Yankee Magazine's New Leaf-Peeping App

AP: Yankee magazine is going mobile with a new app for chasing fall color.

The magazine, which released its annual fall issue Tuesday, is also sponsoring a contest to pick the best foliage town in New England.

Last year, the magazine's editors named Kent, Conn., as the best town in the region for fall color, but this year the public is invited to make the choice by nominating and voting via YankeeFoliage.com. The "Readers' Choice Best Foliage Town in New England" winner will be announced on Sept. 28.

Yankee's new Leaf Peepr app, free and downloadable for iPhones and Droids, lets users check color status by region or zip code, and also offers interactive elements like the ability to upload new reports and photos to YankeeFoliage.com's fall foliage map. Leaf color on the Leaf Peepr app is coded as green, turning, moderate, peak, fading and gone.

The YankeeFoliage.com website also offers more than 30 scenic routes across New England, including 12 new road trips for 2011. There are driving tours for each of the New England states — Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island and Vermont — as well as recommended routes for certain regions such as Moosehead Lake in Maine and Route 100 in Vermont.

Features in the magazine's September/October issue include a look at the Topsfield, Mass., annual fair, this year set for Sept. 30-Oct. 10, said to be the oldest agricultural fair in New England, dating back to 1820; a list of five notable country stores in Vermont (Willey's in Greensboro Village, Currier's in Glover, Dan & Whit's in Norwich, Floyd's in Randolph Center, and Warren in Warren Village); and tips for carving a pumpkin (use an ice-cream scooper and scouring pad to clean it out, cut the lid from the bottom, not the top, and seal the cut edges of your design with Vaseline).

Editor Mel Allen writes in the magazine that he hopes the issue will inspire readers "savor a cider doughnut, or take a camera to a marsh or a lake in the early morning, or even set out to get lost for a while in the maze of country roads somewhere."

To vote in Yankee's contest for best foliage town, click on "Vote for your favorite town" on the lefthand side of YankeeFoliage.com. Type a town name in the white box next to "Choose your favorite foliage town," then click on the correct place from the list of choices that pops up.

Are Travel Agents Obsolete?

The Economist: On Thursday, President Barack Obama said this during a town hall meeting in Atkinson, Illinois:

"One of the challenges in terms of rebuilding our economy is businesses have gotten so efficient that—when was the last time somebody went to a bank teller instead of using the ATM, or used a travel agent instead of just going online? A lot of jobs that used to be out there requiring people now have become automated."

Travel agents flipped their lids. The American Society of Travel Agents wrote a letter to the White House, and Travel Leaders Group, another trade group representing travel agents, "strongly rebutted" the president in a press release. Here's ASTA's argument:

In its letter, ASTA informed the President that today, the U.S. travel agency industry "is comprised of nearly 10,000 U.S.-based travel agency firms operating in 15,000 locations. We have an annual payroll of $6.3 billion. Most importantly, our businesses produce full-time employment for more than 120,000 U.S. taxpayers."

Further, the U.S. travel agency industry:

• processes more than $146 billion in annual travel sales, accounting for more than 50 percent of all travel sold. This includes the processing of more than 50 percent of all airline tickets, more than 79 percent of tours and more than 78 percent of all cruises

• helps more than 144 million travelers get where they want to go each year.

It is true that travel agents are still a significant part of the American workforce, and $6.3 billion in annual payroll and 120,000 jobs are nothing to sniff at, especially in this economy. Suggesting that such a large number of Americans are doing a job that is no longer necessary was perhaps not the wisest move politically. But just as it's true that ATMs have changed the roles of bank tellers, so too have internet travel sites changed the travel agency industry. The number of agencies in America declined "from 32,000 in 1998 to somewhere in the vicinity of 20,000" by 2007, according to USA Today's David Grossman. The sector has seen further consolidation since then; as ASTA noted, the industry is now "comprised of nearly 10,000 U.S.-based travel agency firms."

Fewer agencies and industry-wide consolidation could be expected to lead to job losses even without technological change. The federal government, at least, doesn't foresee growth in the number of travel agents in the near future. America's Bureau of Labour Statistics projects that there will be about 1% fewer travel agents in 2018 than there were in 2008, despite population growth. IBISWorld, an industry research provider, believes that continued change in the industry will "effectively eliminate many smaller brick-and-mortar establishments," but there are good prospects for growth online.

The real challenge for travel agents going forward will be convincing younger business and leisure travellers who have never used anything other than a website to book travel that they can and should use an online travel agent. (Getting those folks to switch to using the phone or an in-person meeting to book travel seems like a lost cause.) There's a case to be made, but it won't be easy.

Russia Planning Out-Of-This-World Hotel

Reuters: A hotel in orbit, lunar sightseeing flights and luxury rides into the cosmos -- all are part of Russia's vision to ensure it is not left behind in the growing space tourism industry.

Russian firms unveiled their plans at the country's premiere air show this week at Zhukovsky, outside Moscow, saying the race was on to build a new craft to take people into space following the retirement of NASA's space shuttle in April.

RKK Energia unveiled plans for a replacement shuttle and Orbital Technologies said it hoped to build an orbiting hotel with room for seven guests by 2016. Other plans include flying tourists to the dark side of the moon and, by 2030, to Mars.

"Space tourism is a real and fast-growing business," said Sergei Kostenko, head of Russian firm Orbital Technologies, said at the MAKS air show. "Whoever builds the first new spaceship now will reap big dividends. "

Although Russia currently holds a monopoly on rides to space aboard its Soviet-designed Soyuz, it starts at a disadvantage .

Foreign experts say they doubt Russian firms can achieve their ambitious goals because they lack funding and even Russian officials said it would be hard to rival U.S. private sector firms now competing for contracts with NASA.

Funding for the U.S. space programme is much higher and NASA is expected to forge ahead with building a new generation of craft capable of travelling into deep space, with flights into low Earth orbit outsourced to private firms.

"The U.S. has more possibilities than us right now," said Alexander Derechin, deputy chief designer for Russia's partly state-owned space contractor RKK Energia.

He said the United States had made a "very wise decision" in planning a state-funded spaceship for deep-space flight and that Russia faced tough competition from companies such as Boeing Co and Lockheed Martin as well as start-up firms.

"But we must make a state-funded spaceship, though in such a way that it is also commercially competitive. It is a very difficult task," Derechin said.

RUSSIAN FIRMS AIM HIGH

A decade after it flew the first U.S. millionaire to space in 2001, Energia plans a six-person shuttle which it said would offer a softer landing for the super-rich than its 40-year-old Soyuz craft. It said it hoped it would be operating by 2015.

"People paying for the most expensive ticket in the world must be comfortable, not scared," said Vladimir Pirozhkov, who designed the model of the shuttle on show this week.

"This is just a glance at the future, but it is the ultimate transportation dream. It should be desirable."

Russia cannot sell tourist seats until 2013. It is carrying European and U.S. astronauts -- for more than $50 million a ride -- on its single-use Soyuz capsule, the only way of getting to the International Space Station since the U.S. shuttle was retired.

Russian officials say at least one of four U.S. companies at the forefront of the commercial space industry could develop space taxis by 2016 to take astronauts into low Earth orbit, up to an altitude of about 2,000 km (1,250 miles).

"We don't want to come late to the market," Derechin said.

Orbital Technologies said the planned new spacecraft would be able to take VIP clients to a hotel it plans to build in orbit 217 miles above Earth, catering for guests paying about $1 million for a five-day stay.

Orbital Technologies' Kostenko said the space hotel would be more comfortable than the space station, but did not promise luxury -- vacationers would still have to eat space food, take sponge baths and use vacuum toilets because of weightlessness.



DOUBTS OVER RUSSIAN GOALS

Foreign space officials and experts said they doubted Russian firms would be able to replace the 40-year-old Soyuz, much less launch a space platform, as quickly as planned.

Houston-based space consultant James Oberg said part of the publicity blitz at MAKS was "fantasy" aimed at helping Russian space agency Roskomos find foreign funding for new boosters, manned spacecraft and nuclear-powered Mars engines.

Roskomos' new head, Vladimir Popovkin, said at the air show the agency could no longer afford to spend nearly 50 percent of its budget on manned flights.

Oberg said Russia risked quickly losing its monopoly on transportation into space, adding: "This question is really worrying the more thoughtful Russian space strategists."

Russia "depends on an increasingly ageing workforce saddled with mostly obsolete ground equipment and a few basic 'old reliable' designs with little prospects for upgrade or improved economy," he said.

Marriott Looks to Video Game for Recruiting

Wall Street Journal: While it's not clear if "Farmville" ever did anything to inspire future farmers, Marriott International Inc. is hoping a hotel-themed online game could be a recruiting tool for the hotel industry.

At "My Marriott Hotel," orders stack up at the restaurant. Meanwhile, the manager has to decide how many pieces of shrimp to buy for the shumai. The kitchen runs out of croutons for the Caesar salad and there's not enough money for a new stove.

"They'll find that in fact this is a very intriguing business," said David Rodriguez, executive vice president for global human resources at Marriott, speaking about the game, which is making its debut this week on Facebook. The game "will demystify it."

Unlike Zynga Inc.'s "Farmville," which was developed as a revenue-generating game, Marriott's title is part of an emerging trend of using computer games for recruiting. Nearly a decade ago the U.S. military introduced America's Army, which proved to be a wildly popular and effective tool that cost very little, according to Ethan Mollick, a professor of management at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School who has written about the game.

Mr. Rodriguez declined to provide details on the cost of developing Marriott's game.

Siemens AG unit Siemens Industry Inc. in March brought "Plantville," which simulates the experience of being a manager for a bottling facility, a vitamin factory or a plant that builds trains.

Another genre of service-industry simulation games—sometimes called time-management games—turns the inner workings of a diner, hotel, nail salon or other type of service business into a game generally played on mobile devices.

In "Hotel Dash" from PlayFirst Inc., users simulate the actions of Flo, who rushes to deliver luggage, deliver room-service orders and decorate a dilapidated hotel into a more high-class venue.

More than Fun

Marriott says "My Marriott" will be more realistic.

"Those are great because they brand the hospitality industry and get people thinking about hotels and travel, but I think people are smart enough to know" the difference, said Susan Strayer, a human-resources branding expert at Marriott who helped develop its game with input from people within the company who operate restaurants and hotels.

"That's why our game is so appealing," Ms. Strayer said. "Not only am I having fun but I'm actually getting an understanding of what it takes to run a kitchen. "

Ms. Strayer's group at Marriott has the challenge of attracting newcomers to around 50,000 hotel positions this year, many in emerging markets such as India and China, which don't have strong hospitality-industry traditions.

The company hired Evviva Brands LLC, a recruitment-branding consulting firm, to develop a solution. Evviva Chief Executive David Kippen said he came up with the idea for a social-media game while on a market-research trip to India.

The first iteration includes only one game, which depicts a Marriott kitchen. The player buys ingredients, such as lettuce for the hamburgers and cheese for the spaghetti, after being given an array of options in quality and price. The player also hires staff, choosing from a range of experiences and salaries, and buys stoves and kitchen utensils. During rounds in the kitchen, players have to direct tickets to cooks and inspect food orders for quality before sending them out to customers.

The company says it will roll out games depicting other aspects of the hotel business and will introduce mobile-phone play next year.

Wharton's Prof. Mollick said most companies that have attempted such games have found it difficult to create a game that is enough fun to be effective marketing and realistic enough to attract the kinds of people to a job who would be suited to it.

The 'Holy Grail'

He said the "holy grail" of recruiting games—which would market a job and determine people who would be good at it—so far remains elusive.

Ms. Strayer said Marriott's game is designed to be purely marketing and shouldn't be confused with an attempt to evaluate and select employees. That doesn't mean there's not an important dose of reality, however.

"You get to see what kinds of decisions people have to make when they're running the hotel," Mr. Rodriguez said. "You better pay attention to inventory and make sure you're not running out of ingredients."

The Hotel Push for In-Room Movies

New York Times: At a dinner party in Tucson over the weekend, the subject of movies came up. The five friends there were all business travelers, all movie buffs.

One is semiretired but is still a frequent traveler and goes to movie theaters frequently. Yet, he is still unable to see a handful of the very latest and most talked-about movies. As a result of the archaic studio distribution systems, many of the cutting-edge films have not yet come to theaters outside of the major marquee cities like New York and Los Angeles.

Two of the others at the party, including myself, occasionally go to the movie theater but more often catch up on films later on DVD. The other two, very frequent international travelers, never go to theaters, and instead see movies, including current ones, on in-flight entertainment systems offered by many premium international airlines. Some of the systems offer more than 100 on-demand high-definition recent movies on big flat in-seat screens.

None of us, however, said we watched a movie in a hotel room.

That reality underscores challenges facing LodgeNet Interactive, the major supplier of hotel-room movies and television. Challenges also face the hotel industry itself, digging out of a recession, still perplexed about what guests are willing to pay for in in-room on-demand entertainment. The chains are also struggling to weigh the cost-benefit of investing in new hardware like big flat-screen high-definition screens for hundreds, or thousands, of rooms they may operate in any given hotel.

LodgeNet provides interactive video service in about 1.5 million rooms in 9,000 hotels in North America. This week, the company plans to announce a new initiative, VOD 2.0, to broaden its appeal to travelers.

Instead of selling a selection of video on-demand movies at a single price, LodgeNet has revamped its system to offer a wider range of movies at various price levels, including budget prices for older movies. But the main feature is a new-release feature that LodgeNet says will provide the earliest availability, outside of movie theaters, for a select number of movies.

This move comes just weeks after DirecTV, whose satellite TV service is mostly used in homes, introduced DirecTV Cinema, which charges $29.99 for high-definition newer movies like “Just Go With It,” starring Jennifer Aniston and Adam Sandler. It was available about 60 days after opening in theaters, and will become available on usual cable on-demand menus or on DVDs and Blu-ray. LodgeNet says its VOD 2.0 for hotels has a wider selection of these earliest nontheatrical-release movies, at a price of about half what DirecTV charges.

Will people pay this much for a hotel-room movie, especially as the trend rapidly grows in travelers bringing with them more sophisticated personal mobile technologies like iPads? With free cable television choices in rooms, with the Internet and myriad other diversions already available in ever-wider options on personal mobile devices, is there a real growth market for selling hotel-room movies?

In hotels, market research shows that “the consumer profile of the guest improves with more trips made and higher affluence; that this group is huge consumers of entertainment,” said Derek White, the president of LodgeNet’s Interactive division. “In important terms, they also are very important in helping to socialize new movies.”

He is referring to the argument that some airlines also make — that the studios should be working harder to get newer releases in front of business travelers. These travelers, like my friends, are movie buffs who spread their interest via word of mouth.

In general, movie theater owners, who have been big powers in Hollywood since the silent-film era, do not like any suggestion that might keep anyone away from the box office. But as on-demand personal and in-home video grows, battles over movie distribution schedules are intensifying.
Word of mouth recommendations from people with wide social networks, like business travelers, can actually be part of a newer movie’s promotion and “help these movies take hold” in the market, said Mr. White. “It won’t really steal business away from the main theaters, which is the big issue right now with premium VOD that has the theater owners up in arms.”

It’s going to be interesting to watch, so to speak. Right now, only 16 percent of LodgeNet’s hotel-room base has the requisite big-screen, high-definition TV sets. But as the hotel industry gains better economic traction, “the transition to high-def is really back in gear,” said Mr. White, who added: “For those hotel rooms that actually have gone to the flat screens and hi-def, we’re seeing 40 percent more revenue. You’re just more likely to plunk down $15 for a movie if you can enjoy it on a big beautiful screen in your room.”

Kayak Rated Fastest Travel Web Site

MSNBC: Just a few seconds make the difference between browsing for a plane ticket and buying one, according to travel experts. If you’re addicted to quick clicks, a new 15-month study has ranked the speed of travel companies’ websites – down to a millisecond.

The study, conducted by Compuware Gomez for USA Today, was based on the premise that many consumers will click away from a website if it’s too slow to load or complete a transaction. “Too slow” is not exactly poky. Quoting Forrester Research, the paper says online shoppers expect webpages to load in two seconds or less; 40 percent of shoppers will abandon a page that takes three or more seconds to appear.

“Customers simply don’t want to wait,” Forrester analyst Mike Gualtieri told USA Today. “There is a performance arms race among the travel websites because they know how important this is."

So, who’s winning the war? Kayak ranked as the fastest of all travel sites. With a homepage load time of 1.231 seconds, the booking service beat 45 other online travel agents and all airline and hotel sites.
Among the 12 airlines monitored, the top spots for speediest homepage went to AirTran at an average of 2.065 seconds, followed by Delta, Frontier and Hawaiian, all of which clocked in at under 2.8 seconds. Alaska Airlines was the slowest, at 5.12 seconds, although company spokeswoman Marianne Lindsey said the airline was posting faster times since redesigning its website in April.

On the hotel front, the study looked at 47 booking sites and found that 10 beat the two-second mark. They included Marriott, Best Western, Holiday Inn and Hotels.com, with Marriott and Best Western taking first and second, respectively.