HSMAI Curacao

Source: allbusiness.com
By Keith Rosen

 I’m blessed; and on many levels. One being, I am truly in love with what I do as an executive sales coach. If I could have any job in the word (other than being a rock star but I’m digressing to the dreams of a child) I would still excitedly and passionately choose being an executive sales coach and consultant. One of the things I love most about what I do is the creative aspect of my work. That is, the creativity that comes into play when working with clients.

Whether we are creating new processes, powerful questions to better qualify and enroll your prospects, new templates, new ways of doing things, collaborating on ideas, co-creating new solutions and innovations to develop and maintain their competitive edge, the creativity in the coaching process is a non-negotiable essential component that drives the value each client receives during every coaching session.

The same holds true when selling. After all, selling is the art of creating new possibilities. The creation of new possibilities; possibilities and solutions that weren’t there before or ones that your clients couldn’t see. That’s what it’s all about, especially when you are working with your clients and prospects. (more…)

Source: Hotelmarketing.com

IT isn’t easy to astonish Kathleen Ameche, who is usually on the road five days a week as a speaker, and who literally wrote the book on women and business travel.

But the result of a recent Web seminar on travel safety that she helped organize among 500 female business travelers did just that.

“Ninety-eight percent of them said they had their personal safety compromised on a business trip within the last 45 days,” said Ms. Ameche, the author of “The Woman Road Warrior: A Woman’s Guide to Business Travel” (Agate, 2005). “Ninety-eight percent! That number is staggering. In 2007 we still have that issue?”

It has been noted, here and elsewhere, that the growing number of female business travelers has had significant effects on the travel experience. Women are a big part of the reason that a typical hotel room, whether midlevel or luxury, has better bedding, lighting, room service, closets, work spaces and overall design.

Unlike men, women tend to notice the details and share them with friends and colleagues. So hotels are going to be hearing more about safety. (more…)

Source: hotelmarketing.com

NEARLY every morning, over his second cup of coffee, Tom Brady, general manager at the Affinia Chicago, logs onto his computer and surfs over to TripAdvisor.com to see if there are any new postings about his hotel.

“It’s an obsession,” he said. If the review is positive he moves on. If it’s unfavorable — like the complaint posted in March from a guest who had received a $90 parking ticket because of a valet’s error — he’s on it immediately. In that case, he marched straight out to the valet to find out what had happened. After identifying the guest, he made sure that the company issued an apology and a reimbursement for the ticket.

“This is all over the world,” he said, describing his concern about any negative comment on TripAdvisor. “Everyone is looking at this. I’ve got to make sure it’s solved quickly, so God forbid someone else doesn’t have the same problem.” (more…)

Source: www.hsmai.org

LAS VEGAS — “Travelers get the control they want to buy exactly what they value,” according to Henry Harteveldt of Forrester Research, who delivered the keynote address at the Travel Industry Association’s TravelCom Res-Expo conference and trade show in

In the future, will your computer plan the perfect trip? 

By Rob Lovitt, Travel writer MSNBC contributor

Way back in the Dark Ages (circa 1999), the folks at HotBot ran a very clever ad campaign likening Internet search to a room full of befuddled old men. Regardless of the query at hand, they’d pop up with the most ridiculous results, including, in one memorable case, a bow-tied geezer with a whip who would beckon: “Enter my dungeon of delight.”

“Why is he here?” asks a cohort, to which another replies in exasperation, “He comes up for everything.”

If you’ve ever researched a vacation online, you probably know the feeling. From choosing a destination to finding good deals, the typical search can lead to some wildly inappropriate results. A few weeks ago, I started asking various analysts and entrepreneurs what the explosion of online travel resources means for the rest of us. Can airfares be predicted? Are user reviews trustworthy? And, perhaps most important, is there any way to take the ever-expanding trove of travel-related data and make it less of a catalog and more of a guide? (more…)