Laffitte Conseil

Hotels.com adds interactive rate calendar

Hotels.com unveiled a new room rate calendar feature that helps travelers quickly identify the best room rates available at the property of their choice. This tool is available for the full hotels.com selection of lodging options, including hotels, resorts, vacation rentals, and bed and breakfasts.

The rate calendar, which appears on the “Rooms & Rates” tab for each property on the hotels.com site, is color-coded to give users a quick, at-a-glance view of pricing levels for each day. Green indicates the lowest room rates, beige indicates moderate prices, and orange indicates the highest prices. In addition, the calendar displays the actual price for most properties, so that users can compare specific cost differences among different dates. hotels.com provides calendar data for six months into the future.

“For travelers who are flexible in their plans and mindful of costs, the rate calendar is an invaluable tool,” said Scott Booker, chief hotel expert for hotels.com. “This site feature is designed to help customers make a more informed decision; we will continue to focus on providing resources to help make the property research, selection and booking process as simple as possible.”

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Optimizing images deliver online

To capitalize on growing searcher interest in vertical content such as images, news and video and to improve the search engine user experience, Google and the other search engines have begun blending vertical results into the main search result page. This phenomenon, “universal search,” is advantageous for searchers, as it gives instant access to many types of files on the same search result page.

For retailers and catalog merchants whose sites are rich in images, universal search provides new opportunities for prominent display of these images in search results. The following easy-to-employ tactics will help you optimize images for Google. Use meaningful names that suggest what the image represents. For example, name the image of a pineapple “pineapple.jpg.” Avoid naming images with numerical sequences that are only meaningful to you and your company.

Use the ALT attribute. For all images, in the ALT attribute include short descriptive text of the image content. Include captions. Google uses the image caption (among many other factors) to identify its content, so employ keyword-rich image captions. Be sure the caption describes the image — cute but distracting captions may hinder your chances.

Optimize the page. Google also uses text on the page adjacent to the image to determine the content of the image. To score well, optimize content around the image. Be sure that keywords are in close proximity to the image.

Make images spider accessible. Check that site images aren’t in a folder that you have blocked access to through your robots.txt file. If there are images you don’t want to appear in the search results, put them in a separate folder and block access.

As more webmasters and search marketers begin to employ tactics to improve their image search, expect more competition for image placement in the search results. Now is the time to optimize your images and get a head start.

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Comment Améliorer la Rentabilité de sa Campagne Google Adwords (partie 2)

Dans la première partie de l'article, nous avons vu quels enjeux imposaient les campagnes de liens sponsorisés et que sans stratégie, les dérives pouvaient être multiples et pouvaient influer négativement sur le retour sur investissement. Nous avons fait un état des lieux des facteurs influant sur la conversion des clics d'actions mesurables et déterminé que le meilleur moyen d'augmenter le taux de conversion et par conséquent le ROI d'une campagne était par l'élimination des clics de faible qualité, c'est-à-dire ceux qui sont le moins susceptibles de convertir.

Cette seconde partie vous propose des solutions pour y parvenir, et pour qu'en définitive, chaque dollar dépensé soit rentable.

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Nielsen survey: Ignore China’s big spenders at your peril

A new survey has warned that Chinese consumers are becoming increasingly sophisticated and the travel industry needs to monitor changes and trends in their travel preferences, attitudes and perceptions towards various destinations,"

A report released by The Nielsen Company -The Nielsen China Outbound Travel Monitor 2007 - found more than one third of Chinese outbound travellers choose to stay in four-star hotels, with a further 10 percent opting for five-star luxury accommodation when heading overseas.

Dr. Grace Pan, Nielsen China head of Travel & Leisure Research, said, "While Chinese travellers appear to seek comfort, they are also becoming wise and well-prepared as they plan their trips, leveraging all the information available to them on the Internet."

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Hoteliers, don’t be fooled by the Web 2.0 hype

Social media may become a major force to be reckoned with by hotels, but, it isn’t right now. Remember that your first point of sale for the Internet is now your hotel’s web site. Make sure it’s well designed for search/sales, and it is well promoted, says Neil Salerno.

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AsiaTravel.com taps Bezurk

Asiatravel.com, the pan-Asia total travel reservation service and Bezurk.com, Asia Pacific’s leading travel search engine today announced a marketing partnership as part of which Asiatravel’s hotel and flight prices will be integrated into the Bezurk travel search which will expose Asiatravel to a large new audience.

Asiatravel.com recently launched an instant confirmation flight reservation service allowing customers the convenience of booking flights departing from Singapore.  This service will subsequently be extended to departure from all major Asian cities.

“We’ve had great results to date working with Bezurk to promote Asiatravel’s hotel offerings so now that Asiatravel has entered the online flights reservations business we’re delighted to extend our already successful partnership to promote our new flights service,” said Boh Tuang Poh, Asiatravel’s Executive Chairman. “We’re confident that our partnership with Bezurk will drive new users, increased bookings and repeat customers to Asiatravel.com”

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Travelocity launches new trip planning tool

Travelocity has announced the beta launch of the RoadTrip WizardTM, a new tool that streamlines and simplifies the road trip planning process. First to launch the RoadTrip Wizard platform, Travelocity customers can now benefit from a new way to plan every aspect of their road trip all in one place—a task that previously required multiple Web sites. This tool is available through an alliance with LeisureLogixTM, a new travel and navigation services company.

“Road trips are a part of the American culture,” said Andres Fabris, vice president business development Travelocity. “What our customers were missing was one place to plan their road trips based on what they want to see and do. The RoadTrip Wizard will not only fill this gap, it will also allow them to personalize plans based on what they want to get out of their trip.”

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Search and social media marketing services for hotels

Lodging Interactive, a provider of interactive marketing services to the hospitality industry, today announced the roll out of comprehensive Search Engine and Social Media integrated marketing services to help hotels drive online awareness and bookings.

Lodging Interactive is taking hospitality Internet Marketing to the next level by combining its proven search optimization techniques with services that allow its clients to manage their online reputation in the rapidly emerging social media web2.0 environment. “Social media web sites and specifically user generated content sites continue to evolve and are becoming increasingly important in the travel industry by having a direct affect on consumer buying decisions. It’s only natural for hotels to start leveraging the enormous reach of these sites,” said Mr. DJ Vallauri, Lodging Interactive’s President & Founder.

According to a recent Deloitte Consumer Product Group study, Deloitte found that 62% of Internet users read product reviews written by other consumers. In travel, 41% of US online leisure travelers use some form of social media tool in their travel research efforts.

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Plus de 20 millions d’abonnés FTTH en Europe en 2015

A l'horizon 2015, le très haut débit (THD) représentera 27 % du total des accès à l'Internet rapide en Europe de l'Ouest, soit 32,7 millions d'abonnés, selon une étude prospective publiée par l'Idate. "Si le haut débit classique tiré par l'ADSL restera le moyen d'accès dominant, le THD commencera à remplacer l'ADSL à partir de 2010/2012", précise Roland Montagne, responsable de la practice Broadband au centre d'études et de conseil spécialisé dans les télécommunications. Cette évolution se caractérisera par la place prépondérante du FTTH comme technologie du THD, avec une moyenne de 18 % d'abonnés à la fibre en Europe en 2015, soit environ 21,5 millions d'abonnés, tandis que le VDSL ne représentera que 9 % du total de la base haut débit.

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Spamdexing: un travers qui peut coûter cher

Spamdexing, qu'est-ce que c'est ?

Néologisme anglais, le spamdexing est un mot-valise issu de la contraction des mots spam et indexing. Son principe consiste à tromper les moteurs de recherche pour arriver dans les premières positions. Pour ce faire, les spammeurs ne manquent pas d'imagination pour pousser une page en tête des moteurs : générer des contenus différents pour les robots, cacher des pages ou encore dupliquer son contenu, ils ne reculent devant rien.

Les moteurs restent volontairement flous autour de la définition du spamdexing, ce qui complique le travail des référenceurs, une technique pouvant être admise jusqu'à ce qu'un moteur la conteste.

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