Chat Chat Diary

April 8, 2007
NY Times
Practical Traveler | Online Reviews
The Web Gives Hotel Guests the Last Word
By MICHELLE HIGGINS
NEARLY every morning, over his second cup of coffee, Tom Brady, general manager at
the Affinia Chicago, logs onto his computer and surfs over to TripAdvisor.com to see if
there are any new postings about his hotel.

“It’s an obsession,” he said. If the review is positive he moves on. If it’s unfavorable —
like the complaint posted in March from a guest who had received a $90 parking ticket
because of a valet’s error — he’s on it immediately. In that case, he marched straight out
to the valet to find out what had happened. After identifying the guest, he made sure that
the company issued an apology and a reimbursement for the ticket.

“This is all over the world,” he said, describing his concern about any negative comment
on TripAdvisor. “Everyone is looking at this. I’ve got to make sure it’s solved quickly, so
God forbid someone else doesn’t have the same problem.”

The individual traveler’s word is weightier than ever. Before the advent of travel review
sites like TripAdvisor, IgoUgo.com and MyTravelGuide.com, customer complaints about
dirty showers or threadbare sheets typically went to hotels directly and discreetly in the
form of comment cards, phone calls or e-mail messages. But as review sites have
become more popular, customer feedback that was once viewed only by a hotel’s staff is
increasingly being posted online for all to see, enabling guests to share their praise or air
their gripes publicly.

“We love it and we hate it,” said Steven Pipes, vice president at the Jack Parker
Corporation, which owns the Parker Meridien in New York and the Parker Palm Springs in
California. He regularly checks TripAdvisor. “We love it because we really look for
feedback and want to know what people are thinking about, and we know they don’t
always tell us to our faces,” he said. “We hate it because it’s anonymous.” The anonymity
of the comments makes it difficult to respond to guests and find out exactly what
happened, he said, or to know if they truly stayed at the hotel.

Nevertheless, the growing influence of such sites is hard for hoteliers to ignore. Three out
of 10 American travelers who do travel research online read reviews written by other
travelers, according to Forrester Research. Of the people who book hotels online, 30
percent have changed their hotel plans because of comments written by other travelers.

Because of the importance consumers attach to guest reviews, some hotels have gone to
great lengths to boost their ratings. Some encourage guests to write flattering reviews;
some even submit phony write-ups or hire outside companies that specialize in online
reputation management to monitor and respond to comments. Review sites, in turn, work
to weed out bogus reviews.

Now, interest in the review sites is taking a new turn. As more travelers post detailed
comments on everything from room service to décor, hotels are looking at their postings
as market-research tools — sources of new ideas, feedback on new concepts and even
promotional material.

“What this does is give you the information you need to improve,” said Tony Fant,
president and chief operating officer of the Soho Grand and Tribeca Grand hotels in New
York. “You look at it, evaluate it and learn from it.”

For small hotel groups like his, Mr. Fant said that online hotel reviews have helped level
the playing field. “I have the same exposure through these Web outlets as Starwood,
Marriott or Hilton, and they give me access to millions of customers I didn’t have access
to,” he said.

Some hotels have taken to publishing TripAdvisor reviews on their own Web pages. In
response, TripAdvisor, which says it has a stockpile over five million reviews and
opinions, has started to offer them to hotels and other travel companies in order to
expand its reach. Last month it began allowing hotels to publish TripAdvisor reviews
directly on their own hotel Web sites through R.S.S., or Really Simple Syndication, which
transfers the comments directly, as they appear on TripAdvisor. So far about 200 hotels,
including the Barclay House in Vancouver and Chanters Lodge in Zambia, and at least
one hotel group, Affinia, have begun posting the reviews through R.S.S. Most of the
customer reviews these hotels receive on TripAdvisor are positive, making the new
feature an attractive option for them, regardless of the risk that some negative
comments are bound to creep in.

TripAdvisor says there is no opportunity for hotels to manipulate reviews because they
are automatically fed to the hotels as is, but it does allow hotels to post their own
responses to comments.

“The hotels are saying, ‘We have nothing to hide,’ ” said Henry H. Harteveldt, a travel
analyst at Forrester Research.

By publishing the TripAdvisor reviews on its site, Affinia Hotels hopes to reinforce the
message — to both customers and its own employees — that the guest’s experience is
important to the hotel. “It raises the stakes for everyone when we make it that open,”
said John Moser, Affinia’s chief marketing officer.

Since the reviews went live on its site, Affinia has begun developing a policy to monitor
and respond to negative TripAdvisor comments. In the last month the company has
begun asking general managers at its six hotels to monitor TripAdvisor and post
responses to negative comments within five days.

Not every hotel is paying so much attention to consumers’ reviews. Neither Marriott nor
Hilton has a formal corporate strategy in place for monitoring hotel review sites, though
both keep tabs on Flyertalk.com, a frequent-flier Web site where travelers obsess over
getting the most out of loyalty programs.

“We’ve got so many hotels it’s impossible to scan everything that’s going on,” said Bala
Subramanian, senior vice president for global distribution services for Hilton Hotels.
Hilton, he said, “makes a tremendous amount of investment in collecting feedback”
through customer surveys. But as more hotels do take careful notice of guest reviews
online — and even stake their reputations on them — posting one may be a surefire way
for a customer to get a hotel’s attention. “I can tell you that you’re going to get a
response,” said Mr. Moser of Affinia. When a complaint is out there on the Web, he
said, “there’s no one to sweep it under the rug.”

The Internet Power Grab
Everyone knows that the Internet is moving from free to fee. So why isn't the Internet
army fighting back?

From: Issue 61 | July 2002 | Page 98 | By: John Ellis

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The great transition that is taking place on the Internet -- from free to fee -- is now
gathering speed. You used to be able to listen to audio streams of Major League Baseball
for free. Not anymore. Now you have to buy something called Total Ticket at
www.mlb.com for $9.95 a month or make do with Gameday Audio for a onetime fee of
$14.95. You used to be able to read the Financial Times at www.ft.com for free. Not
anymore. Now you have to buy a subscription to read its "most valuable features," just
as you do for online content from the Wall Street Journal. Want extra storage space for
your Hotmail account? Please remit $12.95 annually.

There's a blog that chronicles all of this at http://theendoffree.com. It reports on the
latest converts from "free to fee and beyond." If you read it every day, you can see the
trend unfolding in real time, right before your eyes.

This was inevitable. None of the dotcom revolutionaries ever thought through the
permission-advertising model that might have enabled "forever free" Web content. The
Webmasters went with a broadcast-advertising model instead. White space on a Web
page was filled with billboards that no one wanted or needed. The Webmaster's response
to consumer indifference was to make the advertising ever more invasive, which made it
ever more annoying. We have gotten to the point where "traditional" advertising on the
Web is probably an exercise in bad brand management. And so the end of free content
nears.

This trend, from free to fee, is emblematic of a more ominous development in the
Internet arena. Bill Taylor, one of Fast Company's founding editors, calls it "the
counterrevolution": mature companies in mature categories striking back at Silicon
Valley technology and the pricing-power collapse that it implies. They are doing so in
Washington, DC and in state capitols, where the technology crowd is weakest and most
clueless. Their efforts are meeting with considerable success.

To understand what is happening, it's necessary to back up a few years. Back then, on
Sand Hill Road, where the top venture firms met the top technologists, there was the
sense that the work that they were engaged in represented the future. It was the future.
Their technology would reinvent every business and shift the paradigm of every
enterprise. And nothing could stop it or them.

They had no use for politics, no use for government, no use for the old rules. But it was
more than that. They were openly disdainful of government regulation of any kind, and
they didn't bother to hide their contempt. When the National Security Agency raised
concerns about unbreakable encryption software, Valley technologists sniffed that their
concerns were the product of old thinking. The whole nation-state thing was so retro. The
digerati weren't really Americans, after all; they were citizens of a wider world. They
were global technologists. They could sell to whomever they chose. And they did.

Just as their technology raised security concerns, it also threatened two established
businesses in particular. The first was old-fashioned telephony -- the telephone business
was the choke point of Internet technology. With billions of dollars of Wall Street cash,
thousands of miles of information-superhighway fiber-optic cable was laid into the ground
between major hubs. The problem was the so-called last mile: the wire into your home.
Most homes were equipped with three wires: electric, telephone, and cable television.
Most people connected to the Web over a standard phone line. Converting that line into a
high-speed-access line was crucial to the success of all of the other Internet technologies
that the Valley had to offer.

But there was a problem. Regional Bell Operating Companies made their money on local
and long-distance telephony. The Valley was proclaiming that the days of such services
being fee-based were numbered; in the future (through Internet-Protocol telephony), all
voice calls would be free. And it was true. If every last mile was connected by fiber-optic
wire or high-speed cable, every voice call could be free.

The RBOCs, of course, did not see such a future as beneficial to their financial health. So
they went to work at the state and federal level to forestall the implementation of this
technology until they could control it. RBOCs have state and federal political relationships
that are the envy of every industry, with the possible exception of the electric utilities.
They own most state legislatures, and they know everyone and anyone who matters at
the federal level. They have been dealing with regulators since the first part of the last
century, and they've been contributing to the political war chests of committee chairmen
for as long as anyone can remember.

And so the Tauzin-Dingell bill, a blatantly pro-RBOC piece of legislation that granted the
Baby Bells the more or less exclusive right to build out DSL access, passed the U.S.
House of Representatives this spring by a comfortable margin. This success came on top
of an FCC regulatory ruling that favored the RBOCs on building out DSL access. Tauzin-
Dingell will probably not pass the Senate in its current form, but when and if it gets to a
House-Senate conference committee, the betting among political professionals in
Washington is that something favorable to the RBOCs will emerge.

This outcome would have seemed unimaginable three years ago, when Internet
technology seemed like a tsunami. But today, the outcome seems almost predictable.
After all, the last-mile logjam hasn't been broken. Voice calls are still not free. And the
companies that will build out the high-speed-access system to most homes will be the
very companies that did so little to make it available (at an affordable price) for so long.

The other empire striking back is the entertainment industry. Bad as Tauzin-Dingell might
be, it pales in comparison with what Hollywood is proposing. Threatened by companies
such as TiVo and Napster and copying technology that essentially Napsterizes everything
from movies to television to live programming, the entertainment industry called in all of
its chits and asked for passage of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which was
enacted in 1998. It is now asking for passage of the Consumer Broadband and Digital
Television Promotion Act, introduced by Senator Fritz Hollings (D-SC). That would require
computer makers to build copyright-protection technology into all personal computers. It
could also make illegal all software that enables copying. The target of the latter piece of
legislative legerdemain is the Free Software movement itself.

The Hollings bill is breathtakingly far-reaching legislation, but it is a measure of
Hollywood's clout that California senator Dianne Feinstein -- formerly the mayor of San
Francisco -- has cosponsored it. If it passes both houses of Congress, the Hollings bill will
likely be vetoed by President Bush. But that's not the point. The point is that legislation
that would effectively devalue Apple Computer (whose new iMacs are capable of copying
music and video and sharing those copies over the Internet) may well pass both houses
of Congress. That's real power. There aren't many industries that can cut themselves
that kind of deal.

With free content heading toward extinction, free telephony on hold, free sharing of
private property under attack, the design of personal computers in question, and the
Free Software movement in the gun sights, you might think that Silicon Valley would be
organizing itself to fight back on the political front. But they're late to the game. And
remarkably, they still haven't appealed to the public for support. There is no widespread
public campaign to defeat Tauzin-Dingell. There is no widespread campaign to defeat the
Hollings bill. And there are no grassroots efforts on the Web. The Internet army, which is
enormous, hasn't been engaged or conscripted.

There was a time when Silicon Valley could ignore politics. But that was then. These
days, their business depends on it. Either they get a mitt and get in the game, or they
lose. And if they lose, we -- the Internet army -- lose big-time.

John Ellis (jellis@fastcompany. com) is a writer and consultant based in New York. Read
his weekday musings (www.johnellis.blogspot.com) or find a catalog of his columns, here.


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Copyright © 2006 Mansueto Ventures LLC. All rights reserved.
Fast Company, 375 Lexington Avenue.,New York , NY 10017

加拿大的第一份正式工作还要等一段时间, 转眼就已经找到了。

今天下午刚刚接到的Offer, 是下个学期也就是秋天的工作。

不过夏天的这一份还是正在进行时, 不知道什么时候能找到呢。

不过我会努力的!

大家也要加油哦!! ^^

 

今年很幸运的过年正好放假, 往年都没有这么好。

不知道大家都想干什么呢?

先跟大家拜个早年吧!

新年好!!!^^

 

<)  ^^  (>

  ((..))        年快乐!!!!!!!

      - 

 

 

 

 

 

 翅膀尖上还没有上色，不过不要急．等反面也煎的差不多了以后，就可以起锅了．不过还没好哦！

 

 

 

 煎好的小翅膀还要进一下烤箱．烤盘里放上锡纸，把鸡翅放上去，在上面撒上孜燃粒，黑胡椒，辣椒粉。我们家的烤箱我用350就够了。6分钟翻一下，再等六分钟就可以拿出来了。

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

每天带着期待的心情等待天明,

遗憾掺杂着幸福中迎来迟暮

等待,等待明日

想说, 这便是......