Solo travelers now account for over $28 billion in travel spending.

There are a lot more single Americans than you realize.  It’s time travel and hospitality marketers started catering to them.

Nearly 1 in 3 Americans are single, and over 50 million Americans have never been married.

• 105 million adults in the U.S., nearly one-third of all Americans, are single.
• Almost 40% of the single population are divorced, and 60% have never been married.
• Marriage rates have declined from 72% in 1960 to just 52% in 2008.

Recently, Gary Leopold, CEO of ISM, one of the top travel and hospitality marketing firms in the U.S., explored the subject of solo travelers in a blog post for Media Post.

According to Gary, the statistics on singles travel spending are staggering.

• Singles account for $2.2 trillion in annual buying power.
• 1 in 4 Americans who travel domestically or abroad now do so alone.
• 25 million singles age 42 or older spent over $28 billion on travel in 2008.

Women are more likely than men to travel alone.

• According to Gary, women aged 42 or older are twice as likely as men to vacation alone.
• More than 80% of Match.com users listed travel as one of their interests.

A few travel and hospitality markers are taking advantage of this trend.

• Norwegian Cruise Line launched a ship, Epic, that has 128 “studio” suites and a private lounge designed for the single traveler.
• Some of the all-inclusive resorts like Breezes have packages just for singles.
• REI Adventures partners with Match.com to offer adventure travel trips to singles.

I did a Google search on the keywords “singles travel” and found dozens of  singles travel specialists.

They’re focused on a wide variety of singles travel niches, including:

• Cruises
• Adventure travel
• Over 40s travelers
• Luxury travel
• Jewish Singles
• Singles Travel Clubs

It’s harder to find restaurant chains and other hospitality brands that cater to singles.

That surprises me, since the mothers of newly graduated 20 somethings and recently divorced adult children will tell you they eat out more than their married brothers and sisters.

What you can do to attract singles to your travel or hospitality brand

• You can start by developing packages and promotions just for singles.
• If you’re a travel brand, experiment with eliminating your use of single supplements.
• When marketing to singles, stop pricing on a per person/double occupancy basis.
• If you’re a restaurant, consider a singles’ menu and options for people who don’t cook at home.

What are you doing to reach the single traveler or diner?

Have you tried special packages or offers? What’s worked? What hasn’t? Tell us about it.

If you’re a travel marketer, it’s important to understand how these sites are changing the travel game, and how you can use them to attract new guests and gather competitive intelligence.

Here are five fast-growing concepts leading travel experts say are leading us into the future.

1. HotelTonight is an iPhone and Android app that delivers day of booking hotel discounts.

The app gives consumers the ability to book a hotel the same day they need it, at a steeply discounted rate.

The site partners with hotels with too much inventory to fill open rooms with last-minute guests, and save them up to 70% off the hotel price.

Implication for travel marketers: If you’re a hotelier, consider partnering with HotelTonight to sell out your remaining day-of inventory.

2. Backbid allows travelers with a flexible hotel reservation to solicit other hoteliers for better deals.

They post their reservation on the site and wait to see if other hotels will offer them a lower rate or incentives to move a booking over to the second hotel.

Implication for travel marketers: This site gives you an opportunity to see the rates your competitors are offering in real-time, and decide if you want to beat them.

3. Room 77 is built on the philosophy that you should be able to choose a room in a hotel like a seat on an airplane.

Room 77 offers you the chance to see what rooms look like in a hotel and instructs visitors on how to book that exact room. So far, they have well over half a million room sin their database.

Implication for travel marketers: This is one more site to showcase your property and market your inventory to savvy travelers. 

4. Hipmunk is a new flight metasearch site that takes travel planning to the granular level.

In their own words, the site”takes the agony out of travel planning” by giving you more information on your flight.

For instance, if you like to sleep on the airplane, you can find out which ones will be “dark flights.” It also displays in as simple a format as you can get, the flights that are cheapest, quickest, and have the shortest stopovers.

Implications for travel marketers: This is just one more example of how much detail travelers now want in their searches. Look for ways to provide more detailed searches on your site.

5. Gogobot  is built on the belief that people want travel advice from people they trust.

So it offers travelers tips and advice from a member’s network of family, friends and business colleagues.

Implications for travel marketers:  The Gogobot phenomenon proves that people are using social media to make more and more of their travel decisions.

Make sure you’re monitoring social sites like this and responding to both positive and negative comments.

Thanks to EyeforTravel for identifying these sites for their North American Innovation Award. By the way, HotelTonight won, and Hipmunk was the runner up!

Tourism destinations can use twitter to drive traffic to their websites.

These 15 twitter tips are designed to help tourism destinations develop a more effective twitter strategy. And ultimately to drive traffic to your website.

A Couple of Chicks, a savvy Canadian e-marketing agency whose mission is to take the fear out of web marketing, recently posted some practical twitter tips for tourism destinations.

1. Use Twitter to increase site visits. Google indexes twitter feeds and drives traffic to your website!

2. Strategize. Plan ahead with an editorial schedule to tie in with planned events, promotions, etc.

3. Be consistent with profile information i.e. using brand “http://www.twitter.com/acoupleofchicks” or “http://twitter.com/HfxNovaScotia” as name, URL, descriptor.

4. Use your ‘brand’ as graphic background; see ex: http://twitter.com/BayOfFundy.

5. Use the 3&3 rule: Three tweets and three re-tweets per day.

6. Tweet smart: Tweet at different times throughout the day; use ‘pending tweets’ functionality to schedule tweets outside of your work day but in time zones relevant to potential target audiences.

7. Use auto-welcomes i.e. “Thank you for following Tourism Fredericton – your source for things to do in Fredericton, the Capital of New Brunswick. Want to find out what’s happening? Check out our other Twitter feeds….”

8. Tweet using your targeted keywords.

9. Use pics and website URL’s (remember to use URL shorteners like tinyurl.com).

10. Proper Twitter etiquette is to follow those who follow you, but be cautious of “cleaning” your list of who you follow regularly.

11. Follow your competitors and their followers.

12. Engage with your audience: Differentiate yourselves from broadcasters and be rich content providers.

13. Link to your Twitter feeds (& show them on your site) from all that you do online & offline; see: http://www.travelportland.com/visitors/twitter.html andhttp://www.halifaxsociable.com

14. Follow other DMO’s or destinations and don’t be afraid of some back and forth conversation.

15. Follow partners in your communities: Reach out and engage with hotels, attractions etc… that are already on twitter.

Those are the do’s of destination tourism tweeting.  Read about the don’ts in their original post. Thanks to a Couple of Chicks!

If guests like you, ask them to share that love with other travelers.

How to ask for reviews, get more and better reviews, improve your rankings on review sites, and more

Last week I wrote about the importance of paying attention to your rankings in online review sites.

This week I’ve assembled some of my favorite content explaining the value of online reviews, how they work and how to improve yours. Here goes…

1. Why hotels should encourage guests to leave more online reviews

Anil Aggarwal, CEO, Milestone Internet Marketing explains the importance of online reviews to a hotel property’s success, and how to use online reviews to benchmark how you’re doing versus competitors.

2. Five Basic Guidelines for managing your hotel’s online reputation

This post in Hotelier is one of the most succinct overviews of the subject of online reviews, and offers some good suggestions for developing a systematic approach to responding to online reviews.

3. How to respond to online reviews

Explains the dos and don’ts of responding to online reviews, is comprehensive in its approach, and provides some unconventional ideas on how you can respond to negative reviews.

4. How to improve your hotel rankings in TripAdvisor

If you want a good explanation of how TripAdvisor’s Popularity Index works, and how you can affect your Popularity Index scores, read this post.

5. Increasing direct hotel bookings with social media

Joshua McKenzie from ReviewPro focuses on how online reviews can help your search rankings and increasing sales conversion rates by increasing consumer confidence.

In particular, Joshua offers a number of novel suggestions for using online reviews to keep people on your website longer.

6. How hotels can increase the volume of their reviews

If you’ve always wondered how and when to ask guests for reviews, read this ReviewPro report.

It also offers excellent case studies on how hotels have successfully increased their reviews using some of the recommended techniques.

What have you learned about online review sites, and how to manage your online reputation? Share your experience with us.

Before we show it to you, here are a few statistics on social media Simpliflying didn’t want you to miss:

• Travel marketers surveyed revealed that using social media reduced PR costs by at least 24%.
• Most companies in the travel industry are spending over 25% of their marketing budget on social media.
• 61% of companies surveyed will spend more money on social media efforts over the next quarter.
• Interestingly, social media is being seen as a viable way to drive customer loyalty given that almost82% of frequent flyers use Facebook and place the most importance on great customer service.
• Airlines are increasingly taking to performing customer service on social media as almost 86% of tweets to airlines are about customer service issues.
• There’s an increasing investment in social media platforms to engage customers. About 191 airlinesnow have Twitter accounts and tweets sent out by airlines increased by over 51% from March 2011 to July 2011.

Credits: Simplifyling and EyeforTravel

A German think tank recently interviewed over 500 marketing professionals about their knowledge of social media. Their findings explain why so many social media campaigns fail.

Many marketers of travel and tourism brands are asking the same question these days. ”Why is my social media campaign failing to meet my expectations?”

Brand Science Institute, a German think tank, recently interviewed 560 marketers representing 52 brands in 12 countries on their knowledge of social media.

Their answers point to 10 reasons why social media campaigns fail.

Based on my experience with travel and tourism brands here in the U.S., I suspect the results would be similar if the survey had been done here.

The top 10 reasons why social media campaigns fail:

1. 96% of the participants said they did not share their social media experience throughout the company.
2. 89% of the participants said their companies had no social media guidelines.
3. 87% had unrealistic expectations at the start of the campaign.
4. 84% tried to gauge the success of their social media campaigns against standard media measurements.
5. 81% of companies surveyed lacked a clear social media strategy.
6. 76% said their legal departments hindered their success.
7. 76% didn’t understand they had to moderate their social media projects.
8. 73% of projects had to demonstrate a financial return after 12 months.
9. 72% thought social media must be viral.
10. 68% didn’t understand the 90-9-1 principle.

Using social media to enhance your travel, tourism or attraction marketing is a great idea.

To ensure success on the back end, make sure you follow these 5 principles for defining expectations for yourself and others on the front end.

1. Establish clear guidelines before you ever start.
2. Establish appropriate measurement tools.
3. Work with senior management to educate and contain legal’s influence on your social product.
4. Set appropriate expectations early and often about ROI
5. Set up a system for sharing your social learning with your entire company

A great place to start any social media campaign is by asking yourself these questions.

If you’re the marketer of a travel or attraction brand, I also suggest you check out the highlights of the Brand Science Institute’s study on Slideshare.

What’s your experience with your social media successes and failures?  What did you learn from those experiences?

Reports of widespread use of fake reviews has hurt TripAdvisor's image.

Is Expedia’s latest move an attempt to combat the negative image of its former brand?

As complaints about fake reviews rise, Expedia tries to distance itself from the problem.

As travelers are doing more and more of their research online, hotels and resorts are relying on online reviews to entice new guests to stay at their properties.

In the process, critics have complained that an entire cottage industry of paid reviewers has sprung up, calling into question the validity of reviews found on booking sites like Orbitz, Travelocity and Hotels.com.

Review site TripAdvisor has received its share of those complaints.

The New York Times reported recently that the average review on TripAdvisor receives 3.7 stars, thanks no doubt in part to the rise in fake reviews on the site.

According to the New York Times, a team of researchers from Cornell University has developed an algorithm for identifying fake reviews.

As Expedia spins off TripAdvisor, it has also announced a new service to combat this growing problem.

They call it Expedia Verified Reviews.  And only guests who stay at the property will be able to submit a review, using a form emailed to the guest after he or she has completed their trip.

Expedia says consumers in Australia and New Zealand are already using the new feedback loop and it’s expected they will launch the program in more markets soon.

Although Expedia has spun off TripAdvisor, its users will still be able to click on the TripAdvisor logo and be directed to the corresponding hotel page on TripAdvisor.

Certainly, the concept of verified reviews is not new. But the announcement does seem timely.

The travel blog Tnooz found it interesting that Expedia would announce this new service shortly after it had spun off TripAdvisor, which is receiving a lot of complaints about the number of false reviews on its sites.

What do you think? Is Expedia trying to distance itself from TripAdvisor? What do you recommend the industry do to combat the problem of fake reviews? Share your thoughts with us.

According to Forrester, only 5% of Americans surveyed actually scanned a QR code.

QR codes are showing up in all sorts of travel ads, but are they effective?

According to a Forrester Research, only 14 million Americans scanned QR codes in a recent 3-month period.

Their research found that only 5% of Americans who own mobile phones actually used the 2-D codes in a recent 3-month period.

And the majority of those 14 million early adopters were young, affluent males.

Ad Age recently interviewed some experts in the field and reported three reasons that QR codes haven’t caught on:

1. People are confused about how to use them.
2. There’s little uniformity among the apps that read them.
3. Many of the codes link to useless information or to the company’s website.

Melissa Parish, Forrester’s senior analyst-social and mobile marketing had this to say:

QR codes are “another instance of shiny-object syndrome.  Something becomes trendy or sexy, and marketers feel they have to jump onboard to position themselves as innovative and make sure they don’t fall behind.”

If you want to increase the likelihood of prospective guests scanning your QR code consider the following:

• Make the content you link the QR code to rewarding and valuable.
• Make sure your QR code is readable.
• Don’t post codes on billboards in areas with no internet access or poor cell phone coverage like subways or in-flight magazines.

For examples of how not to use QR codes, check out QR Blaster’s list of the worst campaigns of the year using QR codes.

And while you’re’ at it, tell us how you’ve used QR codes effectively. Or if you’re really brave, tell us how they haven’t worked for you.

Virgin founder Sir Richard Branson is a master of media buzz.

Virgin Air founder Richard Branson recently shared his secrets on creating marketing buzz with a shoestring budget.

As you know, Sir Richard Branson is a serial entrepreneur, having founded or acquired 400 companies that bear the Virgin name.

He’s also helped breathe new life into the travel and tourism industry with his novel efforts at branding and promotions.

Business Day recently published a column by Branson that highlighted some of those novel marketing efforts:

• When they launched Virgin Atlantic, Branson created free publicity for the airlines by taking part in a series of extreme challenges like a speed boat crossing of the Atlantic and several around the world balloon trips.
• When Virgin Atlantic did buy advertising for the airlines, they made sure their ads were cheeky, topical and newsworthy. Which often got them press in addition to the media space they paid for.
• Expanding air service to other countries helped transport the Virgin brand name to countries which did not have their record stores.
• This created awareness and trust for the broader Virgin brand name and allowed Branson to export Virgin mobile phone service, financial services and health clubs to those countries.

• When they launched Virgin Air in emerging countries in Latin America and Asia,  there was virtually no recognition of the Virgin brand name.
• So Branson’s team used a three-pronged approach featuring adventure, film and social media. This strategy has attracted a younger, more media-savvy audience to the brand in those countries.

• Virgin’s space program, Virgin Galactic has given them lots of free worldwide media coverage. And reinforced that the brand is associated with groundbreaking adventure.
• Virgin’s film production company Virgin Produced has successfully introduced several popular movies, including Limitless and Immortals.
•  This has helped reinforce that the Virgin brand name is associated with cutting edge ideas and the best of pop culture.

• Above all, Virgin uses Twitter, Facebook, the company’s blogs and Google+ to build a stronger following for the Virgin brand, especially in markets where they do not have a physical presence.
• They do this by broadcasting Virgin news, opinions, image and causes to millions of people across the world.

How are you using your brand’s strategy, products, or your destination’s leading personality to bring media attention to your travel and tourism brand? Share your ideas with our readers.

Here’s a video of Virgin Galactic’s launch of their new “spaceport.”

6 in 10 travelers now rely on online reviews to help make their travel decisions.

More and more Americans are factoring in other travelers’ online reviews, and the more money they make the more they pay attention.

According to the third annual Access America Vacation Confidence Index recently released by Mondial Assistance USA,  6 in 10 travelers now factor in other traveler’s online reviews when deciding where to book a vacation.

With vacation spending expected to be up in the coming year, the Index predicts traffic at popular travel review and social media websites will be up as well.

So it’s important you stay on top of what people are saying about your travel and tourism brand online. And to work to influence what people write about you online. Here are the survey results:

8 in 10 people with HH incomes of $75K+ are influenced by online reviews

• Travelers under 35 are most likely to say that online travel reviews influence their travel plans (74 percent) while those 55 and over are least likely to be influenced by reviews (44 percent).
• Nearly 79 percent of respondents with a household income of $75,000 or more factor other travelers’ reviews into their own plans, while less than half of those with an income of under $25,000 do so (46 percent).

2 in 3 people trust other travelers’ reviews

• Nearly two thirds of respondents (63 percent) find other travelers’ reviews to be trustworthy, while 29 percent are less trusting.
  • Travelers under 35 are more likely than those who are older to trust the travel reviews they read (70 percent vs. 54 percent).
  • Over three quarters of respondents with a household income of $75,000 or more (77 percent) find travel reviews to be trustworthy compared to just half of those with an income of under $25,000 (50 percent).

1 in 5 share their travel experiences on social networks

• Among travelers who share reviews of their travel experiences online (24 percent of respondents), social networking sites such as Facebook are most popular.
• Nearly one in five (18 percent) say that they share their travel experiences on social networks, more than double the proportion of those who post on travel review sites (eight percent).

The younger and wealthier you are, the more you share on social sites

• Adults under 35 are more likely than those who are 35+ to share their travel experiences online (35 percent vs. 20 percent), particularly on social media sites (29 percent vs. six percent).
• More affluent adults are also more likely to share about their travels.  More than a third of those with a household income of $75,000 or more (36 percent) share their travel reviews online
• Compare that to 15 percent of those with a household income of less than $25,000, and they are twice as likely to use social networks to do so (24 percent vs. 12 percent).

Next week, I’ll post my top 10 favorite articles on how to improve the volume and quality of your online reviews.

In the meantime, tell us how these findings match up with your experience.