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Archives for January 2010

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Orange introduces new mobile advertising service

Mobile network operator Orange has launched a new mobile advertising service that enables brands to engage and interact directly with targeted segments of Orange’s customer base.

Orange Shots aims to help companies to benefit from real time conversations with customers, offering a highly targeted audience base with no wastage and an opportunity to build an engaging and enduring relationship with customers.

Orange Shots will be commercially available from 1st February via Unanimis in the UK, powered by Blyk.

Orange Shots will initially be available to brands who want to interact with an audience of 100,000 customers from part of Orange’s Pay As You Go Monkey customer base, which offers free music and texts to customers when they top up. The Orange Shots service works across SMS and MMS, and encourages customers to message back and give views and opinions.

The network plans to make Orange Shots available to its entire mobile customer base over time, giving brands the opportunity to engage with a variety of specific demographic segments.

In addition to being able to receive tightly targeted offers, customers are motivated to sign up for the service via a variety of benefits such as “exclusive news and gossip, amusing and entertaining content, film and games previews, and up-to-date sports information,” says Orange. Customers will have the opportunity to opt out at any stage and Orange customer data will not be shared externally with third parties.

Orange plans to make Orange Shots, powered by Blyk Media, available to its entire mobile customer base over time, giving brands the opportunity to engage with a variety of specific demographic segments.

“Orange Shots will transform mobile advertising as we know it. It’s a win-win for brands, as well as our customers, with advertisers continually seeking new and innovative ways to engage with consumers, and our customers getting rewarded with access to exclusive, interactive content and offers, knowing that they’re tailored specifically to them and their interests,” said VP of Wholesale, business development and partnerships, Orange UK, Marc Overton.

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“Non-transparent pricing benefits no one”

Revpar Guru responds to a recent Cornell University study on rate transparency and guest perception

A Cornell University study published this month examined how hotel guests perceive fairness in terms of differential room pricing.  

The report concluded that the best way to combat perceived unfairness in pricing - without sacrificing revenue management strategy - is to increase the transparency of pricing methodology.  Guests, the study infers, are more comfortable with the price they pay for their room if they understand why they pay that price, and under which conditions they might have encountered a different price.

We do agree with the premise that hotels - and revenue managers in particular - should make a concerted effort to disclose the demand-based, time-sensitive nature of room pricing along with the various “rate fences” a hotel might choose to set.  Hoteliers must also ensure that cancellation and change policies are clearly explained -- prior to booking -- to prevent guest upsets.  That said, at a time when sophisticated automated revenue management systems can make dozens of adjustments to rates across multiple online sales channels in the span of minutes, we also believe that total transparency of the pricing process is unrealistic.  But that doesn’t mean that hotels don’t need to make an effort to increase the transparency of their rates and pricing strategies.  Pricing transparency is the only way to maintain consumer trust and encourage repeat business.

For revenue management to be most effective, it must have the latitude to make real-time, demand based rate adjustments.  Though the Cornell study certainly doesn’t advocate a return to static pricing schemes, it implies that the best path to increasing the perception of fairness among customers is to increase the level of familiarity with pricing practices.  In our mind, this is not necessarily achieved (or achievable) through a wholesale disclosure of complex pricing procedures associated with automated revenue management systems.

In today’s market, non-transparent pricing benefits no one.  Cornell’s study confirms that consumers resent them, and hotels gain little from keeping guests in the dark about their pricing strategies.  We agree with the report’s prescriptive remedies of proactively listing the conditions by which a consumer might obtain a better rate.  We further believe that the appropriate avenue for this is the hotel website.  

The Cornell study touches on a couple of points that hint at improvement in perceptions of hotel pricing strategy:

• First, there is a comparison made early in the study between airline pricing and hotel pricing which indicates that consumers perceive differential pricing in both industries as equally fair – a statement which we don’t agree with.  In our experience, especially since the institution of baggage fees and other ancillary charges into the cost of an airline ticket, consumers are becoming more distrustful of airlines’ pricing methods. In our opinion, this type of distrust could one day pervade the hotel industry if it does not put more effort into increasing the transparency of their pricing strategies.  This communication will only help the industry continue to rebound after last year’s weak market, by making consumers feel safe to travel again – not work against it.  

• Second, the study indicates that younger travelers are more comfortable with differential pricing than their older counterparts.  This bodes well for the future of revenue management within the hotel industry. 

Consumers may be becoming more accepting of differential pricing, but it remains the task of hoteliers and revenue managers to encourage this comfort level while maintaining an effective, demand-based pricing strategy.  This month’s Cornell study indicates that these two concepts are far from mutually exclusive, and we couldn’t agree more.

By Bruno Perez & Jean Francois Mourier,
Revpar Guru

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Webjet delivers powerful first half result

Online travel company Webjet says it has completely defied the comprehensively reported media downturn in the travel industry to deliver a powerful first half year with net profit before tax up 45 percent and total transaction values up 37 percent thus indicating an increasing economy of scale.

The half year ended 31 December 2009 has provided a consolidated profit of A$5.197M (after providing for income tax) compared to a profit (after income tax) for 2008 of $3.701M, an increase of 40.42 percent. The profit before tax for the half year increased from $5.003M to $7.27M, an increase of 45.31 percent. Gross transaction values increased for the half year to 31 December 2009 to $248.0M compared to $181.6M the previous year, an increase of 36.56 percent.

In the six months to December 2008, Webjet increased net profit after tax by 29%. This further increase of 40% on that same period indicates a strengthening momentum against a macro-economic and travel industry environment which remains uncertain.

According to the company, the current macro indicators suggest that Australia may have escaped the worst of the global financial crisis and tentative evidence is emerging that:

• Unemployment levels are stabilising and perhaps decreasing.
• Air ticket prices both domestically and internationally are showing the first signs of some percentage increase. 
• However airline capacity was substantially reduced during the industry downturn with the result that airline load factors have in general increased and additional airline capacity that was announced prior to Christmas by Qantas and Jetstar in particular will be progressively added in from around March 2010. 
• Conversely interest rates are continuing to climb, albeit within a relatively small range and despite the reduction in first home owner grants, the housing market appears to be relatively strong and the Australian stock market has shown substantial recovery.

The company also added that its North American operation is on track for commencement from April onwards. 

Also, the full Webjet product range will be shortly released on an iPhone application.

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Jetstar selects Singapore as its Asia hub

Australia’s Jetstar has chosen Singapore as a key hub as part of its major expansion plans.

The budget carrier signed an agreement with Changi Airport Group to make Singapore its biggest operating base in Asia. Jetstar said the three-year deal will help reduce its operating costs and grow its traffic in the region.

With its new partnership with Changi Airport Group, Jetstar is looking to expand its routes in the region and grow new ones.

Apart from Changi, Jestar had also considered airports in Kuala Lumpur, Bangkok and Ho Chi Minh, said its chief executive officer Bruce Buchanan.

“Singapore is of high strategic importance to Jetstar and equally of great importance to the Qantas Group. This agreement provides further leverage to us now seeking the full benefits of a burgeoning hub operation in Singapore,” said Buchanan. “The clear operational advantages of Singapore as a hub and primary access point into Asia are clear and can now be further built upon.”

Jetstar is keen to expand its long-haul routes out of Singapore. The carrier is still waiting for the arrival of 15 Boeing 787 Dreamliner aircraft, which are due in 2013. In addition, it has 65 A320 aircraft on order to arrive at different times over the next five to six years and has options for another 40 new aircraft by 2015.

Qantas owns Jetstar and also has a 49 percent stake in Singapore’s Jetstar Asia.

The decision to make Singapore its hub follows Jetstar’s agreement this month to a strategic alliance with the Malaysian low-cost airline AirAsia aimed at slashing procurement costs.

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AirAsia X targets further 18 percent reduction in non-fuel operating cost

EyeforTravel Exclusive: Interview with AirAsia X’s CEO Azran Osman-Rani

Over the years, there have been intense debates about whether the short-haul low cost concept can be extended into long-haul operations. 

For AirAsia X, an airline that embraced the low-cost long-haul concept in 2007, it continues to get accolades for its performance. In fact, last year in November, it was reported that AirAsia X was profitable. Also, the Centre for Asia Pacific Aviation (CAPA) had indicated that the outlook for AirAsia X remains strong – the “fourth quarter (is) looking positive with strong loads and high yields”.

At the time of launch, it was shared that AirAsia X’s network focus will cover destinations which are more than four hours in flight duration from Kuala Lumpur, offering daily point-to-point frequencies. As of today, its growing network includes services to Australia, China, Taipei, the United Arab Emirates and the United Kingdom. 

“People want to travel for a wide variety of reasons and our affordable fares allow them to travel with good value-for-money,” airline’s CEO Azran Osman-Rani told EyeforTravel’s Ritesh Gupta. 

Osman-Rani, who is scheduled to speak at the Travel Distribution Summit Asia 2010 (to be held in Singapore, April 28-29), spoke about the next big thing for travel in Asia and airline’s plans. Excerpts:

What according to you is the next big thing for travel in Asia? 

Azran Osman-Rani: Multi-destination holidays. Instead of just visiting one place and flying back, we’re now seeing a clear trend of travellers taking advantage of the exploding new air connectivity across Asia and low fares to plan two or more destinations as part of the holiday – enriching the overall holiday experience by combining the best of different regions.

For example, a European visitor flying from London into Kuala Lumpur can experience great shopping and eating in KL, venture off to Siem Reap to see the amazing Angkor Wat in Cambodia, and then make their way to Bangkok and Phuket for the tropical island experience. Alternatively, an Asian tourist flying into Australia can hop from the cosmopolitan city of Melbourne and its vineyards, to the family theme parks in Gold Coast, and then on to Cairns and the once-in-a-lifetime Great Barrier Reef experience.

In October last year, AirAsia X stated that while 2Q2009 was the most difficult period yet for the low-cost long-haul carrier, with high pressure on yields and load factors, encouragingly, volumes have picked up again in the third quarter of 2009. Can you reflect upon the demand for such service at this juncture?

Azran Osman-Rani: There’s a longer lead time for long-haul travel. 2Q2009 was the toughest because we were still in the depths of the economic recession and we had the H1N1 scare. However, things started to pick up in Q3 and kept strengthening in Q4. We managed to end the year with the same number of passengers and load factor that we set out for ourselves, with Q4 making up for the Q2 shortfall. International travel is indispensable. People want to travel for a wide variety of reasons, and our affordable fares allow them to travel with good value-for-money.

Can you elaborate on expansion plans, route-wise and aircraft-wise, for AirAsia X? What factors are driving these expansion plans?

Azran Osman-Rani: Ultimately, you have to have scale in the airline business. We’re already the world’s lowest unit cost operator, but we want to keep driving this down further. 

With our planned four new aircraft entering into service in 2010, we expect to get a further 18 percent reduction in non-fuel operating cost. We also want to expand our footprint further in our Asia Pacific network, with a focus on routes that will provide feed into other routes. India will be a big part of AirAsia and AirAsia X’s expansion plans for 2010 – we want to replicate our unrivalled network in China there, where we serve not just the main cities, but secondary cities not served by other airlines. 

Late last year, AirAsia Group indicated that the group is well placed to take advantage of the prevalent situation especially considering that airports are offering attractive deals in return for growth and also other airlines are not introducing new routes, thus making it easier for AirAsia to expand. How do you assess the situation from AirAsia X’s perspective?

Azran Osman-Rani: Same with us. More important than just a good financial deal, is finding airports that act as partners in jointly developing the new markets that we create, through a lot of co-marketing, joint problem solving, and industry engagement. We value active partners who work side-by-side with us.

AirAsia Group indicated that it is on course to achieve the group’s target of carrying 25 million guests for the full year 2009. How do you assess AirAsia X’s performance last year? 

Azran Osman-Rani: We survived 2009 in a much sounder position than most legacy carriers. We met our passenger targets and we even operated profitably for a relatively small airline.

Recently, AirAsia and Jetstar, came up with a non-equity partnership. Can you elaborate on what impact is it going to have on long-haul travel? How can we expect AirAsia X to benefit from this?

Azran Osman-Rani:  Too early to provide details. The primary focus on this alliance is on narrow-body aircraft purchases and parts/services pooling. Opportunities in long-haul would follow later.

What are your targets for this year? What’s on your agenda?

Azran Osman-Rani: Growth! More planes, More destinations, More profits. We’re also looking forward to delighting our guests with yet another innovation – Premium lie-flat bed seats – the first of its kind for a low-cost carrier and not just any LCC, but the world’s lowest unit cost carrier.

Azran Osman-Rani is scheduled to speak along with John Koldowski - Director, Strategic Intelligence Centre, PATA, Rob Bailey - President & CEO, Abacus International and William Bao Bean – Senior Analyst, Softbank Venture Capital in the inaugural session of Travel Distribution Summit Asia 2010 (to be held in Singapore, April 28-29).In all, there will be more than 50 expert speakers during the two-day event. 

For more information, click here: Travel Distribution Summit Asia 2010 (to be held in Singapore, April 28-29)

Or contact:

Marco Saio
Global Events Organiser
7-9 Fashion Street
London, E1 6PX
Direct Line: (+44) 020 7375 7219

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New application to push real-time travel details automatically to your iPhone

Pageonce has released the TripTracker and TripTracker Pro apps for iPhone and iPod touch.

TripTracker puts all essential travel documents in one place and assists users through every stage of their journey. The application imports travel itineraries for hands-off travel management.

To get started, travellers download the app and enter their account information for airlines and hotels once. From then on, anytime a user travels, his itineraries and travel details will automatically appear on his iPhone or iPod touch. 

“TripTracker was designed specifically to be your mobile travel agent, saving traveller’s time on organising the annoying details. What makes TripTracker unique is that it’s the only app on the Appstore that automatically pushes real-time travel details to your iPhone, removing the inconvenience of adding it manually or sending e-mail commands to a third party provider,” said Guy Goldstein, CEO of Pageonce.

TripTracker features 10 essential travel tools. Users can track:

• Live flights worldwide
• Gate numbers, delays and cancellations
• Hotel confirmation numbers, check in/out dates, phone numbers and maps to hotel
• Push alerts – iPhone buzzes for itinerary updates, even when not open 
• Live flights maps with weather radars
• Future flight and hotel itineraries
• Automatic imports of flights and hotels – no retyping of itinerary info.
• One click full itineraries at a glance
• Weather reports in departing and destination locations 
• Notification when frequent travel rewards are granted

Car rentals will be added soon, according to the company.

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Aer Lingus shares its renewed focus

Aer Lingus has shared that its focus now is on preserving cash and to forge closer links with bigger, full-service airlines while ditching its focus on being a low-cost carrier.

In an interview with The Irish Times, Aer Lingus’ chief executive Christoph Mueller set out his stall to make Aer Lingus “Ireland’s civilised airline”. He also mentioned that the airline was not in danger of running out of cash and could return to profitability in the first quarter of 2011 following agreement with staff groups on a restructuring deal to save €97 million a year. Aer Lingus said it made a “small profit” in the second half of 2009 but this was outweighed by the €94 million loss in the first six months of the year.

The airline plans to target markets in Asia for growth by feeding Irish travellers into one of Europe’s three major hubs: Heathrow, Frankfurt and Paris. According to ft.com, while Aer Lingus hopes to lure business travellers with faster check-in times, pre-paid meals and central airports, rather than the secondary ones for which Ryanair is known, it will not focus on the quality lounges, free food and drinks associated with full-service airlines.

Alliance 

Meanwhile, a report by Bloomberg indicated that Aer Lingus Group Plc aims to join a global airline alliance to add destinations and attract more passengers after dropping its “no-frills” business model. Dublin-based Aer Lingus will begin offering paid-for extras including lounge access, newspapers and croissants in 2011 and views membership of a global grouping as a logical next step, Mueller said after an investor meeting in London.

Aer Lingus pulled out of the Oneworld alliance, which includes British Airways Plc, in 2006, saying the revenue benefits weren’t sufficient.

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“Hoteliers should strive to create the best, deepest, most SEO-friendly and unique content”

By Max Starkov

Duplicate Web content is when two web pages with different URLs contain “largely identical content.” These two pages may reside on the same website (internal duplication) or on two different sites with two completely different core URLs (external duplication).

Here is Google’s definition: “Duplicate content generally refers to substantive blocks of content within or across domains that either completely match other content or are appreciably similar.”

What are the reasons for duplicate Web content?

In some cases duplicate content is a result of hoteliers’ “innocent ignorance”. Example: a hotel signs up with an online travel agency (OTA) and completes the OTA questionnaire, providing the OTA with hotel descriptions which are an identical copy of the content descriptions from the hotel own website.  When the OTA publishes these descriptions on its own website without editing or altering them in any significant manner, then we have a clear case of duplicate content under two different core URLs (external duplication). 

An example of internal duplication is printer-only versions of web pages on the hotel website. 

In other cases content is deliberately duplicated across the Web in an attempt to manipulate search engine rankings or win more traffic. These deceptive practices are usually performed by shady SEO vendors or self-taught in-house “experts”. 

In all cases, in the eyes of the search engines such duplicate content practices, if served within the search engine results, result in a poor user experience.

Duplicate Content and the Search Engines
Generally speaking, search engines hate duplicate content. Why? The search engines are working very hard to index and show pages with distinct information. For them duplicate information is not beneficial to the search engine users and inhibits the user experience. Duplicate content is “spam.” This is the reason why when two or more Web pages are identified as "too similar", one or more of those Web pages usually disappear from the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs). Google’s own guidelines to webmasters are very clear: “Don’t create multiple pages, subdomains, or domains with substantially duplicate content.”

The search engines perform duplicate content filtering throughout the three main parts of the search engine process: spidering or crawling, indexing, and query processing. In this way

some duplicate content is filtered out before Web pages are even added to the search engine index, some during the process of cataloguing new content (indexing), and later, when responding to user searches and serving the SERPs. The end result is that typically duplicate content is not displayed in the search results.  

What do the search engines do when they discover duplicate content?

Internal Duplication:

In the case of a simple internal duplication e.g. if your site has a "regular" and "printer" version of each page, and neither of these is blocked with a “noindex meta tag”, the search engines will choose one of them to list. If your site contains multiple pages with largely identical content (e.g. large e-commerce sites or poorly structured hotel brand or OTA websites), there are a number of ways you can indicate your preferred page and its URL to Google and the other search engines. This process of identifying the preferred URL is called "canonicalization" and may involve the use of a 301 re-direct or noindex meta tag.

External Duplication:

As mentioned above, a typical example is a hotel providing hotel descriptions to an OTA that are identical to the ones from the hotel’s own site. When the search engines discover this duplicate content about the hotel on both sites, which one prevails? Typically a site that is better known, has a larger user audience, and a better link popularity (backlink structure in Google-speak), is likely to trump any other website. In other words, the search engines will include the OTA pages about the hotel in the search results and ignore the hotel’s own website. 

Deliberate Content Duplication:

In cases of content duplication in which the search engines perceive that duplicate content may be shown with intent to manipulate search rankings and deceive users, the search engines make “appropriate adjustments in the indexing and ranking of the sites involved”. As a result, the ranking of the site may suffer, or the site might be removed entirely from the search engine index, in which case it will no longer appear in search results.

Hotel Websites and Duplicate Content 

Providing content about the hotel to other sites is inevitable on the Web. This is not a new phenomenon. All hotels provide hotel and room descriptions to various third-party sites, branding and distribution partners, etc:

• Major hotel brands, soft brands and hotel rep companies
• OTAs, GDSs, booking engine vendors, etc.
• Hotel listings on CVB and Chamber of Commerce sites, hotel directories, destination portals, etc.

In addition to distributing the hotel inventory to a wider audience, some of these content listings provide added benefits to the hotel’s own website. Hotel listings on directories, destination sites, CVB sites, etc which feature a URL link to your own hotel’s website directly affect how your hotel is ranked on the search engines. Search engines love such incoming links to your site (so-called strategic linking; Google calls them backlinks) as each such link is considered a vote of confidence in your website’s content.

In other words, hoteliers cannot avoid sharing content descriptions about their hotel with other sites. But hoteliers have to be very smart about it and avoid providing duplicate content to any external distribution or marketing partner site. Unfortunately, this has been a serious problem in the industry for many years: hoteliers provide the third-party sites with exactly the same content descriptions found on their websites. Why? It is much easier to “copy and paste” than write “significantly different” hotel and room descriptions.

The inevitable result of the existing practices is that many of these third-party sites like the OTAs know SEO (search engine optimisation) techniques far better than the hotels do, and the result is that the OTA listings end up higher in the search engine rankings than the property’s own content.

Unique Content to the Rescue

So what should hoteliers do to avoid their own sites being excluded from the search engine results or not indexed at all by the search engines, or being ranked lower than third-party sites?

To begin with, avoid duplicate content at all cost. Make sure that all content descriptions about the hotel are “significantly different” across the Web:

• Franchised Hotels: on the brand website vs. the hotel’s own vanity site
• Independent Hotels: on the hotel’s own site vs. the management company’s website vs. the hotel rep company’s site
• All Hotels: the hotel own site vs. hotel’s descriptions on the OTA sites.

Understand that the real threat is not in providing content in the form of hotel listings on a CVB site, or in the form of re-seller listings on Expedia.com, but to use the same content on your own website. 

By providing unique hotel and hotel product descriptions on the hotel’s own website, your site will have a clear advantage in the eyes of Internet users and search engines alike, compared to all other sites that provide duplicate content descriptions about your hotel. Therefore, creating the best, deepest, most unique and relevant content (textual and visual) about your hotel on your own website, naturally optimised for the search engines (SEO) as per best practices, should become a top priority for any hotel in 2010.

Case Studies:

A typical Marriott Hotel:

• Expedia has 4-6 pages of content for each Marriott hotel on its website.
• Marriott.com has in average 30-50 pages of content for each Marriott hotel with good SEO
• The result? Property content pages from Marriott.com are usually ranked better on Google and the other search engines than Expedia’s content pages on the same properties.

Mandarin Oriental:

• Expedia has 4-6 pages of content for each Mandarin Oriental hotel on its website.
• MandarinOriental.com has in average 100-150 pages of content for each Mandarin Oriental hotel with good SEO
• The result? Similar to the Marriott.com case, property content pages from MandarinOriental.com are usually ranked better on Google and the other search engines than Expedia’s content pages on the same properties.

In other words, the content on your own website has to be able to “outshine” any other description of your hotel product and services on any other website. If the CVB site or a hotel directory or an OTA site has a single page of content/description of your property, your own website should have at least 25 pages of deep, unique, relevant and SEO-friendly content about the property.

Conclusion

Sharing textual and visual content about your hotel with third-party distribution and marketing sites is inevitable. In the same time hoteliers should avoid at all costs having content from their own website duplicated on other sites to avoid the hotel site from being marginalized in the search engine results or de-listed by the search engines altogether. 

Hoteliers should strive to create the best, deepest, most SEO-friendly and unique content (textual and visual) about your hotel on your own website, complimented with the following action steps in 2010 aiming to position your hotel website as the most sought-after source of information about your hotel:

• Re-design the hotel website as per industry’s best practices
• Create fresh and deep textual and visual content on the sites (the best content about your hotel should be on your website)
• Implement robust Web 2.0 functionality on the hotel website:

o    Blogs

o    Customer reviews/comment card on the site
o    Interactive calendars about local events/happenings, special offers and packages
o    Photo and experience sharing
o    Interactive contests and sweepstakes
o    Rich media and videos

• Implement solid SEO on the website
• Implement robust strategic linking from relevant, preferably non-paid sites and directories
• Implement social marketing initiatives (Twitter profile, fan pages on Facebook, etc), and maintain regular engaging postings and new content creation – Google now delivers real-time results from these social networks to its search result pages
• Implement comprehensive Internet marketing: email marketing, search marketing, banner advertising and sponsorships, mobile marketing, etc), each piece featuring unique content about the property
• Implement an online PR campaign and property news dissemination campaign, featuring unique content about the property
• Implement an enterprise level website analytics and campaign tracking (e.g. Omniture SiteCatalyst and Omniture SearchCenter) to measure the results and ROI from your efforts.
• Partner with hotel Internet marketing experts who understand the intricacies of how search engines work and provide in-house copywriting and SEO expertise as per industry’s best practices, as well as guide your direct online channel strategy, website re-design and optimization, search and email marketing, social marketing and mobile Web  initiatives. 

About the Author and HeBS:
Max Starkov is Chief eBusiness Strategist at Hospitality eBusiness Strategies (HeBS).

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Celebrity Cruises launches Twitter giveaway for access to preview of new ship

Celebrity Cruises is launching a Twitter-based campaign to allow access to an exclusive preview of the new ship, Celebrity Eclipse.

Any UK and Ireland twitter user can enter the competition simply by stating why they want the chance to sail with the new ship on its first ever trip - the 26-mile journey from the Papenberg ship yard in Germany along the River Ems to Eemshaven in The Netherlands. 

Entrants have just 140 characters, the normal twitter posting limit, to tell the @CelebrityUK twitter profile about, why they should be given the chance to be one of the very first to see the new Celebrity Eclipse and what it would mean to them.

Jo Briody, head of marketing, Celebrity Cruises, said, “We’re looking for succinct creativity, recognition of the innovations onboard the ship, and to engage with the biggest fans of Celebrity Cruises. It really is the chance to tweet your way to the trip of a lifetime.”

The River Ems trip - termed a conveyance by Celebrity Cruises - takes place in mid-March 2010, over a month before the new ship arrives in the UK for the first time for its inaugural celebrations and naming ceremony in Southampton.

The competition launches on 25th January and closes on 14th February.

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Aldi Travel suspends bookings, reviews its service

Aldi Travel, launched in the UK in January last year, has stopped taking bookings.

According to reports, the firm, a subsidiary of the German supermarket group, said it had carried out the move to enable it to review the deals that it offered.

The company on its site, http://www.alditravel.co.uk, stated: “Aldi and our travel partners are currently reviewing the travel service to offer customers even better value for money.”

Customers who had already booked holidays through the company would be unaffected.

The company didn’t share when it would open again for new bookings.

“Aldi Travel proved popular with customers and sales have performed well throughout 2009,” the spokesman said, according to a report filed by The Independent. “However, the UK travel market is becoming increasingly competitive and we are working in consultation with existing partners to make sure we can continue to offer market-leading deals.”

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