Los Cabos has a new look online. The city’s Convention & Visitors Bureau has launched a new traveler-facing website, www.visitloscabos.travel, to help guests plan their vacations with ease. With the website’s new features, you’ll be able to tailor your trip to this hot vacation spot to whatever specific needs you have.
The most useful of the tools available is “My Los Cabos Planner.” You can put together an itinerary and share it by e-mail, print out ideas and, when you are ready, pull the trigger with “Book Your Trip.” Before you get to that point, though, you’ll see a wide range of possibilities … so you won’t miss a thing. If you’re a meeting or event planner, you can use a dedicated part of the website to coordinate every detail of your event and send an RFP directly to the Los Cabos CVB … without having to get on a plane.
“Our goal with the launch of the enhanced consumer website,” says Gonzalo Franyutti, President of the Los Cabos CVB, “is to offer travelers important, valuable information about our destination as well as provide a convenient resource for travel planning.” He continues, “We are thrilled with the final product and will continue to update the site regularly to ensure travelers are receiving the most current and vital information.”
Yellowstone National Park is one of the most popular destinations in the U.S., welcoming nearly 3 million visitors per year. Most of those come during the summer months, when the weather is consistently beautiful, and the travel season is in full swing. But this article suggests that we should go now, to beat the crowds, and enjoy springtime in the Northern Rockies, where no matter what time of the year it is, Old Faithful erupts, whether anyone is watching or not.
The Park covers more than 2.2 million acres, spreading out across Idaho, Wyoming, and Montana. It was first established back in 1872, and is home to hundreds of species of birds and animals, including sixty distinct species of mammals, such as elk, moose, bison, wolves, and bear. Yellowstone also contains diverse terrain, with rivers, lakes, canyons, and mountains dominating the landcsape.
Of course, all of these natural wonders are also what attracts the large summer crowds, which makes visiting the park in the offseason such a popular idea for outdoor enthusiasts. For instance, even though it is spring, and temperatures are on the rise, there is still plenty of snow in the high country, allowing for some late season skiing or snow shoeing. At lower altitudes, the trails are now open, granting access to much of the park, and since the crowds haven’t arrived yet, there is plenty of solitude as well.
The article offers some excellent links to websites that cover Yellowstone from top to bottom and have plenty of great tips on how to maximize your visit, including the best places to stay, both inside and out of the park. Beat the rush in Yellowstone. Go before Memorial Day weekend, to have the park mostly to yourself.
Our friends over at Jaunted and Hotelchatter are up to no good again, this morning kicking off Vegaschatter.com, a sister blog that will cover all things Vegas.
Why Las Vegas? According to one Mr. Mark Johnson, the founder of SFO Media, “Las Vegas has always been one of the world’s most popular travel destinations, and for years the city was in dire need of a daily travel web publication that would cover Vegas the same way HotelChatter covers hotels and Jaunted covers travel — from a visitors perspective.”
This means you can expect the same witty delivery, quality content and high volume of posts as you get from the other sites, particularly since
Juliana Shallcross
, managing editor of [editor of?] Jaunted and Hotelchatter will be in charge.
And what of starting a Las Vegas blog in the midst of a deep recession that seems to be hitting the City of Sin the hardest? Will the investment now grow as the city rebuilds? Is Vegaschatter as doomed as the flailing Nevada economy? Tune into Vegaschatter.com for the details.
Travel research firm PhoCusWright is trying to get people to buy its latest report by making some (supposedly) bold predictions about travel industry technology trends. Realistically, most of this stuff falls into the “No Shit” category, but alas, Gadling will not make that one of the official labels from which I can choose.
These are some real gems. In fact, I’d be willing to bet my MBA that a backpacker with three joints and a smile could have come up with most of this.
After the jump, you’ll find 10 pearls of wisdom from this research firm. Please, click the link to continue reading. I dare you. You’ll get in a few hundred words what cost me more than 40 grand. The italicized content is from PhoCusWright. The rest is from me.1. Despite Market Woes, Pockets of Investment Still Exist Okay, Sami Mahroum, Research Director of Britain’s National Endowment for Science, Technology & the Arts (and believe it or not, I’ve shortened his title) says what I’ve been telling people at De La Concha for months: “During economic downturns, innovation is the single most important condition for transforming the crisis into an opportunity.”
In financial parlance, this is just saying that contracyclical investing occurs all the time. If you put your money into what sucks today but which may not suck tomorrow, you have a shot at some big gains. Investing in the flavor of the month doesn’t afford the same opportunities.
2. The Entire Trip Experience Will be “Informationalized” I lived through the “dotcom” era (with a CMGi company, even … remember them?), and I heard – and said – some pretty moronic buzzwords. But, how can you use stupid catch-phrases in this sort of economy? All that’s missing is a sock puppet!
What PhoCusWright is trying to say is that online companies that provide booking capabilities are going to need to supply information past the financial transaction. Duh. Have you left a review on Hotwire or TripAdvisor lately? This is what the report is talking about.
3. Software as a Service (SaaS), Cloud Computing and Open Source Spawn a New Flock of Innovators Ummmm, how? I’m sure open source could make me less bald if I don’t have to prove it.
4. Suppliers (Finally!) Provide Personalized Shopping/Booking Tools The example provided by PhoCusWright is basically what people called the “My Yahoo! phenomenon long before I entered my thirties.
5. Technologies Will Continue to Converge Yes, and my refrigerator will continue to keep stuff cold. This is natural trajectory. C’mon, PhoCusWright. All the cool research and consulting firms are tired of talking about convergence. Back when I was in the consulting world (left in 2007), we were disgusted with the word.
6. A Flood of New Mobile Travel and Location-Based Applications Come to Market I’ve been hearing about this since mobile internet company NetMorf (RIP) tried to convince me it mattered. Mobile has come a long way since 2001, but this is more stuff that just makes sense today. Why would you pay for this?
7. Advertising Technology Transforms Travel Distribution This one’s just stupid, so I give you travel advertising technology in action.
8. Still Searching … for Better Search Oh, come on …not this typical gripe again. At the end of the day, it’s the searcher, not the search tool. Unless you commit some reasonable time to searching for what you want, you won’t get it.
9. Democratization of Supply Levels the Playing Field All I can say is that “democratization” is explained by “oligopoly,” “mashups,” “SaaS,” and “the transparency of the internet.” I call it all … bullshit.
10. Business Intelligence and Analytics Move to the Forefront The moved to the forefront a long time ago. Everyone uses this stuff now. Catch up.
So, here’s the good news. PhoCusWright will let you download “a full and detailed description of the first two trends” free! Wow! They want you to pay for the other eight … to the tune of $350. But, for the price of a mouse-click, you’ve already gotten more.
When I first went to Vietnam in the mid-90’s, Hanoi was still a fairly sleepy town where cyclos could go everywhere and the buzz of motorcycles was a once in awhile occurrence. Most places to stay were family-owned guest houses and luxury meant air conditioning and a TV that worked and offered more than a couple of channels.
One morning, I stood on the corner of a street in Hoi An taking pictures of people on bicycles gliding past a yellow building. In Hue, I waited for people to pass in cyclos to see what the cyclos carried. One had a coffin. Each time I’ve returned to Vietnam the changes have been substantial. On my fifth visit, although the bicycles were a fixture, they were dwarfed in number by motorcycles, and cars had become king.
Like the vehicles, the options of where to stay has expanded as well. While the guest houses have still remained a solid option, for anyone looking for more upscale digs, there are plenty of choices. Big business tourism hit Vietnam awhile ago and the results show.
To help people find the best places to stay, Vietnam Travel culled through 16,000 reviews of 350 hotels to pick out the top ten. The ten are in six of Vietnam’s popular destination spots that range from beach locations to historic cities. Each entry is linked to descriptions and photos of the hotels which have me salivating for my sixth trip.
Here are the results that attest to Vietnam’s change when it comes to where to slumber scenery. If you head to Hue, there are three hotels that made the cut. I wonder if you’ll see any one pedaling a cyclo carrying a casket? I doubt it.
This list is in order of which hotels were given top ranking from number 1 to number 10.