A new product from Starcite shows some promise in this area:

The StarCite Group Rate Advisor equips meeting planners and meeting suppliers with forward-looking hotel rate forecasts using meeting planning data from RFPs flowing through its meetings platform.

Using data collected from StarCite’s marketplace, StarCite can produce reports for any city or geographical region, that will provide sleeping room rate ranges and trends as far as twelve months in advance. The StarCite tool will also provide in-depth benchmarking information derived from years’ worth of historical booking data from the StarCite marketplace.

More at Starcite

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Absolutely wacky and in true british beach holiday spirit - and a great video from the BBC to cover it. Click here to see it for yourself

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Now the all pervasive google goes into virtual reality ala Secondlife - according to a hotelmarketing.com report the google application is meant to be much more interactive than Secondlife.

Just like the real estate concept in Second Life started a scramble for space there, is Google Lively the next virtual world? Or the better one? Check it out at http://www.lively.com/html/landing.html. Your computer does require Windows XP or Vista for it to work.

And will hotel groups start getting into the act? I seem to remember that Starwood had set up one of its brands in Second Life ( I have not actually checked out the presence of Starwood on Second Life - so can’t vouch for it)

As with most Google applications, this one is worth watching.

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With a new stylish look and feel, Expedia Corporate Travel has been recently re-christened Egencia. And they will be doing everything they can to shake the dominance of Carlson Wagon Lit (CWT) and American Express (Amex) in this sector.

In a report in the Financial times, their chief executive Mr Khosrowshahi says that, now is as good a time to launch a revamped product as any inspite of the economic gloom worldwide. He believes that the the downturn plays into the hands of travel companies such as Expedia - “In times of transition, consumers look for more information and research more,” said. “They are going to look harder for bargains,” he added. More on that report from the Financial times

Egencia offers a number of tools including some popular products which have recently entered the Expedia fold including

• SeatGuru – A color-coded interactive airplane seating charts that outline the pros and cons of different seats for over 275 airplanes and more than 40 airlines. Provided by a community of frequent business travelers, the integrated intelligence tool takes convenience and comfort factors – such as legroom and ability to recline – into account. This informative SeatGuru content is integrated within the seat selection process for travelers and their bookers to help make more informed decisions for flights.
• TripAdvisor City Guides – Gives Egencia business travelers access to destination information that links to the traveler’s itinerary and provides pertinent destination information.

Some of these products bring some unique new benefits to corporate travellers and offer Expedia a fair chance to catch up with CWT and Amex in this highly lucrative segment. Click here to go to the Egencia website.

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To provide more energy, drive and ideas into predictably routine conferences, events & meetings, Crowne Plaza hotels (part of the Intercontinental group) is working with leading creative thinkers to do something different in their meeting rooms.

And the first of these comes from an inventor Roger von Oech - selected Crowne Plaza meeting rooms now come equipped with an exclusive Roger von Oech designed Crowne Plaza Think Box. The Think Box is an assortment of inspirational tools and exercises invented by him that allow participants to plan and participate in activities that will bring life into meetings.

More at their dedicated website - http://en-gb.crowneplazathinktank.com/Default.aspx

It is heartening to see big hotel companies moving from talking innovation to actually innovating - can they sustain it and what are the measurable changes from such innovation in customer satisfaction and revenues? We’ll have to wait and watch.

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Will your hotel benefit from having live flight information being made available to your guests? If yes, Flight Time TV promises a solution - the company offers solutions of software or in the form of plug and play systems.According to them, the logistics required to get the data to the hotel and distributed onto the network are minimal. The data is transported over the internet to the hotel or convention centre into the guest TV network.

Flight time TV believes that immediate ROI will be generated from the rebooking of rooms or prolonged stay due to cancelled flights or flight delays.

Will it work for all? Certainly not! But for big city destinations, the business traveller is going to love your hotel for offering that extra service.

At the moment the service is US based with no information available on worldwide coverage.

Find out more

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One of the recent trends spotted by Springwise comes from a company which can literally produce a hotel on demand!

Abilmo a french company offers temporary hotel rooms 12 square meters in size with wood flooring, wood furniture and private bathrooms including toilet, shower and hot water. The units also offer thermal and acoustic insulation along with individual heating and air-conditioning.

So how does it work and how does the company expect its customers to use it?

Abilmo can create a pop-up hotel for use inside or outside at such events as festivals, seminars and sports events lasting anywhere from a few days to a few weeks. Very compact when folded, they require no cranes and Abilmo’s staff can set up as many as 25 per day. And apparently , interiors and exteriors can be customized to reflect any corporate image.

In my mind the dependency on the company team to build these temporary hotels is a critical factor and as far as the costs v’s revenue possibilities, it needs some looking into.

So will the idea catch on? What do you think?

According to a report in Hotels magazine, it is the turn of U hotels to follow W hotels by Starwood.

U hotels concept from a large property development company in Thailand aims to develop a deluxe brand of simple hotels in the region. Chiang Mai is the location for their first hotel.

This shift in purchasing and distribution patterns has been showing more and more clearly over the years - and according to the most recent comScore report, excerpts of which were published by www.hotelmarketing.com, the first quarter of 2008 has seen a 3% plus rise in hotel website bookings (the majors like Hilton, Marriott, Best western etc) and a proportionate decrease from online travel agency websites - OTA’s (majors like expedia, orbitz, travelocity etc).

Marriott and Best Western have achieved the best increases over the period with Hilton, Hyatt and Starwood losing some. Orbitz saw the most decrease among the OTA’s.

This percentage change seems to be the quickest ever and it will be really interesting to watch whether it speeds up further or stops at a plateau. My thoughts - it still has a fair distance to go before it hits that plateau….

So does this mean that the fight for independent hotels gets hotter with the major chains grabbing bigger and bigger slices of the OTA pie? Are there going to be more SMD companies (see a previous blog post) in the running? Definitely a trend worth watching for all hoteliers large or small!

For more on the hotelmarketing.com article click here

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If you are really particular about how you travel and where you stay - not just which airline and/or class or which hotel brand, but to exactly pick out where you want to sit and where you want to  sleep, check out these websites.

Seatguru  launched in 2001 by frequent flyer Matthew Daimler - He started with a single color-coded interactive airplane seating chart. Having experienced firsthand the vast differences between airline seats, he was determined to collect this useful information and share it with other travelers. Now seatguru.com covers more than 300 airplane seatmaps from more than 45 different airlines and was purchased by Trip Advisor in 2007.

Seat 61 is not strictly comparable but a unique site dedicated to train travel around the world - if you want to know something about trains in Inner Mongolia to the palace on wheels in India, this is your ultimate resource.

Tripkick - and now tripkick.com promises to do for the hotel industry what seatguru.com has done for airlines - early days yet with the site covering some US regions, but it has every chance of taking off.