In less than a week two well-known tourism related media have published news about Hoobing. On one side, Hosteltur published on Wednesday, March the 25th, a press release informing about the first achievements of Hoobing after 3 months of operation: incorporation of more than 3000 hotels, integration with the main channel managers (EZ Yield, Rate Tiger and Channel Direct), improvements on the content manager and new homesites for blogs and hoobers (registered users).

Today, Monday the 30th, it’s been the British Tourism portal Eye For Travel who published news about Hoobing. We invite you to visit these portals and read what the media says about our project. By means of these portals, you will be also able to stay tuned with the latest novelties of the Tourism and Hospitality sector

Some weeks ago the blog “El Sueño de la India” (India’s Dream) registered on Hoobing.com, a blog written by Alba Garrido where we are told about the trip Alba made through Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh and Uttar Pradesh provinces of India. She travelled during autumn 2008. When she registered we realized that she had been nominated for the Travel Bloggers Awards, organized by Lonely Planet, an award we already commented on Hoobing.com. Today Alba reported that her blog has been awarded with the first prize in the category of Photographic Travel Blog. Congratulations from the Hoobing Team, Alba!!!
We strongly recommend you to visit Alba’s blog and enjoy the wonderful pictures from such a magical country as India!!!

Congratulation and, as usual, Keep on bloggin’

Recently, Hotels are often relying on QR Code technology. But, what is the QR Code? The QR Code is a system to obtain data with an operation resembling that of the code bar. The acronym QR stands for “Quick response”. To read QR Codes a mobile phone with an integrated camera is required, it is also necessary that this mobile phone integrates a QR Code reader. If your mobile phone has not this functionality available, you can get more info visiting the website of  the manufacturer

Reading QR Codes from Hoobing hotels is as easy as to focus the code that is displayed by clicking on the link in each hotel datasheet and then taking a picture of it. Automatically, the contact info for that hotel will be displayed on the screen of your mobile phone such as name, address, phone number and email address; you will be able to save this data in the phone’s memory. This is a very handy for users will be able to store the said info in case they need to contact the hotel when travelling.

Other services implemented within Hoobing hotel datasheets:
- Twitter account (enlace wiki/twitter hotel), - microblogging service that allows you to distribute information comprising a maximum amount of 140 characters-,
- Link to the corporate blog
- Link to the hotel RSS system, very useful to receive real-time updates, offers, news, etc.

Would you like to visualize all tools included in each hotel datasheet? Check the datasheet of the Soho hotel in Barcelona and check our project on the terrain.

All these services are an answer to the real needs of the traveler of the future. We hope you find them useful!

On January, the 29th we announced the implementation of Google Street  Views on Hoobing.com, for a better visualization of hotels directly on the terrain. Last week, The Guardian announced that finally, the Google Street Views service was now operative for the whole territory of the United Kingdom. So, all those wishing to have a virtual walk from their living room to the cities available within the application will be able the visit the streets of cities like London, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Leeds, Manchester, Liverpool, Oxford, Cambridge, Belfast, Birmingham, etc…

The implementation of Google Street View is a very useful service for Hoobing users to visualize the hotels as if they were directly “on the ground”. As one can observe in the picture, the tab “Location”, located within the hotel extended datasheet, allows you to activate the Street View option just by clicking on the top left margin of the map. The image of the map will automatically switch to the “Street View” mode. You can get familiar with this service clicking on the following examples:

Malmaison Belfast

Park Plaza Cardiff

Marks Hotel Glasgow

The Threadneedles Hotel

Apex International Hotel

As every week, we update our “Blog of the week” section on Thursday. Yesterday we decided to highlight one of our favorite blogs, the one written by a couple of travelers who is traveling around the world. These days they are visiting Morocco but if you pay attention to the right margin you will find a list including all countries they hit so far (some of them even three times!!!) . It’s simply amazing. We are green of envy!!! And we want you to share this feeling with us!!!

This morning, while visiting the blog as we often do, we found a surprise; click here to find out what we are talking about.

Greetings for Autumn and Danny… Keep on bloggin’!

Last February the 2nd we announced that the Blog search engine homesite was already running. A little more than a month after, we have the pleasure to inform that we already have a homesite for the community of hoobbers.
We already explained in due course that Hoobing.com is not only an intermediary-free hotel search engine; it also wants to become a social tool for the whole community of travelers. That’s why, functionalities like the blog search engine or the community of travelers are very useful to get ready for a trip: one can complete the available information about destinations by means of blogs, which are written by the travelers themselves, as well as sharing experiences with other users.

Hoobbers, our registered users, can create pix galleries, upload photos, write on his travel diary and share it with other users. This way, one of the activities that will enhance our social network is the possibility to check the recent activities of other users. Besides, users can also search for other users by means of the functionalities “search by continent”, “search by country” and “search by map” included within our search engine.
Another functionality which will allow users enjoying their tourism experience is the option to search hoobers depending on the kind of tourism they practice: family tourism, business tourism, gourmet tourism, etc. The said functionality can be used by clicking on the tab “Types of Tourism” on the top area within the user homesite.
These are little details we are implementing to make Hoobing a great traveler social network. What about you? Aren’t you a hoober yet? Sure you are one of those who books directly on the hotel website, aren’t you? And then you go checking tourism blogs around to get ready and avoid forgetting any detail for that long dreamed trip of yours. Am I wrong? So, what are you waiting for to become a Hoober? We, at Hoobing, want you to visit the official Hotel website so you can carry out your booking processes directly there, because of the reliability it implies, because you can get lower rates, because it’s a more transparent process;  Hoobing has included a blog specialized homesite where you will be able to look for information relating your future trips . Do not forget to check the activity on Hoobing by means of our new Hoobers Homesite

And now… register with our community and follow Hoobing’s philosophy: Book directly | Travel smart

As we commented last month, our blog search engine is already up and rolling. Today, we would like to dedicate this post to our “blog of the week” section, one of the options included within that search functionality. From January the 29th, 7 blogs have been honored as our “blog of the week”. From last thursday, the Hoobing team recommends you a blog that recently registered with Hoobing.com. Its name: “Volta dels 25”, an interesting blog written by a young Catalan journalist who is traveling around the globe with the intention to interview 25 25-years-old youngsters from all over the world. “La Volta dels 25” was awarded most voted non-English blog by Travel Blog Awards 2009, which we commented last week. Next, we display the list of blogs that Hoobing highlighted to date. Amongst them, you will find purely informative blogs, while some other prefer a more personal approach, we will even find some completely unpublished before, as” A Outra Face da Cidade Surpreendente”, a superb  fotoblog about Oporto.

Club del Viajero

3 viajes al día

Asiasido

Berlin Unlike

China, prepara tu viaje

A Outra Face da Cidade Surpreendente

Today we write about a much-discussed topic that makes a call to a reflection exercise. This topic is about the price disparity between the website displayed on the hotel website and those offered by the intermediaries. The said issue arises from a discussion which took place on the Twitter community. After an exchange of opinions between Ignasi Casellas from Hotel Condado, Jordi Ruiz from City hotels, Carlos Velilla from Finca Prats, Andreu Roig from Es Picot and myself, Jordi Ruiz send us an article posted on his blog (written in Spanish) where he recalls his personal experience when trying to book a room directly on his website, finding his prices higher than those displayed on the intermediaries. Jordi’s experience is not an isolated case: many hotels sell their products at a cheaper price through their IDS than on their own booking channels. That implies a lower opportunity cost for the hotelier.
On his post, Jordi Ruiz highlights the remarkable investments many hotels carry out on their corporate website, booking engines, positioning strategies for main search engines, etc. One must make these investments profitable and the best way to do so is offering equal prices on the official website and avoiding higher prices than those displayed by the IDS, who in many cases already get remarkable commissions. Generally speaking, we will get the best prices going directly to the factory, won’t we? So, how is it possible that this is not applicable for some hotels? How is it possible that one may find cheaper prices on intermediary portals than those offered directly on the official website? The benefit the hotelier gets for online bookings carried out directly on his website is completely free of intermediary costs and that’s where hoteliers should focus. Otherwise their benefit margin is reduced.

The debate is open…

If last week we announced that HUSA hotel chain registered all its entities in Barcelona, today we end the week with another good new: Mariott hotel chain just registered its hotel in Denia, Denia Mariott la Sella Golf Resort & Spa, besides another hotel chain, Radisson, has acted the same registering its establishment in Brussels, Radison SAS Royal Hotel.

It is completely free to register with Hoobing, as Hoobing is no intermediary; HUSA, Mariott and Radisson have discovered it already, why don’t you also try?