Category: Blogging

Would WTM accept a Blogger as Publisher/Editor/Journalist?

WTM LOGO

In order to sniff up some travel and luxury travel news I would like to attend WTM as a Blogger, not as a Hotelier. Not being able to offer thousands of rooms my hotel is simply too small to justify a visit to WTM (although I did that once in the past).

So by way of experiment I applied for a Publisher’s Badge.

In reply to my application I got following answer:

Dear Mr Van den Elshout,

Thank you for submitting your registration to attend World Travel Market 2007 as a member of the press.

Press badges are restricted to Publishers, Editors, Journalists, Photographers and Broadcasters. A press badge allows access to the Press Centre at WTM.

In order to process your registration we need to ask you to send us by mail a copy of accreditation in the form of a photocopy of a recognised press or media card, business card, NUJ card or a letter from the editor, that verifies you are working member of the press community.

Please print a copy of this email and send it with the copy accreditation to the following address:

As Blogger I would like to attend the WTM. However as a blogger I do not carry around business cards and I try to avoid any snail mail. So I am curious to see how this can be solved with WTM….

The funny thing is that for my other Blog I do the same with trade fairs and manufacturers and they have no problem to recognize a Blogger as press. They even are sending me tons of press releases……without questioning me….

Update 24th October 2007
Good sports at WTM. I just received their confirmation that they have accepted me and will issue a press badge after I had referred them to this post in my answer to the above quoted e-mail.

El Blog de un Hotel: A Blog to Market a Hotel Under Construction!

El Blog de un Hotel 01
El Blog de un Hotel (A Hotel’s Blog)

My Blogger friend Albert Barra pointed me to El Blog de un Hotel ie A Hotel’s Blog. [ed: since the opening of the hotel the Blog has been discontinued and removed]

Not that I am able to read or write Spanish, but with the help of Google Translate (Beta) I can at least assume I know a bit about what El Blog de un Hotel is posting about.

I like the concept: The Hotel talks to the reader while being built and is meandering in its posts the same sort of way I am meandering myself in this Blog. It keeps its name and brand and location secret. It will be located in Spain and will open 365 days after the Blog started. As the Blog started September 25, 2007, the hotel will open in September 2008.

The last post shows us interesting Artist Impressions of the mystery hotel’s design like this:

El Blog de un Hotel 02

It features two clever ways of building traffic:

  1. If you Blog about me, I will give you a link back: So Bloggers link to me!
  2. If you guess me out, You may gain a freebie hotel night …..

Both may create their own buzz, or maybe even hype….

I will follow the developments with interest.

Last edit August 2009:
Alas the Hotel is the Madrid Eurostar, but it appears the blog has been wiped.

The landing page says: Translated via Google:

Blog of a Hotel

Hola a todos.
Hello everyone.

Como sabéis ya soy una realidad. As you know I’m already a reality. El pasado 9 de enero abrí mis puertas para empezar a recibir huéspedes. On January 9 I opened my door to start receiving guests. De momento todo va muy bien, pero estoy desbordado de trabajo: coordinando los montajes de las habitaciones, controlando la calidad de mis desayunos, poniendo a punto mi Well Health Club y dando una cálida bienvenida a todos los que ya han querido conocerme.
At the moment everything is going very well, but I am overwhelmed by work: coordinating the assembly of the rooms, checking the quality of my breakfast, my point being Well Health Club and giving a warm welcome to all who wanted to know.

Por todo ello, y lamentablemente, me será imposible seguir manteniendo activa esta bitácora . Therefore, unfortunately, I will be impossible to keep this blog active. Hemos compartido mucho juntos, he aprendido un montón de vuestros comentarios y espero que, a lo largo de este año vosotros también hayáis disfrutado con mis comentarios y descubriendo mis interioridades.
We shared a lot together, I learned a lot from your comments and hope that throughout this year you also you have enjoyed my comments and finding out my insides.

Ya se ha empezado a contactar a los ganadores de los diferentes premios, pero si estáis impacientes, podéis enviar un email a.
Has already begun to contact the winners of the awards, but if you’re impatient, you can send an email to email

Como dicen los humanos, esto no es un adiós sino un hasta pronto.
As the human, this is not a goodbye but a see you soon.

…It was a very nice and creative example of marketing via a blog… I am really surprised they simply threw away all the good work…

Veerle

Veerle Self Portrait
Photo © Veerle Pieters

Veerle Pieters is a Grapic/Web designer based in Belgium, a talented photographer and founder of Duoh!, a dynamic print/new media and web design company, based in Deinze –near Ghent, Belgium, She has an impressing portfolio.
Veerle’s Blog 2.0 is always interesting to read. The Blog covers a myriad of subjects that interest me as well, like:

  • struggling with Photoshop, Illustrator and sequels (as I struggled to crop her photo that I borrowed from her Flickr account);
  • well illustrated pondering how to furnish your terrace;
  • how to design your bathroom

    • and

  • many others

Enjoy!

The Private Islands Blog

Private Islands Blog Banner

Note: I have reworked this post entirely on December 30, 2009.

Sometimes I get requests to pay attention to this or to that. Sometimes I honor those requests, sometimes I definitely won’t honor them and sometimes I forget them.

Some time ago someone (I’ll refer to him further as Mr X) asked me to give his Blog some attention. I forgot, but recently remembered that there was a rumor that a real online casino would be established on the (in)famous Principality of Sealand about which Island Mr X had written once in one of his posts on his blog, as I did myself in February, which rumor seems a recurring rumor…without becoming true.

Added September 25, 2007:

According to the first commenter to this post, there is somebody out there who claims Mr X to be a fraud. I really don’t know and don’t want to get involved in a feud. I don’t know who to believe. The commenter doesn’t give away a lot of information about her/himself. So be careful who to believe! This is especially the case as there is another Private Islands Blog Out there: The Official Private Islands Blog.
Again: Who to believe?

Added December 30, 2009
Mr X commented somewhere here on the blog on December 18, 2009 out of the blue:

Dear Sir, the following page has numerous highly libelous links attacking me, can you please delete the page?

The Private Islands Blog

and gave his name telephone number and e-mail address.

[ there were two spelling errors in his comment that I redressed here. Because of the highly personal information I’ve deleted the comment ]

My reaction was this:

Mr X
I don’t agree that the post is libelous it self.
I’m not here to attack you.
Therefore I’ll make the post private.

And you know what? The original link he gave me is now a dead blog anyway….

But after making this post privat, I got 404 errors when people were trying to reach this post.

I now have published the Rules of Engagement to make more clear what I want and don’t want here.

Thereafter I have reworked this post and made it public again to make it visible for everyone ….and deleted the comment with the links that mr X may or may not find libelous. Again I don’t want to get involved.

Happy Hotelier on WiWiH

After the recent Facebook unpleasantnesses I looked again at WiWiH (Who Is Who in Hospitality). [ed: I checked it in december 2015 and WiWih seems now also part of the Dead Travel Blog society].

Earlier I stayed away from it for the same reason as I stayed away from Hyves (the Dutch My Space alternative), Second Life, My Space, Twitter and other community sites only meant for school going kids….as I should have stayed away from Facebook…..which also originated from a bunch of school going kids….as WIWIH seemingly originates from Maastricht in The Netherlands and seems to have strong ties with the Hotel School of Maastricht.

Looking further into it, I found a professional site that started in March 2006 and still presents itself as being in Beta. It has over 12,000 members who are all related to the hospitality industry.

WiWiH offers its members the possibility to create a free WiWhH Blog or to syndicate their own Blog with WiWih which is a clever feature. However, the navigation of the WiWiH Blogs deserves a bit enhancement.

Guess what? Happy Hotelier is not the only one creating a syndicated Blog WIWIH Blogs | Happy Hotelier on WIWIH:

I found a couple of fellow travel bloggers and T-List members that have a syndicated Blog on WIWIH: [Update: I’ve ltaken away the links of WiWiH]

To name a few.