Mistery is over, the Blogger Hotel unveiled its identity

My name is Eurostars and my surname Madrid and Tower. I mean, my full name is Eurostars Madrid Tower ( “Hotel” for friends)

With these words written by the hotel yesterday the Blogger Hotel unveiled its identity. The Blog of a Hotel, has over 4.000 registered users and more that 500 comments per day, posted by its visitors.

The hotel is located on a privileged site on the main Castellana avenue, inside the Cuatro Torres (Four Towers) Business Area, one of the major areas of economic development in Madrid. This same business park will eventually house the future City of Madrid International Convention Centre.

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Some concerns about Blogging and the Conversation

Javier Garcia, started a Meme that consists in having Spanish travel bloggers posting about the reasons why TripAdvisor should join the Conversation and discuss the issues that worry Spanish hoteliers.

I have clear position about this as the hoteliers have already some resources to block third parties use of their brands.

The fact is that TripAdvisor is a company with a business model based on reviews (and advertising, of course). It does not mean it is an Enterprise 2.0 so I see no reason why TripAdvisor must participate in Blog comments or a conversation if they don’t want to.

There are few 2.0 Enterprises, realistically speaking, very few in the tourism sector, may be none. A real 2.0 Company would be a company that promotes and incentivizes R & D through employee participation and collaboration, internally and externally by creating a community with its customers. It would be a company that joins the conversation with its customers with the aim of seeking continuous improvement and customer satisfaction.

We should get back to the real world and not demand anyone else to join our conversation just because we are blogging about it. If we have something to ask, we should honestly knock TripAdvisor’s door and say…

Hello, I would like to ask you a few questions.

That is what I have done.

New Host, all over again

I messed up when moving the blog to a new Host. yes a faster one, a more reliable one, but a I made a big mistake.

Just backed-up the spanish Blog, and redirected the domain to the new host, so I can not recover the content of the english Blog.

It made think that I’m not posting in english at all since the last 3 months. That was the moment to consider if I will continue with this blog or not, and decided that I will.

I’m sorry about it folks.

Should T-list bloggers learn from the spanish ones?

I’ve seen a lack of communication between the travel bloggers during last weeks. In fact, after some tries of puting things together, it has been impossible to create a real community.

Guido at Happyhotelier, has posted an historical overview of how things evolved since Mathieu from Radaron launched the T-List. By the way, Darren from TravelRants, in a funny (or may be not so funny) would like to let the T-List die. Before the T-list, TiB - TravelinBlogs, was launched by me.

After the T-List, came the L-List launched by A Luxury Travel Blog,

Jens Thraenhart created the T-list group on Facebook. Chris Clarke created an open wiki, and Guillaume Thevenot, is scared about a war of bloggers.

As Happyhotelier pointed, it has been impossible to create a real social network nor a Community. In fact Communication between bloggers goes from one blog to another, but remains in the blogs. I understand that there are many blogs, and each blogger has his particular interests. It is understandable the fear that creating a community out of for own blog will decrease the social interest for your blog.

In my opinion International Travel Bloggers must understand that creating something bigger than their own blog, where they and they blog can be part of it, will denifitely benefit the Travel Industry even more than individual initiatives.

A few months ago I launched among other initiatives, something so simple as a discussion group called Turismo 2.0, so cheap as a Google Group, and asked some fellow bloggers like Alberto Galloso, Andreu Llabrés, Edu William, Isaac Vidal, Javier García Cuenca, Jimmy Pons, Joan Gou, Jorge Gobbi, José A.García, Juan J. Sobejano, Juan Llantada, Nando Llorella, Ruymán García to become part of the group, becoming administrators and promoting the discussion from their blogs as well as by posting content.

We understand that not everybody reads blogs, but everybody has email. Our surprise was that after three months, the number of members of the group is around 400 subscribers, and increasing by 10 new members everyday. Discussions are way more interesting than the ones that take placeat the blogs, as travel proffesionals create their own subjects and discussions. My experience is that since Turismo 2.0 was launched, my blog got even more traffic, but the real point is that we, all together have now more readers, and a greater reach of the content.

We all share data, studies, content, and enthusiasm.

I feel we are doing something great all together, and I’m very proud to be part of a community like this.