Category: T-List

Hospitality and Travel Bloggers Community: T-Listers and L-Listers Unite!

WiWiH Hospitality and Travel Bloggers Community

After my July review of the current situation in T-List and L-List Blogland (T-List and L-List: The Next Step: Community Building), I noted the following developments:

  • Albert Barra has created an English language channel on his Spanish Blog (pff I lost the link but here it is: Travel Web Cafe)
  • I found myself temporarily booted from Facebook
  • I looked further into WiWiH and found out that already 19 T-Listers are a member of WiWiH (see Happy Hotelier on WiWiH )
  • Travolution Blog tried to separate the dogs from the sheep in their post The Recommended
  • There will be a e-connect conference in Vancouver
  • The conference will be covered with a book with T-List tips

Probably I missed a few.

Because I felt uncomfortable with some solutions or felt they were not working as they should and because I felt comfortable within WiWiH and with some of their forums I participate in, I asked the WiWiH people if they would be willing to host a Hospitality and Travel Bloggers Community.

They gracefully honored the request.

Invitation for You!

So I am proud to invite all professional Hospitality and Travel Bloggers to join WiWiH | Hospitality and Travel Community. If you are a WiWiH member already just knock to get in, otherwise register free at WiWiH and then knock to get in.

Hope to see you there!

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.

Perfect Escapes and The Suite Life Blog

The Suite Life

Perfect Escapes is a site with a collection of luxury hotels I can live with as afficianado. Today I found out they even have their own Blog called The Suite Life Blog which I have added to my T-List and L-List. Enjoy reading!

Update:

Either it is a hosting problem, or they really discontinued…links are not working…

Last edited by GJE on November 24, 2011 at 4:35 pm

Happy Hotelier on Bloggers Choice Award

bloggers choice awards

I noticed Bloggers Choice Award’s Best Travel Blog Category out there and thought: “Why not advertise myself?” and nominated Happy Hotelier for Best Travel Blog….A long way to go still.

The funny thing is there are hardly any Blog from the T-List, but there are many Blogs in the travel category.. It seems there is a sort of explosion of Travel Blogs out there…..
and, and, and: It is already a year ago that I started publishing this Blog…Hurray for Happy Hotelier!

If you like what you read here, I would appreciate a vote from you:-).

Just another way of community building….The other way around works also…vote for me, leave me a note here and nominate yourself and I’ll vote for you as well.

Update: The site disappeared since and is now part of the Dead Travelblog Society

T-List and L-List: The Next Step: Community Building!

Time for an update on the T-List and the L-List:

First some history:

  • On March 2, 2007 the T-List was launched by Quebec (CAN) based Mathieu Ouellet of Radaron who modeled it after the Z List, originally launched by Mack Collier of Viral garden.

    Mathieu now states in a response to Leeds (UK) based Darren Cronian’s provocative and funny The Death of The T-List:

    I’ve created the T-List for fun and also to see the impact it could have in the tourism&travel bloggers environment.

    If you take a look at my own blog, you’ll see that I talked about the T-List only once since it started. Exactly the same number of times you did. I’m not the hardest defender of the T-list. haha ; )

    I’m bored of the T-List itself but if there is something to remember from it, it’s that there are a lot of tourism & travel bloggers which would like to connect with each other. Is it good or bad? I don’t think there is something bad doing that. I don’t have personally any particular plan about it but I guess that some people do. Good for them.

    I found some interesting blogs/people with it so I’m totally happy 😉

  • Shortly thereafter. on March 7, 2007 Lake District (UK) based Paul Johnson of A Luxury Travel Blog launched the L-List, modeled after the T-List.
  • I have since tried to keep a tab on the development of both lists on my Happy Hotelier deli.icio.us driven page T-List and L-List. Currently I count 185 Blogs on the T-List an 49 Blogs on the L-List.
  • On June 14, 2007 after a quiet period, London (UK) based Kevin May of The Travolution Blog revives the T-List with his post Revisiting the T-List.
  • On June 16, 2007 Keith of Tripcart reorganizes the T-List with his post The T-List Reloaded and presents it in a nice way (a lot of work!).
  • On June 27, 2007 Scott Rains of The Rolling Rains Report copies and pastes this reorganized T-List in his post TripCart Spotlights the T-List.
  • On July 11, 2007 Intermundial shows us The T-List Reloaded.
  • On July 17, 2007 Darren Cronian posts his The Death of the T-List.
  • Also on July 17, 2007 London (UK) based Guillaume Thevenot of Hotel Blogs 2.0 posts a reply in another tongue in cheek post: Battle of the Blogs regarding the T-List.

Sofar the T-List history part and now the community building part of some T-Listers:

  • Barcelona Based Albert Barra had set up Travel in Blogs. I noted this here in my post Travel in Blogs: A new Travel community? and showed some scepsis. Albert replied correctly to my sceptical questions:

    Hello all,
    I’m Albert Barra, I have been reading all comments and articles regarding my blog and TravelinBlogs.com and decided to post to clarify your concerns.

    TravelinBlogs is an idea that came up between me and other bloggers some time ago. It was an idea that was created time ago when we noticed that there were very few interesting blogs about tourism, travel and Hospitality, and we considered it would be a good idea to put them all together or just listing them would be fine.

    The original project was called thBlogs.com and we started with it by posting manually those articles we liked. It has never been an interest on making business out of it.

    Danay, who is actually my wife, runs the site, and the admin user you mentioned is here. There is no machine thing at TravelinBlogs, but just RSS syndication of those blogs we like, and yours is one of them.

    Then came the T-list and we discovered new blogs. Some of them posted about TiB, and traffic increased fast.

    We still understand that having a Digg like project for the Travel and Hospitality would be of interest not just for the readers, but also for the bloggers as it allow them to get noticed and get extra traffic.

    Regarding your concerns about the reason why there are also categories in Spanish, the answer is quite simple, my blog which is considered of the best Spanish hospitality ones is in Spanish. There are also excellent Spanish blogs that deserve being promoted,and we post their articles at the site manually. Since then they are getting new readers from Germany that understand Spanish, and had no idea that those blogs existed. And last, our idea was also creating categories in German where there are also fantastic blogs, and French, but we are not so fluent in those languages to translate the categories.

    I hope I have clarified some of your concerns. You are welcome to visit the site.

    Albert Barra

    I joined the site and rummaged around. Look for yourself to see who from the T-List is also rummaging around. Thus far there is not a lot of communication going on between the contributors.

  • The Beta launch of VibeAgent, who by the way finalized an angel seed round today, also drew some T-Listers as beta testers which resulted in some contacts between them.
  • Then Vancouver Based Chris Clarke, also known as Chrispitality from his Blog Crispitality media Blog, a hotel industry blogger on Vacant Ready who earlier had set up the hilarious site Bed Jump Com as a stand alone which he later syndicated with Hotels by City, launched Hospitality Wiki as an experiment. He couldn’t find a relevant, interesting hospitality-specific online wiki anywhere, so he has created one and asks to participate! You will find some t-Listers there as well. Have a look.
    As a side note: have a look at this bed jumping project mentioned on Worldhum
  • There is another T-Lister who is setting up a T-List aggregator, but I lost the URL. When I find it I will fill it in here.
  • On July 4, 2007 Eric Daams (AKA Dr Pepper), A young Dutchman, living Down Under, who contributes with his brother Peter Daams who also lives Down Under, and with a third Dutchman, probably their oldest brother, Sam Daams (AKA Sam I am), who lives in Norway, to the Blog From the Swiveling Chair from the Travelerspoint travel community a post 12 Blogs I Like.
    Actually the format of this post gives me a great idea! Suppose each T-Lister posts about the 5 best posts he has seen on T-List blogs in the past week, or the past month. Then you get some real synergie! Then you really start building a community!
  • Then, on July 15, 2007 Vancouver (BC) based Jens Traenhart of the Tourism Internet Marketing Blog proposes in an excellent post T-List on Facebook to the T-Listers to join the Facebook | T-List Group. Currently there are 34 members. Have a look!
  • Finally: Off course Paul Johnson couldn’t stay behind and created via The L-List on Facebook the Facebook | L-List Community, currently with 8 members

So those are exciting developments and give plenty a possibility to building T-List and L-List communities. The only question is: which forum will prevail in a couple of months?

Note:
In researching one and another I added some details after the publication date.

Last edited by GJE on December 6, 2011 at 8:38 am