Archive for Wednesday 5 July 2006

Sheraton Hotels & Resorts share guests’ stories– online — front and centre!

Guests staying at the Sheraton Hotels & Resorts can now enter a story about their visit and have it displayed on the home page of their new website www.sheraton.com – the first hotel industry website to draw attention to guest-generated content and build an online social network.

You can navigate the globe to see tags posted at their different locations. Select a tag and you can read travel stories, travel experiences and see photographs of the area. Stories include encounters with locals, reasons why visitors travelled to a particular area, events experienced, etc. There is a prize for sharing stories as well.

While this form of online social networking is not new to the tourism industry (see visitPA, USA) it shows the power of bringing “word of mouth” to your tourist destination, and exemplifies the value in building online communities.

Do you have an “on-line community” story to share?

Remember, Roger A. Brooks‘ Rule 23 “The Rule of Public relations” states that ‘Bragging is more effective when someone else does it for you.’

Book a taxi online with Where2Guv

www.Where2Guv.com is the UK’s online taxi reservation system. It’s a two-step process. Enter your pickup and dropoff points, pickup time and date, number of passengers and whether the trip is one-way or return, and wait for a price quote. Then, book and pay. Confirmation is received within minutes. Where2Guv works with pre-qualified taxi service companies and travel agents. Airport services are the major users of this site.

Now, if each taxi was equipped with a GPS we could monitor its path on Google Maps, real-time, as with the Dublin commuter trains experiment, and make sure we don’t keep the taxi driver waiting when it arrives for pickup.

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