Elliott Ng will represent UpTake during the PhocusWright 2009 Conference, Blogger Summit Town Hall on Wednesday, November 18th at 9:00 a.m. Ten topics were suggested by the panelists for discussion during a planning meeting a few weeks ago. We decided to collect the best posts and  examples about each subject and showcase them. We hope this series lends itself to more insightful discussion during the Town Hall presentation.–Patricia Jenkins, Editor

It’s hard to overstate the importance of being able to game the media and keep your company in the news. But at the end of the day, this is a losing proposition - there’s a limit to the number of press releases, interviews and travel columns you can  squeeze out of the media before they get tired of your PR pitches.

To get past the traditional media barriers, some travel companies are straddling the divide between making the news and breaking it – by becoming a part of the media. The travel companies listed below are the ones who are stealing the media’s mojo and beating them at their own game.

Cheapflights

CheapFlights (www.cheapflights.com/) – CheapFlights has a news section where you’ll find plenty of breaking news. It’s not just about air travel - they write about all things travel – hotels, vacations, legislation, destinations, etc. Even more important – the news really is breaking news, and they consistently publish it before everyone starts weighing in.

Bing

Bing (www.bing.com/) – Microsoft’s Bing Travel hosts a community travel blog with some big-name contributors, including Pauline Frommer, Peter Greenberg, Joel Grus and Rick Steves.

  Entries from this blog are getting a lot of exposure in discussions of hot topics in the news, and it’s quite safe to say that this is one of the things that Bing is doing right. 

Uptake

UpTake (www.uptake.com/) – The sum of it is that the traditional media approach was found lacking, so UpTake took a large part of its PR budget, and launched a blog network with 7 blogs and 50 bloggers, as part of a plan to inflict lethal generosity on the travel industry.

UpTake co-founder Elliott Ng explains it in this Businessweek piece – “Now we’re breaking industry stories… covering other companies’ launches… getting invited to cover conferences as bloggers. We’ve built real relationships with people in the media rather than just pitching stories.”

CarRentals, UK

CarRentals, UK (www.carrentals.co.uk/) – Has a news section, entries from which have started turning up in breaking news alerts of late. The news section features stories from a wide range of subjects, most of which have something to do with either travel or the UK or both.

Rogersmith

Roger Smith Hotel (rogersmith.com/) – Take a look at Roger Smith Life and Roger Smith News and you’ll find that everything – the news, the art and all the people – leads you right back to the hotel in New York. And the connections are a lot deeper than just plain talk.

Earlier this year, they ran an ‘experiment’ where a couple from the UK was put up in a storefront recreation of one of the hotel’s suites. Basically, the couple was living in a see-through glass room on the street in New York City, and it was an art experiment by Roger Smith Life covered by Roger Smith News which brought in huge publicity for the Roger Smith hotel. 

Hilton

Hilton (www1.hilton.com/) - Hilton’s Homewood Suites recently launched a family travel blog and community site named SuiteTrip.com. In their own words, “SuiteTrip.com is your go-to guide for everything family travel-inspired.” 

Another Hilton outreach is into Travelskoot’s Videos (www.travelskoot.com/hilton) - Hilton provides destination videos featuring concierges working at Hilton hotels in these destinations.

Starwood

Starwood (www.starwoodhotels.com/) - Starwood runs a blog for its SPG members, called The Lobby, which is more of a traditional travel blog talking about destinations and attractions from all over the world, rather than just a Starwood blog talking about Starwood hotels and resorts.

Related Posts:- Some Travel Companies Just Get It

The PhoCusWright Conference kicks off on Nov 17, 2009 with the Travel Innovation Summit, where travel innovators will demonstrate applications, technology and solutions that significantly impact travel planning and purchasing. Part I and Part II  introduced to you the first 20 innovators. Listed herein are the remaining companies.

Planetism

Planetism (www.planetism.com/) – Gaithersburg, MD based Planetism is an eco-friendly tourism service which promises a ‘revolution in online travel shopping.’  The company, and their website – is premiering at the PhoCusWright Travel Innovation Summit.

Travelport

Travelport (www.travelport.com/) – New York, NY based Travelport’s lines of business include their Global Distribution Systems and GTA, which combined, represent a global travel distribution footprint. Travelport’s IT Services & Software business provides next generation IT solutions for airlines worldwide.

Traveltainment

TravelTainment (www.traveltainment-group.com/) – Aachen, Germany based TravelTainment provides a multi-market, multi-channel distribution system for sale of leisure travel products. TravelTainment AG was founded as Usbeck Engineering GmbH in 1991, renamed TravelTainment AG in 2000 and became a subsidiary of Amadeus Technology Group SA in 2006.

Traxo

Traxo (www.traxo.com/) – Dallas, TX based Traxo enables users to share their past and future travel plans with their network. Starting with travel plans booked anywhere on the web, Traxo automatically detects travel reservations and imports this information into a user’s travel dashboard in Traxo, creating itineraries and keeping track of all past and future travel.

Tripcase

TripCase (www.tripcase.com/) – Tripcase is a travel application put out by Southlake, TX based Sabre which currently works for the iPhone and Blackberry, with plans to add a version for Windows Mobile. The Tripcase app allows you to organize information about your upcoming trips, and will automatically import trip details from connected travel partners.

Tripware

Tripware (www.tripware.com/) – Mesa, AZ based Tripware is a travel service for people who plan, book, and manage their own trips. Tripware can be integrated with your Microsoft Outlook calendar using the Tripware OutBook plugin so that the entire process for booking travel can be done right from Microsoft Outlook.

Voyage.tv

Voyage.tv (www.voyage.tv/) – New York, NY based Voyage.tv – currently in beta, provides  destination video programming, with hotel & resort Profiles, activity & tour videos, and signature series that deliver content that is unbiased, current, accurate and personal. Their technology is provided by Trisept Solutions.

Voyij

Voyij (www.voyij.com/) – Cupertino, CA based Voyij allows users to explore and discover travel sales and deals regardless of origin, destination or dates. Enter where you are and Voyij presents a comprehensive list of travel deals on the web at a given time. Further filtering can be done based on travel dates, hotel star ratings, destination, activities, price, and more.

YourTour

YourTour (www.yourtour.com/) – YourTour is a personal tour planner put out by Mons, Belgium based DeciZium SA, which offers customized trip propositions based on users’ preferences. YourTour allows users to plan and book customized self-drive tours, with the help of content provided by Lonely Planet and online reservations from Booking.com.

ZipSetGo

ZipSetGo (www.zipsetgo.com/) – Dayton, Ohio based ZipSetGo.com is an online community-based travel website which aggregates extensive amounts of credible content, organized in a usable format. Members have access to downloadable documents and hundreds of data points of aggregated information per destination.

The rest of the PhoCusWright Travel Innovators can be found in Part I and Part II.

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The PhoCusWright Conference Travel Innovation Summit takes place in Orlando on Nov 17, 2009. In Part I, we took a look at the first ten travel innovators. This is the second part of an introduction to the 30 odd companies taking part in this year’s Travel Innovation Summit. 

Goby

Goby (www.goby.com/) – Boston, MA based Goby (pronounced Go-be) is a search engine that helps people find fun new ways to spend their free time. Goby creates an information model that provides semantic organization and lends structure to unstructured data. It can search, sort, filter, map, and contextualize heterogeneous web data.

GuestCentric

GuestCentric (www.guestcentric.com/) – Stamford, CT based GuestCentric Systems provides an integrated platform for hoteliers that includes website design, a dynamic booking engine, reservations platform and internet hotel marketing. It gives you your own branded specialty store on the Internet where you have full control over the content, inventory and pricing.

iPerceptions

iPerceptions (www.iperceptions.com/) – New York, NY based iPerceptions offers solutions which allow companies to collect feedback from actual customers in self initiated, real situations. Their webValidator Continuous Listening Solution and the iPerceptions Satisfaction Index (iPSI) help you get inside the hearts and minds of your visitors to discover the issues that matter most to them.

Language Weaver

Language Weaver (www.languageweaver.com/) – Los Angeles, CA based Language Weaver offers solutions and products for automated language translation. Their translation solutions are designed for organizations that need to translate large volumes of information into one or more languages, at high speed and high accuracy.

LuggageTag

Luggage Tag (www.luggagetag.com) – West Chester, PA based LuggageTag.com offers a design tool for you to personalize designs for luggage tags, which the company will then manufacture and ship to you.

Milestone Internet

Milestone Internet Marketing (www.milestoneinternet.com/) – Santa Clara, CA based Milestone Internet provides online hospitality marketing and consulting services, with complete soup-to-nuts solution for hotels, resorts, and hospitality industry for enhancing internet presence.

Mondial Assistance

Mondial Assistance (www.mondialusa.com/) – Paris, France based Mondial Assistance offers specialty insurance and assistance services. Their US offerings – based out of Richmond, VA – include Access America travel insurance and Event Ticket Protector insurance. Mondial also offers worldwide medical assistance and concierge services.

Tourabout

Tourabout (www.tourabout.com/) – Sydney, Australia based Tourabout offers a travel platform called ‘The Social GDS’ where community and commerce are merged in a marketplace and organisations connect and engage directly with travellers. It exists in the Facebook and mobile environments and is integrated with Twitter.

Translations

Translations.com (www.translations.com/) – New York, NY based Translations.com offers website localization, software localization, GMS (Globalization Management System) software products, and enterprise-level, professional translation services.

TravelGuard

Travel Guard (www.travelguard.com/) – Stevens Point, WI based Travel Guard is a travel insurance plan provider, specializing in providing travel insurance, assistance and emergency travel service plans which are distributed through virtually every distribution channel in the travel industry.

The rest of the PhoCusWright Conference Travel Innovators are introduced in Part I & Part III.

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The PhoCusWright Conference takes place Nov 17-19 in Orlando, and the highlight on Day 1 – Tuesday, Nov 17, 2009, is the Travel Innovation Summit. Attendees are expected to rate all 30 innovators in real-time, based on their demonstrations.

Over the next few days, we’ll introduce to you all 30 travel innovators. In this post, we take a look at the first 10 companies.

10Best Solutions

10Best Solutions (www.10bestsolutions.com/) – Greenville, SC based 10Best Solutions  provides search engine optimization, content management, content creation and design/development services to an impressive roster of clients including major hotel chains, cruise lines, airlines and travel sites. 10Best Solutions is a division of 10Best, Inc.

AboutAnywhere

AboutAnywhere (www.aboutanywhere.com/) – Miami, FL based AboutAnywhere.com offers a direct-to-consumer travel website, with a low-cost online travel agency business model with major innovations in e-marketing services and improved functionality for both hotel partners and consumers.

Amadeus

Amadeus (www.amadeus.com/) – Madrid, Spain based Amadeus IT Group SA is the leading Global Distribution System (GDS) and the biggest processor of travel bookings in the world. From global network airlines to low cost carriers, from multinational travel agencies to independent hotels, Amadeus provides IT solutions to everyone in the tourism and travel industry.

CarTrawler

 CarTrawler (www.cartrawler.com/) – Dublin, Ireland based global car rental distribution company CarTrawler offers large selection of car rentals from over 500 car rental suppliers in 135 countries in 15,000 city and airport locations. 

CheapLimoRates

CheapLimoRates  (www.cheaplimorates.com/) – Phoenix, AZ based CheapLimoRates.com claims to be the first comparison shopping and booking engine website for the limousine industry, and matches millions of consumers with nearly 10,000 limousine companies who offer discounted rates to book their unused vehicle inventory.  

Twavl

Twavl (www.connectme360.com/) – Twavl is a city-specific community service based on twitter which offers answers and provides insider tips in the form of tweets. Twavl is run by Connectme 360 – a Denver, CO based answer logistics company which helps employees of travel and hospitality companies locate the perfect response to customers’ queries in less than a minute. 

Dapper

Dapper (www.dapper.net/) – San Francisco (and New York) based Dapper provides technical solutions for quickly creating widgets, Google gadgets, and Facebook apps — leading to its flagship product, Dapper Dynamic Ads, which pull live product and inventory from your site, bringing the right offer to the right consumer at the right time.  

Exalead

Exalead (www.exalead.com/) – Paris, France based Exalead is a global software provider in the enterprise and Web search markets, and the maker of CloudView, one of the top platforms for search-based applications (SBAs), which uses advanced semantic technologies to bring structure, meaning and accessibility to previously unused or under-utilized data. 

Expedia Media Solutions

Expedia Media Solutions (www.advertising.expedia.com/) – Bellevue, WA based Expedia Media Solutions is the world’s largest travel lifestyle media company, which leverages the nearly 30 million customers that visit the Expedia, Inc. network of sites every month. 

Gliider

Gliider (www.gliider.com/) – Based in Brooklyn, NY, Gliider offers a browser plugin and travel tool which helps you to collect travel information from around the web in one place by simply highlighting and dragging and dropping the part you like.

The rest of the PhoCusWright Conference Travel Innovators are introduced in Part II & Part III.

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