Tour and Travel

About las vegas, well who doesn’t know this city. It’s one of the notorious city at Nevada. Some call it city of sin, but hey, it’s much fun there!.

The history began when Raphael Rivera, first European visit Las Vegas Area in 1829. In that time, areas of the valley contained artesian wells that supported extensive green areas (Vegas mean green areas).

In 1844, Las Vegas was still part of Mexico. But on 1855, Las Vegas was annexed by the United States, after that day, United States assigned 30 missionaries to convert the Paiute Indian population to Mormonism. Later, Mormons abandoned Las Vegas in 1857, during the Utah War.

Las Vegas was re-established as a railroad town on 1905, when 110 acres owned by the San Pedro, Los Angeles and Salt Lake Railroad was auctioned off in what is now downtown Las Vegas. Then Las Vegas became an city on March 16, 1911 and Peter Buol was assigned as the first mayor.

Enough for history lesson, now it’s the fun news. According to my friend, there’s a lot of Las Vegas Club and Casino at that city. All of that club and casino have unique landscape and design. And my lucky friend even go to strip club just for fun and prove to me that’s Vegas really had strip club, ha ha. When I ask him, why he didn’t go to Casino, he told me that it’s already seen on film so it’s no fun to go to casino.

There’s only one way to know whether or not your website is doing its job and, that is, to check the number of reservations it’s generating. If you have an independent hotel, this is an easy task; your booking engine’s analytics should tell you. If it’s franchised, it’s a little harder because most brands don’t want you to know how much your proprietary site is contributing to bookings. Many don’t want you to have a proprietary site at all.

Unfortunately, many franchises still discourage the use of proprietary websites and/or measuring your own site’s production. It’s a matter of self-preservation; they’re afraid you won’t need them, I guess. A big hooray for enlightened brands like Hilton and Preferred Hotels, which support the use of proprietary sites for their hotels. It makes common sense; proprietary sites can do what franchise sites cannot. Only a little more than 20% of searches are performed by brand name, anyway.

Is Your Website Producing Business? (Do you know?)

More and more hoteliers are turning to the Internet to sell their hotel rooms, food, beverages, and other facilities. But, the question is just how effective is that website to attract visitors and book business? It is amazing how many hoteliers have no idea whether or not their site is actually producing business and appear satisfied with only knowing how many visitors the site gets.

Would you hire a sales person and not measure how much business he or she books? Would you be satisfied just knowing how many people they talk to? I doubt it.

More than just the way they look, too many hotel sites are not designed to be found through generic search nor are they designed to drive reservations. In the last few years, many website designers have gravitated towards building websites for hotels. Unfortunately, many of them have no hands-on experience with hotels to understand how and why people choose a hotel online. It’s also sad that many of them don’t know how search engines work either.

Destination-focused Websites

In several past articles, I referred to some hotel sites as nothing more than online brochures. A hotel online brochure is a site, which only covers information about the hotel itself; that makes it dead-in-the-water from a search standpoint. Someone who designs such a site, doesn’t understand how travelers use the Internet to find and book rooms.

Few people choose a hotel before choosing a destination. The fact is that most travelers first select a destination, attraction, or activity, then select a hotel within the scope of that destination. Hotel online brochures mention little, if any, information about the destination features nearby. Yet, this is the most important search findability information on your site. Selecting a hotel is most often the “second” decision made by travelers.

A Matter of Value

The location, not the address, of a hotel plays a very important role in the process of determining value. Most travelers do not choose a hotel by facilities and rates alone, it’s value that counts. How convenient the hotel’s location is, as compared to where they need or want to be, is their primary value decision.

It’s Also a Matter of Search Findability

Just designing a website that looks great is a small part of a site designer’s responsibility; almost any site designer can make an attractive site. You’ve read a lot about a site’s search ability or findability; to me, the most important part of any site. Many site designers appear to have been enlightened about the use of title and description meta tags; important search elements, but we still see a lack of understanding about keyword search tags.

Many search engines, like Google, search for keywords within the body text of each web page. This is why keywords are useless unless they have been incorporated within the site’s content. Remember, content is king. Researching and using popular keywords is essential to generic search. Generic search incorporates location attributes; trip types, such as meetings, weddings, etc; and popular attractions or activities.

Getting on page one of generic searches is an achievable goal for all hotels; the ultimate goal is to be within the first three generic search results. Pay-per-click advertising is a great tool for sponsored search results, but is too costly if generic search is ignored.

Competition has never been keener than it is today and the vast majority of travelers are using the Internet to decide where to go and where to stay. There is markedly less incidental travel since the recession started; making productive hotel websites more important than ever before.

Promoting your hotel through the Internet does not end with the publication of your website on the web, it only begins at that time. There are many hoteliers that are successfully marketing their hotels online through packaging, special promotions, holiday activities, and guest comments. Are you?

One person’s budget for a fortnight in Egypt might well run to a couple of thousand dollars, for others it would be a few hundred.

Generally, budget travel is considered shoestring. Lonely Planet almost made the name their own with their original travel guide to Southeast Asia; for travelers on a tight budget. I even used the yellow book myself in the eighties.

Now LP have guides to just about everywhere, and have included mid-range and top end hotels in their places to stay; to cast the net wider. We’ll be looking at the guidebooks next week.

If you’re traveling on the cheap, there’s nothing to stop you entering the five star hotels. Some of them have good value, all you can eat buffets; at a price travelers can afford — occasionally.

If you’re starting out on a lengthy 3 to 6 month overland journey, you will indeed need to budget for three to seven thousand dollars.

Your budget will vary depending on where you travel. Europe is not as cheap anymore, and the gendarmes aren’t so tolerant of back-packers sleeping on the beach.

When the Summer is over you wouldn’t want to anyway, but it’s still a good time to travel in Europe. The queues for museums have gone, you’ll have less tourists in your photographs, and you will get to meet the locals; in the high season they’re all on holiday too. And guess what? The accommodation prices are coming down as well; almost half the price in some heavily tourist areas.

Amsterdam and Prague are great budget places in September and October, and Paris is coming back to life — the Parisians desert the French capital in August, and that’s not a lot of fun if you like to sit at a brasserie table and watch the world go by.

Good value travel can still be had in Asia, South America, and parts of Africa. In West Africa, for example, the Francophone countries are more expensive than the former English colonies, with Abidjan and Dakar the two most expensive cities. Ghana is a treasure. Now’s the time to start planning for the Southern Hemisphere

The most expensive part of the trip is usually the flight ticket. In this article, we are talking about the budget travel after the the ticket is bought. Getting a good price on airline tickets is quite an art in itself.

You can even make reservations online.

Your budget for traveling, once the ticket is bought, will of course depend on your comfort requirements in both accommodation and transportation.

Dormitory beds, or a room with your own shower; hard seats on 36-hour Chinese trains, or a sleeper in a closed compartment. These are the extremes and there is always somewhere in between.

I have stayed in some very nice hotels in South America for $5, and some dives in the United States for five to ten times that.

There are old colonial mansions in West Africa that you never want to leave and water palaces, surrounded by rice paddies, in Indonesia that offer an outdoor swim before breakfast. Once travelers tell Lonely Planet about these places, they loose the atmosphere. So I’m not going to tell you where they are either.

There are always gems on the route less travelled, and that is the beauty of traveling without knowing where you’ll be staying.

That’s budget travel to me. You have a wad of money when you start out, and you really don’t know how far you’ll get with it. If you want to know how much it’s all going to cost and where you’ll stay, then book through a travel agent.

Before you get your head down for the night you’ll have to get there. Some people do hitch-hike in Asia and South America, but transportation is reasonably cheap and frequent.

The greatest luxury is time, budgeting your time is also a part of independent travel. Again if you don’t have enough of it, you’ll be forced to take the tours.

In countries like India and China you will need to book the long-distance trains at least a day in advance, sometimes three days or more.

Many a traveler has come unstuck by looking around Beijing for three or five days, and then being forced to stay another three or five because they can’t get a ticket out.

On the popular routes, you sometimes need to book your tickets out, before you settle in. Unwanted tickets are easier to sell than trying to buy one for a train that leaves in half an hour.

In West Africa you simply turn up at the autogare and wait for the Peugeot to fill up — early mornings are always best. While other countries have bus stations with many companies competing to get you on theirs that is leaving right away.

So whatever your budget, there’s always something for you — you pay the money, you take the choice. Don’t forget that some countries require you to pay for a visa, and when your budgeted time is out you may well have to pay a departure tax.