hotels articles

The way in which many of us book holidays has changed dramatically in recent years. Ten years ago many of us would have relied on our local travel agents to find us a good deal.

When we came to think about our next trip away, we’d simply wander down the high street and nip into a few travel agents shops, picking up a number of different holiday brochures to compare prices offered by different tour operators.

Comparing prices sometimes involved taking into account certain special offers that might be available, or any additional costs caused by the time of year (school holidays, for example) or number of people travelling.

When thinking about destinations, resorts or particular hotels, our opinions might largely be shaped by what friends and family had told us, what we’d read in magazines, or maybe what we’d seen in holiday-related television programmes.

The arrival of the internet and its increasing availability to many of us has undoubtedly changed the goalposts. We now have the ability to research our chosen destinations online - we even have access to the thoughts of previous visitors to the hotels that we may be planning to stay at.

We can compare prices relatively quickly and also have more options in terms of how we structure our holidays. We’re no longer limited by the narrow boundaries of the package holiday market - we can now book our flights and accommodation independently, with far less hassle.

So everything has got better. Or has it?

The internet has brought us a lot of information but how much of that information is really reliable? When I read reviews of places that I’ve visited, I often find that other people’s experiences are very different from my own.

It’s clear that we all have different expectations of what is involved in having a good holiday.

It seems to me that, while holiday prices may well have come down, many of us are left looking to trawl through masses of information, much of which may be considerably less reliable than that once provided by the good old-fashioned travel agent.

Hong Kong is an eclectic mix of Chinese and British influences mixed with a massive amount of adrenaline. Fortunately, you can find places to stay when visiting Hong Kong without much problem.

Finding Places to Stay When Visiting Hong Kong

Hong Kong is both a modern and ancient city. First appearances reveal a modern metropolis teaming with commerce, crowds and traffic you would expect to find in any major city in the world. Walk down an alley, however, and you will find all kinds of oddities and a feel for the underlying currents of the city. Big business is done in Hong Kong, but so is a unique way of life. Whichever you pursue, you will need a good base to survive this hectic city.

Place to stay in Hong Kong come in all types of quality, shapes and prices. There are really cheap youth hostels with lots of “character” and five star luxury hotels that would make an emperor blush. Universally, the accommodations are smaller than you would expect in other parts of the world. You can expect rooms to be smaller than Thailand, but a bit bigger than what you find in Japan for corresponding prices.

Luxury lodgings are primarily located on Hong Kong Island. Hong Kong Island is the central area of Hong Kong, the location you see in pictures of the massive skyline. It is situated on an amazingly thin strip of land between the ocean and mountains. If you are doing business in Hong Kong, this is where you want to stay as most of the major commerce centers are on the island. There are a bevy of five star places offering accommodations. In truth, your choice is limited only by your budget.

If you are looking for cheaper accommodations in Hong Kong, Kowloon and the New territories offer a variety of sources. You can even find hostels on Hong Kong Island. Put another way, accommodations are plentiful regardless of where you are. Hong Kong is a major transportation hub for Asia, so it caters to all budgets.

Finding a place to stay in Hong Kong is a piece of cake. Figure out where you want to stay and then shop around to find the best prices.

British Airways Plc (BA) is to join 10 European airlines to launch an Internet travel agency which aims to cut industry costs of ticketing and distribution.

The online agency will allow travellers to look at flight information and prices from all the airlines involved in the project as well as car hire services, hotels and travel insurance with the scheme expected to be launched by the end of the year.

The new project includes Air France, Lufthansa, Austrian Airlines, SAS, KLM, Alitalia, British Midland, Aer Lingus and Finnair.

According to a statement by BA customers will have access to the biggest international route network and some of the lowest fares available while airlines will reduce their costs of ticketing, travel agent commission and booking fees.

By the end of 2003 BA plans to be selling 50% of its tickets via the Internet and expects annual revenue generated online to rise to GBP700m from GBP45m by March 2002. The agency is also expected to save BA an estimated GBP442m by March 2002, the airline said.

Bob Sparks, Jetset Travelworld chief executive, announced the new marketing strategy of its company at the Travelworld annual conference on the Gold Coast. Sparks said that the changes were needed to maintain the relevancy of travel agencies.

Sparks said, “If we continued to do business the way it was done we don’t deserve to be relevant”, “Consumer habits are changing. The younger generation is far more interested in technology and so forth and we’ve got to be able to be ready for that.”

According to Australian IT, selected travel centers will be fitted with ticketing terminals similar to bank ATMs. Jetset Travelworld has a network of more than 700 centres.

People have it pretty good in the United States. There hasn’t been a war on U.S. territory since 1865, the economy is booming, and the standard of living is one of the best in the world. America even managed to squeak through a hotly contested presidential election without bloodshed.

Now, think of people in Bosnia-Herzegovina. Much of the rest of the world is trying desperately to achieve even a fraction of the quality of life in the United States. The U.S. government, working through the U.S. Agency for International Development, helps by promoting economic, political, and social development around the world. The budget for USAID is $7.5 billion per year–a lot of money, though it’s less than one-half of 1 percent of the federal budget. Relative to many other industrialized countries, the United States doesn’t spend much on foreign aid. Nevertheless, $7.5 billion is substantial, and most of it is explicitly or implicitly earmarked for training.

“That’s the goal of development,” says Joseph Schultz, press officer with USAID. “We want to train people so that they can sustain the programs once USAID’s part is over.”

The importance of sustainability to USAID’s mission creates opportunities for trainers–individuals intrigued by development as a career and firms that are willing and able to handle government contracts. This article gives you a chance to review how training skills are put to use to help countries improve their democracies and economies, as well as point you to places that offer more information.

“The people [in the development community] are some of the most honest, intellectual, and hard working you’ll ever come across,” says Jonathan Darling, director of business development with the Training Resources Group Inc., an Alexandria, Virginia-based training and organization development consulting firm that does significant work for USAID. “They have a real passion for what they do.”

Working in a developing country isn’t exactly a vacation. But if you think you’re up to the task, read on.

USAID is the main U.S. government clearinghouse for foreign aid, managing $7.5 billion of the $9.2 billion that the United States spends on nonmilitary, nonagricultural aid each year. The agency is charged with these objectives:

* Alleviate poverty.

* Help countries make a governmental transition after a civil conflict.

* Provide humanitarian relief after a crisis such as a natural or human-made disaster.

WorldSpan announced an agreement with HandsOn Network, a supplier of personalization software for the wireless Internet, to provide airline flight and reservations information for HandsOn Network’s new wireless personalization technology. Under the agreement, WorldSpan will supply users of the HandsOn Network system with up-to-the-minute flight information for US and international airlines, as well as complete itinerary data for all booked travel, including air, car, and hotel reservations.

HandsOn Network’s MC2 Platform integrates travels data and other destination-related information(driving directions, news, weather, restaurant options, and more) into highly personalized modules designed to be quickly and easily accessed via any WAP enabled phone or handheld organizer. HandsOn Network’s personalization software simplifies Web navigation, enabling users to find specific information with as few as three inputs or “taps” on a mobile device.

The WorldSpan reservation system aggregates travel content from hundreds of travel suppliers worldwide, including 455 airlines, 210 hotel companies operating more than 44,000 properties, 42 car rental companies with 16,000 locations, 30 tour operators, and 49 special travel service suppliers.

WorldSpan also provides Internet-based reservations services for several major travel suppliers and processes more than 50 percent of all on-line travel bookings. Building on its success in the Internet travel space, WorldSpan has extended its services to the wireless Web as well. WorldSpan is leading the development of XML, a standard interface language that enables the company to integrate information from various travel supplier databases and channel it to users through Web-enabled devices.

Environmentally conscious air travelers might be interested in ways to reduce greenhouse gas emissions that result from their travel. TripleE (a travel and emergency road service agency) claims that they offer airline travel with zero net greenhouse gas emissions. TripleE and the Climate Neutral Network–a nonprofit corporation supported by an alliance of organizations committed to developing products and services with limited impact on the Earth’s climate–worked together to calculate the amount of greenhouse gases emitted from TripleE’s air travel services, find certifiable offset projects, and measure the amount of greenhouse gases saved by those projects. TripleE’s TravelCool air travel program was recently certified as “climate neutral,” that is, having “little or no effect on the Earth’s climate,” which can be achieved by reducing and offsetting the greenhouse gases associated with its production, support, and delivery. Methods for offsetting greenhouse gases include planting trees and investing in tech nologies that reduce greenhouse gas emissions, such as renewable energy, fuel-efficient vehicles, or energy-efficient lighting. TripleE established a portfolio of investment programs that offset the equivalent in carbon dioxide emissions from their passengers’ travel, which passengers can purchase shares of through TravelCool membership. According to the Climate Neutral Network, if 20 percent of just two airlines’ customers chose climate neutral travel, 40 million metric tons of greenhouse gases could be prevented from entering the atmosphere, equivalent to eliminating more than 8 million cars from U.S. roads for a year.

My wife and I and her sister and husband spent the month of March ‘01 visiting Australia and, to a lesser extent, New Zealand. We are all 70-ish, rather enjoy being pampered and didn’t consider it a big loss when we found out after our drive along the Great Ocean Highway from Melbourne to Adelaide that we had passed the greatest surfing spot “in the south.”

We knew generally what we wanted to do. We wanted to get the feeling of a few places (i.e., Sydney, Adelaide and Perth) rather than be shown around several cities as tourists. Friends in Australia referred us to Australia/New Zealand Down Under Travel (1328 W El Camino Real, Ste. 2, Mountain View, CA 94041; phone 800/886-2153 or 650/9639-2153 or fax 650/696-3215).

What an unbelievable surprise! Mary Lou Serr, owner/agent, has the uncanny ability to discern the needs of her clients in only a few phone calls, and she was uncommonly successful in giving us the trip of a life time.

She moved us around the continent by car, trains (the Indian Pacific to Perth and the tilt train from Brisbane to Bundaberg) and planes (from a puddle jumper to a Boeing 777) in a leisurely, nontiring manner. She placed us in apartment or suite-type hotels with a nice supplement of really high-class and comfortable bed-and-breakfasts.

A representative apartment was the wonderful Buxton Manor in North Adelaide where owners Rodney and Regina Twiss have created a traveler’s dream of an accommodation. Each suite is different in this tastefully redecorated manor house. Buxton has appeared in these pages previously (Aug. ‘99, pg. 44,) and we can confirm everything said about it.

Mary Lou knew all about it from experience (from one of her 30-plus trips to Australia) and apparently has an inside track to reservations when they are requested. If you stay in the Musica Viva suite at Buxton Manor, any subsequent mention of Adelaide will bring on a smile and a desire to return.

This 3 1/2-week trip was not inexpensive. The price was $2,876 per person plus airfare in Australia and New Zealand, but this included two rental station wagons (one for a week), first-class accommodations everywhere including on the Indian Pacific from Adelaide to Perth, comfortable passage on the new tilt train and on New Zealand’s Tranz Alpine Express, a fabulous day on Kangaroo Island and a play at the Sydney Opera House’s Drama Theater.

A study carried out by Keynote Systems (Nasdaq:KEYN) has shown that online travel agencies are outperforming airline websites in terms of customer experience.

The study also found that this affects their booking success.

The company’s Keynote Customer Experience (CE) Rankings for the Airline Industry are based on research with 2,000 customers, who evaluated and interacted with 16 major travel and airline websites. The company also collected detailed qualitative and behavioural data as customers performed tasks at each site in addition to the traditional opinion data.

Keynote said that the AirTran, Alaska Air, America West, American Airlines, CheapTickets, Continental, Delta, Expedia, Frontier, JetBlue, Northwest, Orbitz, Southwest, Travelocity, United and US Airways websites were evaluated as part of the study.

The results reportedly showed that there is a significant gap between the online travel agencies and individual airline websites and it was also found that the advantage comes from a strong online customer experience, as there was a direct correlation between customer experience performance and conversion of site visitors into customers.
According to Keynote, the top three agency sites tested got significantly better scores than any airline site, aside from Southwest, in customer satisfaction and customer conversion, with Expedia, Orbitz and Travelocity ranking as the best sites in the Keynote Customer Experience Rankings. The same three sites also topped the Keynote Conversion Impact Index, which measures overall likelihood of a visitor booking on a site or returning to the site in the future.

Among the airlines, the budget airlines Southwest and JetBlue were rated the best in terms of customer experience and conversion. According to the results, Southwest was the only airline site to drive bookings as effectively as the online agency sites. It was found that Southwest did well because of its price satisfaction and because of the industry’s best online booking process.