TravelPony.com: Let’s ride!

TravelPony.com is a brand new hotel booking website created in 2013. The concept is simple: Register with your Facebook ID and get the best rates available: between 10 and 70% below the big travel sites! 

The question is: How is it possible? 

TravelPony relies on their customer to advertise the website through word of mouth. Indeed, when you book your hotel you just have to click a button and your deals appears on your Facebook page. TravelPony is riding on the social media wave to get free marketing and international recognition. How many friends will see your post and say “It’s the best price I’ve never seen!”? 

The site is creating a real relation of trust with the customers. Indeed, if you find a deal, they ask if you’d like to tell your friends via Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn. If you don’t want to share, they allow you to check a box reading “I promise to tell my friends about this amazing deal.” Indeed, it’s in your interest: more your share, more you’ll get low prices. 

For the moment hotels available on the website are from 24 cities: 22 US cities, London, and Paris. They are from mid-range to luxury hotels, and the customer can book 6 months in advance at a maximum. However it is not only allowing last minut reservations and the client will get the best rates every day. 

Conclusion

This social way of booking reaches already 20 markets with over 2,000 top hotel partners, making it one of the best sites to get a deal and book a hotel room… And it’s a beginning. 

 

We choose to talk about this website because it is an innovative way to find deals on the internet, which will compete with kayak.com, booking.com and others online booking portals. This engine has been tested by other travel-bloggers and they all agree to say that it a quick, easy to use website, based on a fair relationship between the actors. 

Sources: 

http://www.travelpony.com/pages/about

http://www.adventurouskate.com/travelpony-review-i-cant-believe-how-cheap-these-hotels-are/

http://www.so-many-places.com/2013/12/book-hotels-travelpony/

How new technology revolutionizes the MICE industry 2: BlackBerry to overcome the deficit?

A short follow- up to our last month´s blog about the usefulness of the iPad for the event industry...

Despite the crisis RIM (BlackBerry manufacturer) has been facing in the last year it came up with a new tablet computer- the BlackBerry PlayBook. It is the company´s equivalent to the iPad but offers some additional features which could make it a serious competitor for the iPad in the Event industry.

You can not only create and edit presentations on your PlayBook but you can also plug it in to a monitor and remote control it from your Blackberry phone. This allows you to add slides to the presentation directly from your phone. In the same way you can change the colour and the theme of the presentation… and everything within only a few minutes, but find out yourself:

BlackBerry also developed an innovative concept to share documents in meetings. The PlayBook is able to sense where other PlayBooks are in the room and makes it possible to share files between different PlayBooks. With the PlayBook paper hand-outs will be a thing of the past. Check it out:

Another feature that could be very useful to event planners is the PlayBook calendar. It gives users a very clear overview of their day. It shows them when they have a meeting and with whom. As event planners are usually quite busy people who meet a lot of other people they tend to forget what they once knew about these people. Therefore the BlackBerry PlayBook does not only show the contact details of the person you are meeting with but also links you to the person´s latest updates on twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook. Check it out:

As others have already blogged about the opportunities coming up with the Near Field communication (NFC) we only want to say that BlackBerry has already integrated several functions into their devices. You can for example hold your phone to a touch point or advert and it will link you directly to a website or a voucher for a free coffee. It could be used for conventions and exhibitions for example. RIM (Blackberry) is developing it further every day so it is worth keeping up with the news.

And here comes the best thing about it:

It is a lot cheaper than the iPhone. In our opinion iPads are more a fashion device that everyone wants and it probably offers more applications (including games etc.) than the Playbook, but for a business person or a company a Playbook can make more sense concerning both price and functionality. What is your opinion on that?

We think it´s worth signing up for a YouTube account and keeping an eye on the further development…

Source: http://uk.blackberry.com/playbook-tablet/features-work.jsp

http://tydwy.wordpress.com/2012/03/02/playbook-concepts-presentations-on-the-go/

http://tydwy.wordpress.com/2012/03/02/playbook-concepts-document-sharing-in-meetings/

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g7jQmhzEsTk&feature=youtu.be

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RTb0niSSGDI&feature=youtu.be