It has been rather quiet on onlinetravelandhospitality.com last weeks, therefore I thought it would a good idea to share with you what has been on my mind and what kept me from posting regular updates on this blog.

This article is part of an ongoing project about social media used within hospitality and travel industries. Purpose of this project is defining social media and looking for examples of companies which implemented social media in their marketing efforts.

Last week Air France KLM, European based airline holding company and one of the largest airline companies worldwide, launched what they claim to be the first social network launched by the airline industry. All usual social elements such as sharing, recommendations and reviews flights, hotels, restaurants and destinations are included. Next to that, customers are able to display flights booked through Air France KLM on their profiles, find other members on the same flight and find members at similar destinations.

Should Air France KLM instead of setting up their own branded social network have collaborated with existing full featured social travel networks such as dopplr and tripit? 

Last week business oriented social network site LinkedIn launched its opensocial application platform called InApps as an answer to the similar platforms found on competing social network sites such as Myspace and Facebook. Major difference between the application platform on competing sites is the intention and quality LinkedIn is looking for with these applications; all applications will have to go through a quality assurance process before being accepted by LinkedIn and all applications are limited to business purposes.

At the launch of the platform LinkedIn is featuring several interesting applications such as a presentation sharing application from slideshare and google presentations, feed articles from Wordpress, reading list application from Amazon and several application which were developed inhouse. Also, one of the more interesting applications available at launch was a trip application from social travel website TripIt.

TripAdvisor, online travel community and well known for their user generated guest reviews, is currently running a campaign in which they are giving users the opportunity to decide on how the company should spend 1 million dollar on good causes.

For this ‘take only pictures leave only footprints’ initiative, Tripadvisor selected five travel related nonprofits organizations, from which users can now select an organization they wish to support. The total amount of 1 million dollar will be shared among the different organizations, where the height of the donation is determined by the number of votes.

This article is part of an ingoing project about social media used within hospitality and travel industries.  Purpose of this project is defining social media and looking for examples of companies which successfully implemented social media in their marketing efforts.

One of the major cruise companies worldwide is Miami-based Carnival Cruise Lines. Carnival Cruises is part of Carnival Corporation & PLC, the world’s largest cruise company with over 80.000 employees and about 13 billion U.S. Dollar revenue recorded in 2007. Carnival Cruises is operating 22 ships which are expected to carry over 2.6 million passengers this year.

Already following Carnival Cruises through microblogging service Twitter for quite some time, we already got a taste of how Carnival Cruises is implementing social media in its marketing activities. In this article we are elaborating on what specific social media Carnival is using and learning how Carnival is interacting with consumers through social media.