You’ve all dealt with the harried and harassed guests at the front desk.  Their plane was delayed, the airport lost their luggage, and the kids screamed the whole way.  Unfortunately, their vacation experience started when they left the house, and your online reviews could possibly suffer from a traveler’s bad mood.

 What can you do to help guests travel safely and conveniently to your doorstep?  Arm them with some great travel tips to keep them  happy, safe, and on-time!  I was just reading an article that my online friend Shane Keener from the Places to Stay blog sent me from BudgetTravel.com called the Family Travel Handbook  

This article had some great advice for traveling with kids – here are my favorite tips:

Sign kids up as Frequent Fliers

Check the car-seat – don’t use it on the plane.  I just put mine in an airline-provided plastic bag and it’s traveled well every time.  Car Rental car seats are dirty.

DONT preboard.  An extra 1/2 hour strapped in a seat? No Thanks!

Only the essentials – divide carry-on items by parent.  Dad has the fun stuff, Mom has snacks diapers, etc.  Then you’ll know who has what and you’re not digging around in your bags the whole flight.

Bring a few empty 8oz water bottles & refill once through security.

Not all of your guests will be families – so provide some essential items for adults to find your front door.

Printable directions with a map

Transportation information (shuttles & taxis) along with the location of the desk/taxi stop at the Airport Terminal

Let the guests send directions and reservations information via SMS (Text) message to their cellphones

Is your site mobile friendly?  Add a sub-domain to your site that is mobile friendly and contains location information, maps, directions and phone numbers. 

Provide a “suggested packing list.”  If your evenings are chilly, let your guest know beforehand. 

See if your confirmation pages and emails are compatible with a trip organizing service like TripIt.com.  Pretty handy for frequent travelers.

Keep in mind, the journey is part of the vacation…making sur eyour guests have a good one is a great service to offer.  Sometimes a “How was your trip?” is enough to release tension.  A sympathetic ear and some help with lost luggage goes a long way to gaining a good review.

texting photo from Nesster
packing photo from Tomeppy
Kid flying photo from ninjapoodles

As the Social Media Marketing wave keeps rising, Blizzard keeps surfing it. Blog link building, online media rooms, entire blog website designs, and online brand management are just a handful of the places this wave has brought us. Recently we have, for the benefit of our clients, begun testing the popular social site, Squidoo.com.

Squidoo allows users to design a “lens” for any and all topics imaginable. A lens is basically a single webpage on which you can include video, text, links, photos, and a variety of other media. However, the real benefit to our clients is the rankings that can develop from these lenses. Think of it like a free directory listing over which the author has complete control.

Here are some examples of lenses published for three clients:
Destinations Link Hospitality
Lahaina Island Accommodations
Peak Properties

For most of the clients tested, a search for the client’s name and location most often produces their Squidoo lens in the top ten search results. This is a great brand and reputation management tool. Often their lenses appear above many directories they have PAID to be listed in!

Another great aspect of Squidoo is the ability to create a “Group.” A group is a collection of similar lenses. The “Blizzard Client Directory” group is the one we have constructed that has become a moderately powerful page in a relatively short amount of time. From this group we link to our client’s websites as well as their individual lenses. The potential traffic, ranking and SEO benefit is immense.

Squidoo is but one small piece of a GIANT internet marketing puzzle. Keeping up with trends, new ideas and techniques keeps our clients on the edge of what is being done in todays online marketplace. If you’d like to hear more about Blizzard and our offerings – contact our Business Development department or send an email to rfp@blizzardinternet.com.

In Carrie Hill’s article, “Top 5 Reasons You NEED Maps on Your Travel Website“, she discusses the importance of offering maps to help drive website visitors to make a booking on your site.

Why put a map on your site? The top five reasons, from Carrie’s article, include:

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JavaScript is a programming language that is mostly used in web pages, usually to add features that make the web page more interactive. When JavaScript is included in an HTML file, it relies upon the browser to interpret the JavaScript.

According to Wikipedia, one major use of web-based JavaScript is to write functions that are embedded in or included from HTML pages and interact with the Document Object Model of the page to perform tasks not possible in HTML alone. Here are some of the most common uses of JavaScript:

• Opening or popping up a new window with programming control over the size, position and ‘look’ of the new window
• Validation of web form input values to make sure that they will be accepted before they are submitted to the server
• Changing images as the mouse cursor moves over them
  Blizzard Associate – Blizzard Internet Marketing, Inc.

We refer to Flash in a lot of our articles that discuss new websites and website redesigns. Although many people may already know what Flash is, it may be helpful to others to learn about it.

According to Webopedia: Flash is a bandwidth friendly and browser independent vector-graphic animation technology. As long as different browsers are equipped with the necessary plug-ins, Flash animations will look the same. Using Flash, a user can create their own animation or import other images.

Flash was known as FutureSplash until 1997, when Macromedia Inc. bought the company that developed it. You can learn more about Flash at the Macromedia website.

Blizzard Associate – Blizzard Internet Marketing, Inc.

Page saturation or search engine saturation refers to the number of pages that a search engine recognizes for your website. Search engines reward websites that have a large number of pages. You want them to find every page of your site through your navigation and/or site map. There are quite a few things you can gather from this information.

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A cookie is a piece of information or message sent by a website server to a web browser, where it is stored on the local computer.  Each time someone using that computer goes back to the particular web page, the message is sent back to the server.  Depending on the type of Cookie used, and the browser’s settings, the browser may or may not accept the Cookie. The browser may save the Cookie for either a short time or a long time.  Cookies might contain information such as login or registration information, online “shopping cart” information, user preferences, etc.

Blizzard Associate – Blizzard Internet Marketing, Inc.