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.

It’s amazing how easily myths are born. One origin of many myths is the reality that many technical people out there do their best to promulgate confusion about the Internet; making it appears too complicated and too intricate for the average person to fully understand. They even use technical language to describe simple tasks just to stir-up the confusion still more; it’s simply not that complicated.

Many web site designers tend to be right-brain directed people who use their creative side to build a visual masterpiece instead of a functioning site to sell visitors and deliver reservations. This has created a gap between marketing people who believe that “Content is King”, that a site must conform to search engine parameters, and techies who feel that all they need do is to make a site visually appealing to the hotel manager or owner, who hired them.

These people have little or no concern about how and why people choose hotel rooms because few of them have any experience in the hotel industry. Hoteliers know that their hotel’s location is the primary selection consideration, yet we see site after site, which provide no clue to the hotel’s location; please note that your hotel’s location is not simply its address.

We still see many independent hotels without a booking engine, leaving site visitors frustrated that they cannot make a real-time reservation online. We see unusual and strange site navigation schemes; visitors should not have to learn how to use your site. We see many sites with far more images than text; yet search engines only see text.

We see more and more use of flash elements where they are not necessary with a lack of well-written text; leaving the site nearly invisible to search engines.

Myth:

We Already Have a Web Site, So All We Need Now is Search Engine Optimization

Many people, including some site designers, share this delusion; the fact is that the site design has everything to do with its ability to be ranked and found by search engines. Search engines have some very specific guidelines to enable web designers to maximize search results; all they need do is follow them.

Your web site needs to be prepared to comply with search engine guidelines; well researched title, description, and search tags; search words/phrases which are incorporated into the sales text on your site; content is king. Submitting a poorly designed web site to search engines is a complete waste of money.

Myth:

Animation Looks Cool and Creates Interest

This is one of my favorites among all hotel web site myths. The danger with this myth is that it appears to make sense to the uninitiated. Techies love flash because it does look cool, but the fact is that there are several problems with this thinking.

First, since a site needs to be found before it can be viewed, search engines can’t “see” flash. Second, for the many people, still on slow Internet connections, flash takes forever to load. The need to double-click navigation links, instead of the traditional single-click, is annoying and confusing to visitors. Morphing photos do absolutely nothing to enhance a commercial web site; if they morph too fast, one cannot properly view the images, too slow, some images are never seen. Do the images simply repeat over and over again or do they stop on the most important image?

Since content is king, why not simply post static images so visitors can focus on those of interest? I won’t even comment on hotel web sites designed entirely in flash…rubbish.

Myth:

Search Engines Don’t Use Meta Tags Anymore

The fact is that the most popular search engines use Meta Tags, in various ways, to crawl and rank web sites. The description tag is certainly the most important tag, yet we see many sites without one. Key word/phrase Tags set the stage for search key words and phrases to be used within the body of text.

In my opinion, if only one search engine used Meta Tags, that’s reason enough to have them; they are free to use and can positively affect the performance of your site.

Myth:

My Hotel Web Site is My Hotel’s Online Brochure

The fact is that your hotel’s web site should be far more than simply an online brochure; it’s your online selling piece which enables visitors to make real-time online reservations. This makes it critical that your site has good selling text with all the necessary who, what, why, when, and where information; capped-off with a call-to-action…to make a reservation.

Designing a web site is like sculpting an elephant out of stone; merely chip-away everything that doesn’t look like an elephant. With a hotel web site, chip away everything that doesn’t lead the user to make a reservation.

It’s important to understand that, with few exceptions, people don’t travel to stay at your hotel; they travel to visit an area or attraction, conduct business in an area, attend a meeting, or other such reasons; they merely stay at your hotel. Your site should provide reasons to stay at your hotel when they travel to your area. No matter how beautiful your hotel, that’s not a good enough reason to stay at your hotel; provide the reasons why your hotel is the perfect place to stay when they visit the area.

Myth:

People Who Use the Internet Are Only Looking for the Lowest Rates

Any attempt to put all Internet users into one neat market segment is short-sighted and fool-hardy. With the exception of destination resorts, people will shop for the best overall value within a chosen market. This is often falsely interpreted as rate shopping. Few people shop for the lowest rate alone; most people look for the best deal, which includes the location and facilities they want…, at the best rate. This is shopping for value, not rate.

Hotels with the lowest rates within a market area are often viewed as “poor choices” among shoppers. Low rates are often interpreted as “unbelievable or too good to be true”. Your web site should “position” your hotel within the market. If it’s available in your market, use Smith Travel Research’s STR Report and a good competition analysis to determine your hotel’s position in the market; it’s worth the time and effort.

Your rates should reflect your position in the market, even if they are the highest. Showing the best overall value, with rates that show demonstrate that value, sells rooms.

The bus pulled off the highway and into the station marking the halfway point between Madrid and Granada. Stepping down from the bus a slight wind swirled the dust, the sunlight glaring off of the cars parked nearby making the whitewashed adobe walls seem blinding. The truck stop, some shabby hotels and an old deserted petrol station were all I could see among the rolling Andalusian hills.

I scrounged in my pocket and pulled out a handful of change. My fist full with strange unfamiliar coins of varying weights and sizes. Pesetas, francs, pence, guilders, deutchmarks, the sum of my travels so far. Separating the pesetas from the rest I stepped into the truck stop café surveying my options. Smoke hung curled and seemed motionless, the inside of the café had an air of perpetual haziness and I felt like my eyes would never adjust.

I listened to the clink of glasses and chatter of the old men with their cervezas and cigarettes. The menu on the wall was incomprehensible, names of Spanish dishes made even stranger by the missing letters on the board. I walked instead to the vending machines safe in the knowledge that the prepackaged snacks, full of chemicals and preservatives snug in their shiny, crinkly wrappers were less of a risk than a cho zo con ques y mant quill bocadillo.

Sitting awkwardly on a rickety wooden bench I leaned back against the wall and felt the heat from the building warming my back. The wind picked up again sending a chill under my sweatshirt and reminding me that it was still fall. Getting up and sticking my hands in my pockets for warmth I walked across the dirt parking lot and up towards the road. I wandered as far as the deserted petrol station and stood there looking at it. The paint peeling and chipping, the pumps all rusting and dirt and trash piled around the building. I thought of what it must have been like years before, trucks pulling in, the drivers tanned and disheveled with loads of olives or wine bound for San Sebastian or Barcelona.

Remembering what the bus driver said about being left behind if you weren’t back on the bus in twenty minutes I turned from the station and walked back to where the bus was waiting. The other passengers were starting to board so I took one last look at the hillside, let the wind chill me once more and then stepped up and walked back to my seat.

As the bus pulled back onto the roadway I leaned my head against the window. We picked up speed and the olive trees seemed to melt, they dotted the hillsides and sides of the roads, becoming blurs as we moved along faster. My mind drifted to the last time I took this ride, to that last time I was in Spain. The huge crowd in Plaza Mayor at the Festival of San Isidro, the gypsy band and my dancing around spilling my drink and not caring. My feet hitting the cobblestones of the plaza in rhythm to the drums and wavering rapid fire Spanish singing. Walking along near Plaza de los Tristes and looking up to see the Alhambra lit up on the hillside against a perfectly clear sky, the moon bright.

The streets where I was living were a maze of small alleys, twisting and turning sometimes emptying you into a small plaza. They always came up unexpectedly, the plazas, and I hardly ran into the same one twice. They were like little jewels, little jewels with small old fountains and benches, the rough and uneven stones underfoot.

I wish I could freeze those moments, the good ones. The slivers of time when that sense of wonder hits you combined with the reality that it’s not a dream and you fill up inside with the closest thing to feeling like a kid again, it’s like Christmas morning and you feel magical, your skin tingles and breath shortens and it’s just you and that moment and nothing else exists. I wish I could freeze that feeling, bottle it or press it between the pages of a book so I can bring it out years later and feel that same sense of being there, all there.

It’s staring at the Alhambra in the moonlight on a chilly November evening, drinking a cold beer in the sun while sitting in a plaza older than my country, on a bench, head tilted back and eyes half closed. Sometimes it’s something so simple as eating a candy bar at a truck stop in the middle of nowhere.