Sustainable Island Tourism Conference, Santo, Vanuatu, November 27-29, 2019

LT&C member Seychelles Sustainable Tourism Foundation is cooperating with Sustainability Vanuatu, the Department of Tourism Vanuatu and the Global Sustainable Tourism Council to organize a Sustainable Islands Tourism Conference from November 27th-29th 2019 in Vanuatu.

Expect an authentic and innovative conference with different themes of relevance for sustainable tourism in small island states and hands-on local experiences and visits.

The detailed conference programme will be communicated soon via the website www.tourism.gov.vu.

Expressions of interest for participation and presentations can be send to the Director of Tourism: Jerry Spooner, jspooner@vanuatu.gov.vu.

Part of the conference will discuss the contribution that tourism can make to conservation, so it will be of high relevance for LT&C members from other island destinations!

SPTO launches Pacific Sustainable Tourism Newz Beat

SPTO’s Sustainable Tourism Development Division today launched their monthly update for the industry, to share key highlights in the region. SPTO CEO Chris Cocker noted that this was a key focus for the Organisation moving forward, “Sustainable tourism is a key issue in the Pacific particularly with the negative impacts of climate change and natural disasters we are experiencing and the forecasted increases in tourism arrivals over the next few years. As part of SPTOs commitment to ensure that we in the tourism industry are not working in silos, ensuring that the developments in the tourism industry are moving in the right direction as well as sharing of valuable information amongst the tourism industry, we are therefore launching the Pacific Sustainable Tourism Newz Beat to share success stories, best practices as well as the latest developments in the industry”

“This inaugural issue focusses on our greatest assets, our people, and the experiences that they have had in tourism and their careers either as small business entrepreneurs, communities or as individuals. It is fitting we do this given our theme for this year’s World Tourism Day is “Tourism and Jobs; a better future for all”. The Pacific’s tourism industry employs around 131,000 people of our region and World Bank expects by 2040 that an additional 127,000 jobs will be added to this current figure. The sustainable tourism industry itself is a fast growing sector with green jobs a key component in ensuring changes in the industry. Employment in this sector is set to grow promising and exciting opportunities for Pacific People”

“In this issue you will read of women from the community who are turning plastic bottles into amazing jewelry and craft, you will meet island entrepreneurs developing their business in an environmentally friendly manner learning new culinary skills, you will meet an artisan who has championed sustainable development his whole life, you will meet a career focused individual who is now based at the United Nations World Tourism Organisation and you will meet interns who are just starting their careers. The diversity in the sustainable tourism industry is amazing and provides business and career opportunities that are quite dynamic.”

“SPTO continues to work with our partners to promote sustainable tourism development at all levels and across all sectors to ensure we take a holistic approach to meeting the needs of our people whilst at the same time developing tourism in a responsible manner. Above all else our focus remains in ensuring that sustainable tourism remains in the forefront of our development agenda for the region moving forward.

“I would also like to thank the team at SPTO who have been working tirelessly to promote Pacific Tourism globally and to ensure that development in tourism is conducted in a holistic manner to safeguard our resources for future generations.

I wish everyone a happy World Tourism Day”.

Bokun - booking management platform owned by TripAdvisor

Bokun is a booking management platform owned by TripAdvisor, designed to help businesses and professionals in the travel and tours industry improve their visibility, attract more clients, increase their bookings, and grow their business.

The Bokun system provides businesses with their own booking website that they can customize to reflect their brand. products, and services. All content is managed from a single location, making it easy for business owners to manage and update their content, promotions, and prices.

With Bokun’s powerful booking engine, users are able to attract tourists and secure more bookings without swamping their schedules. Bokun’s Channel Manager feature allows users to utilize global travel apps such as TripAdvisor and Expedia to give their business a global reach and engage potential tourists and clients from different parts of the world.

Localization Capabilities

Bokun comes with localization tools to help you make your business accessible. It supports multiple languages, which is useful for attracting, engaging, and converting international tourists to paying customers. Bokun automatically translates your website’s content to any language and synchronizes the changes to all your channels and partners.

Flexible Pricing

Pricing can vary and can change at any moment. With Bokun, you have a software that helps you keep up with the fluctuating rates. Your monthly payment is based on your monthly revenue, hence, you won’t end up paying a fixed amount that’s more than what you’re earning. You can also manage multiple currencies and offers across various channels with ease.

Real-Time Inventory

Bokun helps you stay on top of your inventory, providing you a real-time picture of your stocks and resources whenever you need an update. This helps ensure that you are not selling or underselling. Bokun also provides the ability to create combo products and promotions, which is a strategy you can implement to grab the tourist’s attention.

Accept Payments Easily

Whether your customers prefer to pay via credit cards or online through a payment gateway, Bokun has got you covered. Integrations with the leading payment platforms and leading credit card providers help you facilitate and accept payments from anyone, anywhere, and anytime. On top of that, the payment channels are thoroughly secure, ensuring you run into payment troubles, such as fraudulent transactions.

Thailand and the fallout from mass tourism | DW Documentary

Within months, Google has rolled out new features in flights and hotels that, we dare say, make it a convenient one-stop shop to book travel sans encumbrances. Given its dominance in search, hotels and online travel agencies are on another planet if they are not feeling wary. — Raini Hamdi

In a span of just a few months, Google’s threat in booking travel is looming even larger. Indeed, Skift said last October Google’s new hotel search is presenting a greater threat to booking rivals. Now the tech giant has added a full-fledged destination site for hotels, without any major fanfare, and has potential implications for booking sites, as well as Airbnb, on the lines of what it has done with its already very-popular Google Flights.

Richard Holden, Google’s vice president of product management, travel, wrote about the new features in Google Flights and Hotels in a blog published late last week, and quietly slipped in a development we have been waiting for a year or so now, the full-fledged site for hotel meta search site and booking engine.

Once the users goes to Google’s hotel site and selects a hotel, a “Book a room” button is very prominent. When the user selects one of the online travel agency or other metasearch advertisers, the traveler navigates to the third-party site for booking. But there is often an option to book right on Google for Travelocity or Agoda, for example.

In an earlier February blog, Eric Zimmerman, Google’s director of travel product management said, “We’re evolving the way our hotel search works on smartphones to help users explore options and make decisions on their smallest screens. The new hotel search experience includes better price filtering, easier-to-find amenity information and the ability to book right from Google.”

Thus, if you’re going to Miami at the end of March, and there are over 300 hotel results for your search, you can now find the right hotel for your trip by applying a new “Deals” filter. This filter, said Holden, “uses machine learning to highlight hotels where one or more of our partners offer rates that are significantly lower than the usual price for that hotel or similar hotels nearby.”

Google Quietly Releases Its Hotel Booking Destination With Potentially Huge Implications

Raini Hamdi, Skift

 

- Mar 11, 2019 7:50 am

Prepare for Busy Season on TripAdvisor

Prepare for Busy Season on TripAdvisor 13 March 2019 | 11AM - 12PM (SGT) Register Now 70% of searches for travel during busy season happen over the next 3 months.* Is your listing ready to make the most of high traveller demand? Join us for tips and best practices from TripAdvisor experts on how to prepare a TripAdvisor strategy that drives results. • Get quick tips and solutions to make the most of TripAdvisor — so you can get back to your guests • Enhance your TripAdvisor presence and drive more potential guests to your listing • Learn how to use TripAdvisor analytics to benchmark yourself against your competitors — and make informed decisions

Spots are limited Register Now Please note: Webinar is in English only Can't attend live? Register today and we'll send you an on-demand link to watch at your convenience.

Google’s New Hotel Search Is a Greater Threat to Booking Rivals - Skift

When it comes to Google and its hotels redesign, few things are all or nothing. TripAdvisor can worry that Google now has more traveler photos and reviews, but some of them are from TripAdvisor. Hotel websites and phone numbers get featured, but clicking on a book button brings customers to an online travel agency site. In travel, it’s never winner take all.

Why ever stop searching for travel on Google and turn to a hotel or online travel agency site when you can book your hotel right there without leaving Google?

Booking hotels worldwide on Google just became more prominent on its U.S. site in a redesign of Google hotels on desktop that the company announced Wednesday in a blog post. Google plans to roll out the redesign, which was introduced on mobile earlier this year, worldwide in phases.

In the past couple of years, Google has experimented with taking hotel bookings on behalf of online travel agency or hotel partners, but you would have to search for hours to find such an instance. Otherwise, you would more commonly click over to a partner site to complete a booking. The feature was introduced in 2015.

Google’s New Hotel Search Is a Greater Threat to Booking Rivals

Dennis Schaal, Skift

 

- Oct 31, 2018 6:16 pm

Google partners with UNWTO on Digital Skills Development

Fostering knowledge, education and growth in tourism, is at the centre of a partnership announced today between Google and the World Tourism Organization (UNWTO). 

Google will support UNWTO members in addressing the new digital trends and transformation challenges faced by tourism and needed by the sector, to fully harness its development potential and contribution to sustainability.

Digital skills are crucial for competitiveness in tourism, a sector characterized by technological change and the generation of new business models.

“This agreement with Google coincides with UNWTO’s special focus on education, skills development and jobs, the connecting thread of all our actions this year”, said UNWTO Secretary-General Zurab Pololikashvili. “Google is an affiliate member of UNWTO and this partnership proves the importance of public-private collaboration to advance tourism as a vehicle for sustainable development”, he added.

Lutz Behrendt, Travel Industry Leader, from Google  said: “More than half of tourism revenue in the EU is now researched or booked online. By equipping tourism ministries with the skills, tools and programmes they need to market and protect themselves online, we hope it will increase opportunities for jobs and revenue across the industry. Following a similar tourism programme we ran in Greece, 68% of participating businesses confirmed they saw concrete business results following our training, such as more visitors to their website or physical business.”

A High-Level Dialogue on Digital Skills in Tourism set the backdrop for announcing the agreement. Organized by UNWTO with the support of Google during ITB Berlin, the world`s leading travel trade fair, the event underscored that digital skills development remain a major priority for destinations around Europe.

More detail on the training and partnership will be announced in due course.

Links:
High-Level Dialogue on Digital Skills in Tourism

Grow with Google

http://europe.unwto.org/event/high-level-dialogue-digital-skills-tourism

Benefits of TripAdvisor: How TripAdvisor listing and reviews help grow your hotel business?

When was the last time you searched a hotel and it didn’t appear on TripAdvisor review website?

Probably, 1 out of 10 hotels. (Because other 9 hotels are listed on TripAdvisor!)

Many of us have come across such search results. The point is to give you an idea of how TripAdvisor has penetrated in the travel and hospitality market in the last 18 years.

Launched in 2000, TripAdvisor review website’s journey is an interesting one.
With few years of struggle in the initial years and then a spiraling growth to become one of the biggest travel websites globally.

The travel giant’s 60 million+ reviews play a crucial role as a real friend to travelers. The leading global metasearch witnesses high web traffic and is sought after by many travelers.

Adding 200+ booking sites into its kitty, the travel giant compares the prices of hotels and F&Bs. It gives travelers an option to choose from 4.3 million restaurants and 9 million+ hotels worldwide, providing the best deal.

Now, you may be curious to know how you can get more bookings through TripAdvisor listing and reviews. Right?

Yeah, I’ve shared some tips that’ll help you to boost your hotel rankings or bookings on TripAdvisor and make you stand out from the competition:

Here’s what you need to do on TripAdvisor to achieve bigger results with TripAdvisor listing and reviews:Setup your Tripadvisor listing and review path

You already have your hotel listed on TripAdvisor. If not, initiating your hotel presence on the review website requires you to claim your business listing on Tripadvisor.

Once this is done, you need to add attractive images, a brief description of your hotel, room, and rent.
If you decide to spend a little, then you can opt for TripAdvisor Business Listing that offers extra features as mentioned below:

Link to your website and email addressPhone numberLink to special offers and special offer tagCustom photo slideshows

https://www.ezeeabsolute.com/blog/benefits-of-tripadvisor-listing-and-review/

TripAdvisor will launch social media component, hopes to help users 'plan and book' in one go

Just in case your Facebook and Instagram feeds aren’t already filled to the brim with friends’ photos of glamorous trips and picture-perfect meals, TripAdvisor would like you to satiate any leftover wanderlust with its own social media platform.

The travel site announced Monday that its all-new site and social media component will allow users to follow travel and hospitality brands, as well as social media influencers and travel buddies — with the hope being that users will be able to “plan and book all in one place.”

https://www.foxnews.com/travel/tripadvisor-will-launch-social-media-component-hopes-to-help-users-plan-and-book-in-one-go