Mother’s Day is just a week away, so there’s been a recent surge of hotel deals hitting the market for the big weekend. The common denominator of 2011 Mother’s Day packages seems to be one three-letter word: spa. Day spas and destination hotels will feature discounts on spa packages, as well as treatments designed specifically for the holiday.

Boca Raton, Florida: Boca Raton Resort & Club is giving moms a 25 percent discount on all spa services at Spa Palazzo, as well as 25 percent off golf greens fees and tennis fees. Room packages start at $219 per night at the resort, $249 at the club.

New York City: The Affinia Dumont, a “wellness-themed” hotel in Midtown, will offer a $250 nightly rate over Mother’s Day weekend in a package that includes a 30-minute express service from Oasis Day Spa, an eco-friendly reusable water bottle and a room customized to guest preferences. (Upgrades for longer spa treatments are available.)

Horseshoe Bay, Texas: The Horseshoe Bay Resort in Texas Hill Country has a special package for mothers-to-be that includes 20 percent off all spa services. It also focuses on mother/daughter activities over the holiday weekend, including a golf clinic, bingo and a ping-pong tournament.

Marco Island, Florida: Marco Island Marriott Beach Resort will feature a “Spa Ritual” package designed for moms at its Balinese-style spa. The deal, starting at $519, includes two nights lodging, breakfast each day in Tropiks restaurant, daily spa membership and choice of one spa treatment per guest. This package is available through September 30, 2011.

Maui, Hawaii: The Grand Wailea Resort on Maui’s south coast will offer a Mother’s Day Champagne Brunch on Sunday, May 8, along with numerous “Mom & Me” activities, such as lei-making demonstrations, beach yoga, a botanical tour and hula lessons. Spa Grande has a special Ohe Bamboo Massage in honor of the day.

Whistler, British Columbia, Canada: Scandinave Spa Whistler, best known for its outdoor eucalyptus steam baths, is offering Mother’s Days deals starting at $169, which includes an hour-long massage, access to the baths and a snack from the “health bistro.”

For more spa packages and gift ideas in your area, check out this Mother’s Day gift guide.

Photo: Courtesy of Boca Raton Resort & Club

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Feature: Menlo Park, California–based virtual events company Unisfair’s annual marketing survey of 550 marketeers shows that 62 percent will be spending more on virtual events in 2011. By the same token, 42 percent of respondents said they are planning to cut back on the budget for physical events.

Meetings Mean Business

One interesting finding from the survey was that a full 86 percent of respondents feel that more than half of all corporate events will at least be hybrid (physical with virtual elements) within two to five years at most.

If that’s not enough, two researchers at Columbia University compared the health data of 13,000 employees from a corporate wellness program and found that extensive travelers were 260 percent more likely to rate their health as poor.

On the other hand, 97 percent of business travelers polled in the annual Embassy Suites business travel survey say that face time is the most important part of developing and maintaining strong client relationships. Seventy-six percent who had less face time with clients in the past 12 months reported it had a negative impact on their business relationships.

The future of virtual business environments (2011) - Unisfair
Forget business travel: Survey says marketers prefer virtual events - VentureBeat
Business travel is bad for your health - LiveScience.com
Embassy Suites Hotels’ third annual business travel survey – Hilton Worldwide

Here’s the rest of the week’s interesting news:

2011 PhoCusWright Conference theme: “Travel Unleashed: Any, Every, Always” – PhoCusWright
2011 Hotel Wi-Fi report - HotelChatter

Travel Channel invests $7.5 million in Oyster.com – UpTake
Inspirato announces $11 million funding round - Inspirato.com

Ohio Tourism partners with Groupon to create Tourism Deals Week - DiscoverOhio.com
Facebook Deals: A Groupon killer? TheWeek.com

Rio Tourism and Google Maps bicker over Favelas - The Atlantic
Bing maps aerial victory - Forbes

500 million will use their mobiles as metro and bus tickets by 2015 - Juniper Research
Here comes the bus: America’s fastest growing form of intercity travel - Texas Insider

Fast train hits snags in Silicon Valley - WSJ
Rail simulator offers taste of Canadian train travel - CBC News

Expedia CEO Dara Khosrowshahi (Q1 earnings call transcript): ”What gives me confidence that the investment in Expedia technology platform will pay off?” – Seeking Alpha

Photo – MeetingsMeanBusiness

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HomeAway, Inc., is an Austin, Texas–based vacation rental company. Its website, HomeAway.com, serves as a marketplace for more than half a million vacation rental home listings all over the world. Earlier this month, that number rose with the acquisition of an Australian-based vacation rental company, signaling continued improvement for the vacation rental industry.

The site realholidays.com.au, which features 21,000 listings in Australia, was previously owned by REA Group, a Melbourne–based company specializing in online advertising for real estate websites. Before the acquisition, realholidays.com.au catered primarily to Australian travelers. Now that HomeAway has purchased the business, the new owners look to add Australian customers to its client lists and bring existing clients to Australian vacation homes.

In a statement released earlier this month, HomeAway CEO Brian Sharples said, “Australia is a tremendous travel marketplace, and HomeAway is excited to continue the work begun by REA Group to provide even greater choice to Australian travelers. We look forward to working with the realholidays.com.au customers to help them benefit from our technology and the marketing of their properties to a new, global market of vacation rental travelers.”

While the vacation rental market hasn’t recovered from the recent recession quite as quickly as the hotel market, possibly because of its focus on leisure travel, the industry has been cautiously optimistic about the outlook for 2011 and beyond. HomeAway’s recent expansion seems to indicate that business is, at least for one major player, picking up.

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Fresh on the heels of yesterday’s Visa Inc. tourism report is the latest Vacation Lodging Demand Index from LeisureLink, Inc., a distribution and revenue management provider for independent properties. The data show that demand for leisure lodging increased more than 10 percent in March 2011 versus the same period in 2010.

“March represents the fifth straight month of increasing demand. Further, we have seen consistent year-over-year increases in demand for more than twelve consecutive months,” says Steve Reich, senior vice president of the Pasadena, California–based company.

Results also showed that fly-to markets have been consistently strong over the past several months, but in March there was a spike in demand for several drive markets, including the Gulf Coast Region, the Midwest and California ski destinations.

In addition, LeisureLink released a snapshot of its conversion index, which measures property conversion rates across the LeisureLink network. Results for March 2011 were up 9 percent over the same period in 2010.

“The increases in demand and conversion have a compounding impact on revenue, which is wonderful for the industry; however, the market continues to become more competitive,” says Reich. “All types of vacation lodging, including hotels, vacation rentals and timeshare resorts, can be easily found and shopped online. For the supplier to capture the market, they must consistently monitor market rates.”

A recent LeisureLink poll of 300 lodging suppliers, however, found that only 25 percent of properties had a revenue management solution in place.

Vacations Are Back and Other PhoCusWright 2011 Travel Trends

Photos: Courtesy of LeisureLink

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