Gradually, more and more hotel chains have joined the Hoobing family. Five hotel chains have registered during the last week, we will start introducing Iberostar: 35 hotels peppered all over Spain, but mainly in the Balearic Isles. On the other hand, 14 additional hotels in several locations of the Catalan coast, such as Lloret de Mar, Malgrat de Mar, Platja d’Aro, Calella, etc., have joined our project thanks to H-Top Hotels.  Without leaving the coastline, but this time jumping to the Balearic Isles, THB hotels have registered 16 establishments in locations like Cala Ratjada, Can Picafort, Sant Antoni Portmany, Sa Coma, etc.

Leaving the coast behind, we quickly move to the most genuine urban environment. Sidorme, Quality Low Cost Hotels is a hotel chain formed by 5 comfortable, new and inexpensive low cost hotels. Its entities are located in cities well known for their appeal for business and leisure tourists, cosmopolitan cities like Madrid, Barcelona, Valencia, Girona, Granada, Jerez, etc. Why not paying a visit to these spots to check their amazing value-for-money relationship? Also in the Spanish mainland, we would like to highlight the Holiday Inn and Holiday Inn Express, from Intercontinental Hotels Group. 12 of their 15 hotels have already registered in the first intermediary-free hotel search engine.
Stay in tune with Hoobing, we are skyrocketing! Enjoy and get rid of intermediaries!

Our blog has remained a little bit idle after the busy days of HOTELTrack ’09, but now we are back on the track after having compiled some of the best hotels that registered during this last week. We have prepared a choice of hotels, classified by exotic destinations.

Amidst the Caribbean waters we find a cluster of islands that form a nation with an odd name, Antigua & Barbuda. The Cocos hotel, a resort composed by 26 little wooden bungalows lies in the middle of the ocean, enjoying one of the most impressive islands of the Caribbean. A little bit further on but located on island as amazing as the Cocos Hotel, we find Sangri-La’s Rasa Sayang, a resort –spa located on Batu Feringgi beach in Malaysia. Enjoying a infinite sunset feeling the waters bathing your feet must be an unforgettable experience. Also in Malaysia, but specifically focused on those traveler interested in urban tourism, we recommend the Thomas Bernthaler hotel, a five star hotel located in Kuala Lumpur which registered last Thursday, April the 23rd.

Apart of being exotic, Dubai’s Versailles Hotel is located in the capital of one of the most luxurious of the East. If you are planning to visit that country, do not hesitate to visit the datasheet of this hotel. It is worth the effort. Finally, we would like to highlight the Mandakini Castle Hotel in Jaipur, India. A classy three stars hotel, full of the flavors of the East. A hotel recommended for urban or business tourism.

Last Thursday took place HOTELtrack’09 within the framework of the Sitc (hospitality tradeshow), an encounter taken place in Barcelona and gathering more than 60 professionals from the tourism industry.

This year Hoobing had the opportunity to participate reading the paper “Intermediary Free Environments, an Opportunity for the Hospitality Industry”, and we had the pleasure to share table with Emilia Jódar, Yahoo! Search Account Manager and Ramón Solé, Product manager for Rumbo.es and Viajar.com. Unfortunately, Viçenc Martí, Vueling’s Marketing General Manager could not stay due to work compromises.

First of all we would like to thank Lluis Soler for organizing the event, both the topics reviewed – revenue management, innovation within the hospitality industry, online positioning, etc.-and the readers were excellent. Fernando del Corral, Asunción Zorrilla y Javier García Cuenca were superb in their presentations relating revenue management. Oscar Casasnovas clearly pictured how an independent hotel can innovate in social media marketing and showed the importance not only of listening but also of participating in the conversation, so being able to carry out improvements in the hotel service with the aim to loyalise possible customers.

We, on our behalf, wished to review the evolution of the distribution systems within the hospitality industry, before the internet era, during the first steps of online distribution, what is currently going on and finally, which are the latest trends. Following our motto Book directly | travel smart, direct sales are becoming more and more important, especially during hard times like today’s, a moment when there’s a tendency to cut down intermediary costs.

As a conclusion to HOTELtrack’09, in our opinion, not only innovation is important to generate revenues as Hosteltur online journal noted last Friday, the 17th: microsegmentation of customers is also essential for hotel-driven marketing campaigns to render really effective. To get to know the customer and send him the information he really needs is the best way to “hit the target”.

In the last days two more Hotel Chains have registered with Hoobing.com. On one side, Hotetur Hotels & Resorts, a group based in the Balearic Isles and including more than 10 entities located in Mexico, Cuba, Dominican Republic and the Balearics. On the other, The Three Corners, a hotel chain counting a dozen hotels in Egypt’s Red Sea coast, which we had the pleasure to meet in the past ITB trade show in Berlin.

Now that the Easter holidays are here, take this opportunity to visit their datasheets on Hoobing.com and book directly on their official web sites, where you will find all you need to get some days of well-deserved rest.

As we announced a couple of days ago, Hoobing was present in Fitur. After these intense days visiting the stands of many hotels, the results have been very positive.

The general feeling after these days is that Hoobing is a very attractive project for hoteliers, for our main purpose is to offer a portal where users are not only able to easily find the official hotel website –and check its rates through the use by hotels of channel managers-, but also to look for tourism blogs to better prepare their trips and holidays, share their experiences with other users by means of the Hoobing community, etc. For the hotel, Hoobing is the perfect channel to reach the user, not only because it can redirect traffic to its official website, but also interact with him being able to answer comments and reviews.

One of the most interesting functionalities for the hotelier is the option to include offers on Hoobing.com. In this way, we are already working so hotels can use an offer manager within their datasheet, being able to publicize those aspects they consider more attractive for the final users.

But, we didn’t spend all our time visiting hotel stands; we also assisted to Hosteltur Community Meeting, where we had the pleasure to meet Magdalena Camps, Community Manager of the Hosteltur Community, Carlos, Business Manager of Hosteltur, Andreu Llabres, Marketing Manager of Amic Hotels Mallorca, Carlos Velilla, Commercial manager of the hotel Finca Prats de Lleida, Johanna Cavalcanti, Viva & Vanity hotels e-Commerce Manager,  Juan Antonio Rodriguez, Pierre et Vacances Online Marketing Manager, Andreu Roig, Es Picot Commercial Manager, among others.

Fitur is gone, now is the turn of ITB in Berlin. See you there!

Today, who hasn’t heard about Google Street Maps? For those in need of guidance, Google Street View is the Google Maps and Google Earth application that allows the user to virtually visit streets of cities which have been mapped by Google directly on the surface. It was launched for the first time in USA on the 25th of May 2007. The next year, more specifically on the 28th of October, it was implemented in Spain, including maps of cities like Barcelona (including its metropolitan area), Valencia, Seville and Madrid. On the 26th of January 2009, the application included Hoobing.com.

So, from here on now, hotels located in the cities which have implemented Google Street View application, both in Spain and in the rest of the world will have the option to be displayed in that format on Hoobing.com. If you do not know exactly which cities can be viewed with this application, just click on this Wikipedia link where all cities including this application are listed, grouped by country.

As we said, there are many hotels on Hoobing.com that have the option to be displayed with Google Street View. Check this new functionality visiting their datasheets: Hotel Majestic (Barcelona), Le Park Méridien New York, Akasaka Excel Hotel Tokyu (Tokyo).

On Hoobing, we offer state-of.the-art technologies. Stay tuned!

More and more hotel chains and independent hotels made the decision to rely on Hoobing’s philosophy. Skip all intermediaries and boost your own booking channel: your official website! Hoobing offers you a space where you will be able to include your hotel, with pictures, videos, description, location, services, etc, so users will be able to get the maximum information possible and address directly to your website to carry out their booking processes.

A week ago we announced the incorporation of new hotel chains to the Hoobing platform; now, we would like to highlight the presence of such significant and well-known entities as those part of the Grupo Majestic Barcelona, Hotel Fira Palace Barcelona, Alexandre hotels, Vincci Hoteles, H10, Releais Chateaux Mas Canicatti, among others. At an international level, in Austria, the UK and Germany we are known to Swissotel Berlin, Atel Hotel Lasserhof de Salzburg, el Der Salzburger Hof and the London House Hotel. These are some of the hotels which registered within these last weeks.

So… if you want to join the Hoobing community, as these hotels did, click here and fill in this short form to register your hotel.

BTW… See you in Fitur!!!

Yesterday we posted an article on the Tourism Sector Innovation Group, within the Spanish tourism community Hosteltur, dealing with the impact of the new horizons offered by the new information technologies on the world of tourism industry.

In this article we bring forward a parallelism between the DIY underground trend and new user profiles, those of consumers of tourism products, which are arising due to the boom of free-intermediary environments which allow the booking of trips and hotels stays. Hoobing.com positions itself as the flagship of this philosophy among web portals. So we invite you to read this article and to participate in this discussion.

Until today and since the time we have been up and rolling online, the first preference of Hoobing has been to bring this project to independent hotels and hotel chains, so they can benefit from a hotel-specialized vertical search engine whose main aim is to boost the own booking channel of the establishment: its website.

It is considered that, in the future, segmentation within internet search processes will be a constant, so from this approach Hoobing.com is an innovative 2.0 proposal. That’s why hotel chains such as Hoteles Santos, Hoteles Porcel, Melià Buenos Aires, Hoteles Var, Hoteles Globales, High Tech Hoteles, Roc Blanc, Roc Hoteles, Medium and Prestige have already registered with Hoobing.com.

No time to rest at Hoobing, we didn’t even realize and three weeks have passed since we launched the Hoobing beta version. We are working hard to make a more reliable and easier navigation system. Nevertheless, we still have time to post a few words on the blog. We have a clear reason: we want you to get familiar with Hoobing.com’s search engine, showing you all possibilities so you can design your own trips with no interferences. Don’t get cheated! We are no middlemen, it’s you who starts and completes all booking processes, directly with the hotel. And to put it forward, we propose a simple trip through the core of Hoobing in search of 3 hotels with a very odd and creative approach. Thus, you will get familiar with the search engine; you will discover three incredible hotels and be able to book directly through the hotel official website, all brought to you by Hoobing.

Visit Hoobing.com and type, for instance, “Silken” in the search by hotel field and “Madrid” in the search by destination field. A list will be automatically displayed with all Silken hotels in Madrid. We suggest you to discover the Silken Puerta de América, an avant-garde 5 star hotel designed by 18 different architects, who leave their personal touch in each one of the 13 floors of the building. Want more? What about Liverpool’s Hard Days Night hotel? Just the name shows what sort of hotel it is. Only for those answering “Beatles” to the eternal dilemma between the Stones and the Fab Four. Find this amazing hotel by clicking on the “Trendy hotels” category on Hoobing.com home site, and then refine your search by typing “Liverpool” in the search by destination field. Finally, let’s move to Amsterdam to discover the Qbic, a design hotel, intimate and really affordable. You can find it by typing “Qbic” in the search by hotel field on Hoobing.com.

What about you? Do you know any more special hotels? Why don’t you share it with us?