Looking back to 2009

Photo from Tripadvisor

Introduction
When I sat down to look back at 2008, I got so carried away that I decided to spread it over several posts, but that resulted in a period of 2008 not covered at all. This time I’ll try to be as concise as possible and cover the whole year in one post.

General observations
The depression – the photo a result from a Google search for photos “looking back to 2009” seems apt – hit all of us full blow and various countries had to bail out major banks at the price of huge budget deficits that will haunt future generations.

Luckily our own hotel, Haagsche Suites, didn’t suffer as badly as I feared at the start of 2009. I believe there was a tendency to favor the smaller properties due to the crises. Occupancy and turnover were up when compared with 2008. So throughout the year I remained a Happy Hotelier.

That I was busy with the hotel also shows as I produced slightly less posts: 190 Up to and including this one (215 posts in 2008 and 166 in 2007).

What kept me busy:

1. January: Preparations and delivery of a key note about blogging for the International Federation for IT and Travel & Tourism IFITT Amsterdam conference. I posted about the conference on January 27 and January 30.
2. February: The first weekend I spent in Paris to celebrate my 60ieth birthday with my family. I have much more to tell about it than my two posts Retro Mobile and The Rediscovery of a Panhard Levassor X73.Twitter really took off in the Travel Bloggers world and brought them closer together. I mention:
   • Travel by Twitter or Twitter Trips.
   • The Twitchhiker experiment just before the start and at the start.
   • Travel Blogger Hopping was another way of doing the same: sourcing he Travel Bloggers and/or Travel Twitterati for the best experience at a certain destination.

   I posted about the first Lonely Planet Travel Blog Awards and the Turkish Airlines 737 Crash in Amsterdam. Again Twitter was the first medium mentioning the crash.

3. March: I prepared for, went to and wound down in part 1 , part 2 and part 3 from the T-List PhocusWright Blogger Summit in Berlin.
   In the meantime I produced an posts about Lonely Planet Travel Blogging Awards, an update on the Twitchhiker experiment,  my wine tasting society tasting a 1918 Vosne Romanee and one of my personal favorite posts I frequently look at : Some 20 Random Tips for Twittahholics
4. April: A strong discussion about the use and ownership of a Twitter # Hashtag It was with respect to #winewednesday. After the discussion I lost a bit of interest, but shortly before it I had organized a Sparkling Wine Tasting #Tweetup in Haagsche Suites.
5. May: Wanna Become a Celebrity Hotelier? was a post to see if I could plug the search term celebrity hotelier in the Google search ranking. It brought me into the Google top position for that search term very quickly and even today I keep that position, at least according to my location of the search.
   Then there was the huge attention the Best Job in the World competition got .
   I installed the Thesis Theme. That ended a period of multi WP theme blog here. It also took some of my time away from blogging.
6. June: As I said: In June I was partly Lost under the Hood.
7. July: A fellow travel blogger got a death threat what do you do with it?.
   I took the position that Tripadvisor lures guests away from your site in order to send them to the big OTA’s.
   Finally published my original Dutch IFITT presentation in the English Language in I blog – Five Years Already.
8. August: Later in 2009 I met one of my regular readers who pointed to Confessions of a Hotelier – Two Brides – One (G)room…almost as his most favorite post of this blog. He happens to have first hand hotel experience in Haagsche Suites as one of our early grooms and with that remark gave me the final push to start a separate blog totally focused on Haagsche Suites only. It is in the works.
9. September:
   Tested Clipmarks extensively. See Testing Clipmarks.
   Hosted a Carnival of Cities
10. October: Ventured into food with Amazing Food Art – Dominique Davis and Goodbye Summer – It’s Halloween Time
11. November: Participated in Wordcamp.NL.
    Spent most of the month migrating two blogs to a new server….
12. December: Attended the Dutch Bloggies Award Gala in The Hague and kept on struggling to get the two blogs up to date and right after the migration

Some UFO’s (UnFinished Objects) or AP’s (Abandonned Projects)

• I started a list of Twitter followers and intended to make it a huge list on a separate page, a project that I abandoned
• Many more subjects I didn’t post about as I would have liked, but I’ll keep them in my sleeve, rather than spelling them out for you.

Stay tuned!

Post Alia
[Oops and then it turns out I accidentally have hit the publish button again long before the post has some content at all. Sorry for the early onlookers. I’ve had the post on private viewing for some time at least until I had covered the first three months. I’ll hopefully finish it tomorrow].

Last edited and finalized by Happy Hotelier on December 30, 2009 at 7.18 PM