I know it might sound needlessly hopeful, but Tripadvisor forums can transform your brand, and help you become more successful in the long term. Having hotels move away from ineffective social campaigns on Facebook, to ROI producing ones that root you as experts in travel and hospitality, is something we have needed to do for years. The internet doesn’t happen on Facebook, Facebook users aren’t consumers. The internet happens on forums, and those forums are populated with potential guests that are ready to spend money. Help out that person asking questions with an interest in having hospitality change lives, and that virtual stranger might just end up as a physical guest. Even if we are exhausted by the end of a work day, it’s still our job to mentor up and coming hospitality professionals, and to help connect them with the spark that you once felt about hospitality. These forums might be a simple, easy first step to making that hourly desk agent who thinks of hotels as a “job”, into understanding that hospitality is a noble profession. When you start helping people, and you feel that positive reaction for having done so, it gives life a sense of purpose and hope…. so let’s get excited about hospitality, let’s realize we can make the world a better place with all that we do…. and helping a stranger in a Tripadvisor forum can be one small part of that.

Revelation!  I love it. I don’t always have stuff hit me, but it hit me today. So I hadn’t figured out why Tripadvisor’s Restaurant Reviews had recently, so vigorously, taken off.  For those

I imagine this is one of the first mash ups of a live-twittered conference? If not the first, one of the only ones because this was massively, overly, insanely, time-consuming. I do think what came of it was worthwhile, and I hope this sort of serves as a testament to all we spoke about and considered during Eye for Travel SM SF 2010.