radar

I guess that probably most men won’t read this post since the title is Valentine’s Day, so I hope that you’ll appreciate it, girls! haha

More seriously, I’ve ran a query on Google Trends with the expression “valentine day” and here is what it gave me:

Obviously, the number of searches about Valentine is at its maximum just before Valentine’s Day. What I want you to notice is that the searches start growing on January 1st. The slope is very impressive and you should remember that it’s important to be ready on January 1st. To do so, you should follow some rules:

- Your “Valentine’s Day” related content should be on the site a few months before February so that search engines can index it.
- You should start to link some pages to this content before January.
- On January 1st (depending on your marketing strategy and boxing day sales/promotion) you should start to switch from Christmas/holidays to Valentine’s day.

Driving traffic to the Valentine’s Day content, that is what’s important.

Keep in mind that this is not applicable for every business model but it’s always the same for that kind of event:

- Take advantage of the search engines (publish your content and link to it weeks/months before the event)
- Be sure to give people the content they want (know what they want and when they want it).

Just a few words to inform you that I’m currently blogging in French live from Quebec city (Loews Le Concorde) on lesbonnesfrequentations.com about Startup Canada a “two days high-level seminar that will enable CEOs and leaders of fast growing companies to develop and expand their global leadership and sales skills and improve the overall effectiveness of their businesses.”

Actually listening to Guy Kawasaki’s keynote. ; )

Vueling is a low-fare airline based in Barcelona. Maybe you don’t know them yet since it was established in 2004. As I already wrote in a previous post, I’m going to Spain next May. The planning is going well. We’ve decided to take a plane from Sevilla to Barcelona and another one from Barcelona to Madrid because it is less expensive (… and long) than the train.

Since we have flexible dates, we’ve explored all the possibilities. We compared Air Europa and Iberia on most of the possible dates and we finally decided to go with… Vueling! We’ve found them a bit late, but we’ve booked fast. Actually, we have been looking for the best deal with Air Europa and Iberia for a week and finally we booked with Vueling within 1 hour only. Really cheap fare, good reviews and comments on the Internet and very easy to use website.

Here is a top 10 of things I like about Vueling’s website and Internet strategy.

They don’t ask “Are your dates flexible?”.
Does it really matter if my dates are not flexible? I don’t get the point of asking. If they are not flexibles, I just have to ignore the other results.

The price per flight is all inclusive
It is written 40 Euros, it’s 40 Euros!

You can easily change your flight
You can change your flight for a surcharge of 30 Euros… but a least you can!

You can choose and change your seat whenever your want
Ok, not that important, but it’s a part of the “experience”!

Select your flight, Your flight, Payment
Simple and clear. They don’t try to sell you anything else during the process.

And by the way, a couple of things that could be improved :
- I can’t see the calendar with Safari.
- I feel like the website is not totally optimized for search engines. Actually it is very difficult to find them when searching for low airfare in Spain on Google.

A quick update regarding ZAP Québec (read Wireless Cities)…

Québec City Tourism (see more info below) is now a partner of ZAP Québec. They will actually send info to their members about the project and inform tourists on where they can have access to wifi Internet for free. I’m glad to see that Québec City Tourism (Office du tourisme de Québec in French) understands the importance of this project for the city and will work with the volunteers to make this project a success.

Québec City Tourism is the sales and marketing agency for the Québec City & Area tourism and convention market. The QCT promotes convention and leisure travel through interaction with meeting planners, travel agents and trade and consumer media worldwide for the continual economic benefit of the community

Bill Marriott (and his team) launched his own blog this week. I look forward to read what he (they) will post on it. Too much corporate blogging is not always well received on the Internet.

You really should read the article in Informal learning blog written by Jay Cross.

Thanks to JSB for the info.

Here is an update regarding the post What is going on with WestJet?.

As I wrote yesterday, I’ve contacted WestJet on January 9th at 11h30PM. Believe it or not, I received an answer at 5h10am the day after. 5am! Working hard I guess! ; )

Dave Jones, Web Business director, sent me a pretty long and complete email answering all my questions.

Actually, the website westjets.ca is not a WestJet site neither an affiliate site. They will try to find out. He didn’t know either why this site exists. WestJet is very concerned about brand and trademark respect, and have clear guidelines for their affiliates. “We value our guests’ privacy and security, as well as the value of our brand. I have taken a quick look at this site and don’t see any negative connotation to our guests at this point. However, I’m no security expert so the WestJet security team will investigate that fully”, Mr. Jones said.

Mr. Jones also took the time to give me answers regarding the Google ads errors I found.

I have to say that I really appreciate that kind of feedback from a company like WestJet. It shows a lot of respect and appreciation for their customers, and from my point of view this professional attitude is an important quality in business.

Apple announced today its first all-in-one phone/iPod/PDA. Be prepared for tourists 2.0! Okay, I’m joking with the Web 2.0 / Travel 2.0 buzz but this new revolutionary cell phone (and all the upcoming ones) will have an incredible effect on tourists and on the industry.

What’s the iPhone exactly?
The introduction on the iPhone website goes like this: “iPhone combines three products — a revolutionary mobile phone, a widescreen iPod with touch controls, and a breakthrough Internet communications device with desktop-class email, web browsing, maps, and searching — into one small and lightweight handheld device. iPhone also introduces an entirely new user interface based on a large multi-touch display and pioneering new software, letting you control everything with just your fingers. So it ushers in an era of software power and sophistication never before seen in a mobile device, completely redefining what you can do on a mobile phone. “

More on the iPhone on Apple website.

Which features interest us the most as members of the travel and tourism industry?
Without any doubt the Wi-Fi (and Edge) support let the user connect easily to Wi-Fi networks no matter where he is. In a wireless city it is “oh so” a nice feature. Wherever you go, you can use Internet for free on your cell phone!

The other thing is that it uses Safari - Apple standard browser -, it supports widgets, it plays Mp3 and videos as well as it can take pictures. You got it, it is much more than a cell phone. Maybe they should have named it iVerySmallComputer which also can be use as a cell phone. ; )

Now let’s see what could we do with that…
There are so many things I’m thinking to actually, I’m going to give you some of them right away because the new phones (iPhone and some others) bring us an all-new bunch of opportunities.

A tourist will be able to:
- Easily search for hotels online while he’s in town instead of going to each one of them to verify if they have a room available.
- Wait a bit longer to book his activities because it’s now easier to book them online while traveling.
- Look for the bus schedule while waiting for it.
- Translate on Google Translate an English sentence into this foreign language you try to learn.
- More easily go on World66.com, for example, to get some suggestions of activities to do because “today it rains and I certainly won’t go to the beach!”

What is the most interesting opportunity, in my opinion, is the possibility to get information on request. The tourist will be able to search on the Internet for information about the park/museum/church he is actually visiting, read info on Wikipedia, download historic videos or mp3 tours, look on a map what is the nearest restaurant, find reviews about this restaurant and so on. You want to know something, no problem! Internet is in your hand.

In a couple of years…
When the GPS functionality will be integrated in most of the cell phones, do you realize that, for example, you will be able to automatically send promotions and rebates to the tourists walking in front of your business door? This day will probably come sooner than you think. Imagine the possibilities they say!

The Apple iPhone. Isn’t it hot?

I was doing some tests with Google when I saw this “lag problem” by Westjet (Canadian low-fare airline) which are still paying ads on Google for “Air Ticket, Until Dec 31 Book Flights for $170! Save Hundreds With WestJet www.westjet.com”

Ummm, too late! It was funny (well, not that much actually) so I’ve decided to run a couple more tests. I wrote down “Westjet” and I got this ad : “WestJets (Official Site) www.westjet.com Save up to 50% off Canada and U.S. Canada’s Leading Low Cost Airline.”

WestJets!? They’ve made a typo!? Umm… then I tried westjets.ca and I got to the site http://www.westjets.ca/. It looks like it could be a WestJet project to generate traffic on westjet.com because there are a lot of links to westjet.com on different phrases. And if it is, I wonder why they are now using Westjets with an “s”!

Ok. I think I got it! Linking to Westjet - Affiliate program.
Since, it is possible for anyone who has a website to be an affiliate to earn a 2% commission on each online sale, I bet that someone uses this identity to link to Westjet and get his commission.

I will write to them right away because I’m pretty curious to know what is going on.

As you’ve probably noticed, wireless cities are increasing rapidly. Each day, hot spots are installed in San Francisco, Paris, Montreal, Prague and so on.

Quebec city is actually going wireless as well since a bunch of volunteers started Zap Québec. Based on Montreal ÃŽle sans fil, the idea is simple. Companies (Restaurants, museums, bus stations and libraries) buy a router (100$), antennas (if necessary) and give a yearly contribution (50$). Then, a team of volunteers will secure their network and set up their router so users can use their broadband internet connection. It’s totally free for users and really simple to use, but they are asked to respect a couple of rules (for example : do not use the wifi connexion as their personnal Internet access).

Imagine how it can be nice for someone on a business trip to have access almost everywhere he goes (restaurants, hotels, meeting room, clients) to a wifi internet connexion easily accessible and free!

If you want to know more about how wireless cities could get the maximum out of this in terms of tourism and travel, contact me!

By the way, I’m one of these volunteers, not really surprising eh?