that’s exactly what AAMI have done to travel agents in their recent TV ad (See below). This actually [...]
Best and worst of YouTube tourism videos
The newest VisitDenmark tourism campaign has been hotly debated on blogs over the past few weeks for its unscrupulous use of a mother searching for the father of her child, said to be a tourist visiting Denmark. Alex Bainbridge has written a great post on this already, so I won’t re-debate the videos lack of [...]
Travelodge UK buying Twitter followers
Travelodge UK are giving an exclusive offer to anyone following them on Twitter, 10£ to be exact (19.00 AUD). Call me cynical, but I see this as an attempt to buy followers. I had a look at their tweets, wanting to give them the benefit of the doubt. Maybe there was some good travel advice to [...]
Pro-Poor Tourism, what happened?
I was reading a textbook last weekend (Tourism, Principles and Practice by Chris Cooper) that mentioned a sector of the industry I had never heard of before: Pro-Poor Tourism. It went on to describe the definitions and functions of “PPT” as a vehicle to end poverty in developing nations in a sustainable, natural way. Sound [...]
Money Directs new site, looks great!
Money Direct have released a new site for all regions. Thank you MD, it looks great! For those that are not familiar with MD, they provide a payment system designed for the travel industry. Started in 1991 for Asia pacific, Money Direct really took off when they stuck up a joint deal with Amadeus and [...]
Safety, the missing hotel ranking system
I was helping my wife plan a business trip to London and we were looking for a hotel. She wanted something trendy and in a safe area close to her office, but we realized we didn’t actually know the city all that well. Peoples opinions on the internet were all subjective and pretty much no [...]
Flight Centre rejects the prowess of online travel
In the Wednesday 26th of August edition of Travel weekly Graham Turner, managing director of Flight Centre, made the comment that, “There is some potential for growth [in Webjet] but I don’t think it will take significant amounts of revenue away from us”. That is very bold, considering how prolific the internet has been in [...]
Yahoo expands travel portfolio in Australia