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!

HotelTip! launched

Hotel Tip NL

Recently the Dutch Hotel Search engine Hoteltip! was launched.

Like a sort of crawler the site looks for hotel rooms at various portals/bookings engines. It claims to return the cheapest rates. All depends on the portals they signed up off course, but in the process you can see which sites they crawl.

It was featured on Killer Startups, also a cool idea.

Chicks Away: What Woman Want?

Chicks Away
Meme the original Travel Chick

I copied and pasted the text below as a draft post for further review and editing, but accidentally pushed the publish button. It appeared I had to replace my keyboard as it hung. A couple of hours later I realized the post was published in raw and un edited format and gobbled at by many feed readers already.

It seems like a press release, but I copied it from somewhere else…I simply don’t know where I picked it up, but I am sure I will find out when doing some refining and editing of the post…. Ah it also appears on the Chicks Away Blog itself…..

Chicks Away, the Social Media site for Women and Travel, launches at the Student Youth and Travel Association Conference (SYTA) in Whistler, BC

Chicks Away, the innovative website community for women to Dream, Connect, Share and Remember their travel experiences, officially launched at the SYTA Conference held in Whistler, BC last week.

Developed by A Couple of Chicks e-Marketing and its parent Company, Kuikene Inc, Chicks Away is the first Social Media website dedicated solely to women and travel, and was officially launched last week at the annual Student Youth and Travel Association Conference.

Recognizing women travel differently than men and assume different roles when they travel: mother, wife, sister or friend, Chicks Away allows women to customize their own travel website and share experiences with other women.

According to women’s travel expert, The GutsyTraveler, “it is estimated that women will spend $125 billion on travel within the next year. Last year alone, US women took 32 million trips with 80% of the travel decisions made by women.”

Until the launch of Chicks Away, there were no on line travel agencies, portal websites or social media sites that addressed what is important to women as a unique traveling consumer, and allowed women a voice to share travel experiences.

“Our vision is to provide a community for women to connect with other like minded women to discuss travel dreams, plan a vacation or business trip and share experiences,” said Patricia Brusha Co-founder and Principal of Chicks Away. “Our intent is to ensure that women’s voices and ideas are heard by the travel industry and to allow them to create a central resource for both dialogue and research – a women’s version of Wikipedia for Travel and so much more.”

Chicks Away uses a simple platform combining Blogs and Groups. Women can join for free and immediately create a travel blog, upload photos, videos and invite friends to view and comment. These blogs can be fully imported into other social media applications such as Facebook, so women can use Chicks Away as a main source to discuss and share their travel experiences.

Groups are created by women based on their own individual travel interests. Such diverse groups as single mom getaway weekends, honeymoons, Tuscany travel and dream trips are a few of the initial groups started. All travel oriented business’s including hotels and destinations are encouraged to start their own groups. Both Blogs and groups are being indexed by the search engines and have the ability to be found through natural search.

The website provides a multidimensional on line community and recognizes that women are unique when researching; planning and booking travel. Led by “Meme the Travel Chick,” Chicks Away will become a trusted source for women planning travel as the content will be created by its users.

About Chicks Away

Chicks Away is a new social media site for women to plan, share and connect about their travel experiences. The concept was developed by the online marketing firm A Couple of Chicks e-Marketing, who together with its parent company www.kuikene.com combined social media technology, and online travel industry expertise to create a social media portal for women who travel. Co-Founders Patricia Brusha and Alicia Whalen have developed three distinct business units around online marketing, tourism marketing and online marketing education with the successful e-marketing conferences held annually in Canada, www.onlinerevealed.com; online media firm A Couple of Chicks e-Marketing and the new www.chicksaway.com . The “Chicks” have published over 25 articles and offer interactive e-marketing workshops which take them on many travel adventures of their own. Visit www.kuikene.com for more information.

I took out the reference to Idea Hatching of Alicia as it is my view that reference should not be made in such press release as it is overkill and a bit strange that Alicia didn’t break the news on her Blog…….

I changed my tag WWW into WWW (What Woman Want) and still have to do some editing, but must address other matters for now.

Istanbul Museum of Modern Art: Times Present Times Past

We visited the 10th Istanbul Biennial. On that occasion the Istanbul Museum of Modern Art had a temporary exhibition on the whole ground floor called “Times Present Times Past” with an overview of the 9 past Biennials.

The building itself is excellently located on the Bosphorus. I was mezmerized by the restaurant and bar: what a stunning view over the Bosphorus while having a lunch or simply an expresso (or Turkish Coffee).

What struck me most were four photo’s of Shirin Neshat from her series “Woman of Allah”.

Woman of Allah
One of the four exhibited
Photo © Shirin Neshat

As one of the most controversial of contemporary artists, Shirin Neshat will participate in the exhibition with her works from her series Women of Allah, which was part of the 4th İstanbul Biennial in 1995. In René Block’s biennial, Neshat’s work was introduced to the international community and widely discussed. The Iranian-American artist, who participated in the 4th, 5th and 8th İstanbul Biennials, was recognized internationally after her Women of Allah series, in which she used the images of Iranian revolutionary women who were ready to die for their convictions and combined a poetic expression with a problematical political content. Neshat left Iran in 1979 at the time of the Iranian revolution to resume her studies in the U.S.A. and had to live in exile until 1990. When she returned to her country after having spent 11 years in the U.S.A, she began questioning the role of women in the public sphere under the Islamic regime; in the series Women of Allah, which she produced between 1993 and 1997, she concentrated on issues relating to womens’ body, text and political action.

Immediately I associated these photos with the film Submission made by then controversial member of Dutch Parliament and current Bush think tank associate Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Dutch film maker Theo van Gogh, a distant relative of Dutch painter Vincent van Gogh who was murdered after the film was presented.
Last edited by GJE on December 7, 2011 at 1:41 pm