How are you helping relief efforts in Japan?

If you or your company, organization or group want to help the Japanese people recover from last week's earthquake and tsunami but aren't sure how to do so, InterAction provides options. An alliance of U.S.-based international nongovernmental aid organizations, InterAction has compiled a list of groups that are accepting private, corporate and group donations, along with some guidelines for the most appropriate ways to help. --Rick Stamberger, CEO of SmartBrief

The 7 deadly sins of blogging

Blogging can be a great way to build your business, but it's easy to shoot yourself in the foot if you don't do it right. Lou Dubois outlines some of the biggest mistakes new bloggers make, including one-way conversations, too much promotion and not enough personality.Source

Lehman hopes to auction off Ritz-Carlton Kapalua

Lehman Bros. plans to auction off the Ritz-Carlton Kapalua in Hawaii in May. The investment bank is owed $268 million on the property, after the Maui hotel struggled to repay loans taken out for a 2008 renovation. A new owner could resume efforts to sell condos or restructure the property's operating plan. Honolulu Star-Advertiser

Show me the money

Nontransactional sites are a necessary stop for many online travel shoppers, influencing not only what travelers buy, but also where they buy it. Travelers who visit planning and reviews, metasearch or other types of nontransactional websites have a higher conversion rate than other visitors – but the trend only applies for suppliers, according to PhoCusWright's Online Traffic and Conversion Report, Second Edition.

Leisure Hotel Rates Rise

Forward-looking data by Pegasus shows this segment displaying average monthly growth of more than +20% through July, with accompanying rate, length of stay and booking lead time increases.Get the full report at Pegasus (PDF 145 KB)

Video on hotel website

Adding a professionally produced video can quickly double the budget of a website project. So it’s not a trivial sum for a business of any size. But the difficult question to answer is the one about ROI, as in: what do I get back in relation to the small fortune I'm spending on this thing? Source

Hotels Can Use FourSquare

A question that should be on every hotelier’s agenda these days is: How do we use social media to reach our customers? Many companies already have a strong plan already in place for the big three: Facebook, Twitter and the corporate blog. On top of this, most savvy businesspeople are sufficiently acquainted with the ins and outs of social bookmarking sites. Source

Hotel loyalty programs

The Leading Hotels of the World has never offered a points-based loyalty system, but the organization that represents more than 430 luxury independent properties wanted to find unique ways to reward members of its Leaders Club.

“There’s a lot of point fatigue out there,” said Phil Logsdon, Director of Loyalty Marketing at Leading Hotels of the World. “These people all have high-end credit cards, they all travel. They have miles and points — some of them literally might have millions of them. They accrue them but don’t really value them because they don’t get anything out of them or there’s frustration trying to use them. They’re never available when they want to use them.” Source: