The state of Montana is claiming that travel booking sites like Priceline, Expedia, Orbitz, and Travelocity have been skipping out on paying hotel taxes.  The state’s Department of Revenue intends to change that and be reimbursed for back taxes that have gone unpaid.  While Montana is the most recent state to complain that major travel booking sites haven’t paid taxes, they aren’t the first.

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Triplogged iPhone App

With how technology and the Internet has so quickly evolved in recent years, it’s become increasingly easier to share your memories while traveling. You can take photos of the Great Wall of China, and in minutes they be uploaded for all your friends to see on Facebook. However, as easy as it is to now share your experiences while traveling, a new iPhone application claims to make it even easier to share and manage your travel memories.

The new iPhone app is called Triplogged, which has been developed by a new team of iPhone application developers from Canada. Although their website leaves much to be desired, I have better hopes for their application, which is the first they’ve developed. The application is multi-facted, serving as a single app that allows travelers to log and share their experiences while traveling.

One of the best features of Triplogged is that unlike many applications, it can sync with both Mac and Windows computers. Users can save their travel experiences onto their computer for their personal archive, or even share it via email and their social networks from their own computer. As an iPhone application, it doesn’t just capture and share your photos and videos, but other things you want to capture from your travels, including GPS locations, audio recordings, and text. Users can then download all this information into one file onto their computers, to easily access and share how they like.

Although developed for the iPhone, Triplogged can also be used on the iPad and iPod touch, except only iPhone users can utilize the GPS functionality. I see the application being especially useful for photographers, writers, bloggers, and videographers who want a systemized way of logging their experiences. Users can take photos and videos, while supplementing the media with important notes in the form of audio recordings, text, and GPS locations. I see Triplogged serving as a virtual notepad for travelers. Since the application was just launched this week, the jury is still out on whether Triplogged will be a useful tool for travelers. In the meantime, iPhone users can try out the app for themselves by purchasing it through the Apple App Store for $.99.

Travel Companies Using Klout

Although social media experts are still arguing about whether or not Klout is an accurate measure of a tweeter’s influence, a few companies in the travel industry have decided to trust the new metric and are targeting people with high Klout scores for freebies and special discounts.

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EyeforTravel’s conference on Customer Centric Strategies in Travel kicks off at the Atlanta Marriott Downtown this coming January (Jan 26-27, 2011).

EyeforTravel CRM Conference

The conference has an agenda and expert speakers that will tie in CRM for travel companies with all the usual suspects – post-recession evolution in customer behavior, loyalty programs, emerging trends and so on.

The conference also has panels that focus on the role of technology. There’s one panel for leveraging mobile technology to engage with a large audience, another one to harness the power of social media for real-time sales and customer service, and others on client-facing technologies and advanced data management strategies.

This kind of agenda would need a rockstar lineup of speakers, and EyeforTravel doesn’t disappoint in this regard either. The listing includes everyone from Forrester Research’s Henry Harteveldt to Jessica Myers Rodbell who is Google’s Head of Travel Southeast, and Martin Collings, Head of Airline eCommerce Sales, Amadeus.

Here’s a few highlights from the agenda:-

How to Build & Mine Loyalty Gold: Discover what new trends, channels and opportunities are emerging for loyalty marketers in 2011 and beyond, and make your loyalty rewards stand out from the crowd in an increasingly fierce and cluttered market.
Speakers for this panel include:
Iain Pringle, Head of Customer & Loyalty Insight, The Mileage Company (British Airways Miles)
Geoffrey Lewis, Co-Founder & CEO, Topguest
Greg Brown, VP, Loyalty & Relationship Marketing, Choice Hotels International

Understand and Anticipate the Evolution of Customer Behavior: Have the rules of engagement changed? Retention vs Acquisition – Is cementing existing relationships still more profitable than transactional ‘one-night stands? Learn the five best practice strategies to get you closer to your customers and business.
Speakers for this panel include:
Henry Harteveldt, Vice President & Principal Analyst, Travel Research, Forrester Research
Jessica Myers Rodbell, Head of Travel Southeast, Google
Jim Sullivan, Senior Partner, COLLOQUY

Harness the Power of Social Media to Develop Closer, More Profitable Relationships with Your Customers: This panel will discuss the differences between social CRM and traditional CRM, and show how to analyze and learn from the vast amount of data generated by social media engagement.

Attendees will also find out how to cultivate a loyal army of brand advocates and discover how social media can be used for crisis management and customer care.
Speakers for this panel include:
Robert Cook, Principal, SimpliFlying
Peter Arceo, Principal, Strategic Gaming Advisors
Josiah Mckenzie, VP Social Engagement at Adoba Hotels and Founder of Hotel Marketing Strategies
Hilton Worldwide senior speaker (TBA)

Leverage Mobile Technology to Engage with a Virtually Unlimited Audience: The smart phone market is expected to surge 30% by 2013 to 1.6 billion users, travel decisions and relationships are being made or broken with mobile, and the opportunity for growth is truly enormous.

This panel discusses how to integrate mobile with existing CRM and marketing strategies, and will show how to harness mobile for customer recovery and boost ancillary revenues with personalized offerings on mobile.
Speakers for this panel include:
Jared Miller, Senior Director Customer Self Service, Continental Airlines
Max Starkov, Chief eBusiness Strategist, Hospitality eBusiness Solutions
Martin Collings, Head of Airline eCommerce Sales, Amadeus

Here’s the full agenda, list of speakers and registration info for ‘Customer Centric Strategies in Travel,’ to be held at the Atlanta Marriott Downtown, Jan 26-27, 2011.