Presentation and The End

This is my final task for this blog. I have found blog writing very interesting and maybe one day, if I had something to blog about, I could start blogging voluntarily.  Some of the blog posts are better than others, I just didn't have drive to make them good.. The Twitter post is my favorite!

Now the last problem is how to link my presentation in this blog, cause the presentation is on Google Drive. We'll see about that!

Here is my presentation!

How about Twitter?

Even my mom uses Twitter though I have never. Okay, maybe I'm just a little late with all these new programs and social media tools, but now I'm going to find out what Twitter is all about. Why people like to use it and what are all those "hash-tags" in my favorite magazine..

Signing in in Twitter was pretty easy. I was confused because I had to find some people to follow before I was even in the Twitter. Can someone find me on Twitter if I follow them? Aaaaarghhh this is so confusing! Then I found a button to skip a question.. So I wouldn't have to pick all those sites to follow. Well at least there is now something going on in my Twitter account, cause there is constantly new tweets popping.

This pic is taken when I had already found some sites to follow, and I was asked to tell something about myself. And I was also supposed to add a picture, but I didn't. I can add it later, if I want to.

Making of Twitter account

And then I was in. Anxiety level true the sealing, also cause my whole name was in sight. What if somebody finds me, follows me? Quickly, find the settings and change the name. I was trying to come up with a name that nobody would ever try to find and even though they find it, they would notice that it's not worth to read or follow. My name became Turhaursula. I also managed to change the settings so that nobody could find my twitter or tweets (a messages in Twitter are called tweets). So now it's kind of a diary? Anyhow I'm not so anxious anymore. Notice that even using Facebook is hard for me so this is a super big leap for me in the world on social media.

My first tweet! So proud of myself!

I'm still not sure why people like to use Twitter. Well yes, it's easy to follow your favorite actors and singers and TV-series, but I just still don't get it. One of my good friends is also using Twitter, but she haven't really give me a good reason why. So much time that one doesn't know how to use it, maybe?

Now I found something interesting. One of those sites I'm following on Twitter is Yle Urheilu, finnish TV channel's sports news. And now I'm getting all the latest news from Yle Sport. That could come handy during next weekend's Finland vs. Sweden Track and Field contests...

Some interesting news, some a little bit less interesting..

Unfortunately I did the account in Finnish, and decided to follow Finnish sites, so most of the tweets are in Finnish. Now I tweeted something in English, just for fun! I can find my profile when i click a button "minä" (me in Finnish). And this is how it looks like:

The image of a lock after my "name" means that my account is private and nobody can find it. I think I'm gonna leave it that way for a while. At first I thought I'd delete the account after I've done this exercise, but I'm not sure about that anymore. Maybe I'll come up with some great ideas of using it, when I think about this for a while.

I think Twitter could be very useful in a travel company! You can use it for advertising and if you get someone to follow you on Twitter, one will see all your tweets on one's wall. And with wall I mean the starting page of a Twitter account. So if you get followers, it can be a very powerful source of marketing. Many companies are using Twitter and almost in every TV commercial there is a Twitter-logo and a text "Find us on Twitter". I think that if a company is not using Twitter, they are as poor in marketing as I'm in using social media.. But I'm getting there, and so should they! 

Hotelzon

We are learning to use Hotelzon, and we had to do some tasks. I did the tasks together with Eeva. Here is the picture from what we did.

Original booking

Question 1: When do you normally use Offline registration?

Question 2: Why do you see it is important to use it?

Booking with changes

Question 3: Why is it important that you update the booker information in data base (in every change situation)?

It's important to have all the changes visible in the booking history.

Question 4: Write in your blog what you can analyze in your booking history.

When you check the reservation history you can find all the changes and additions as well as the original booking. You can also see who made the changes.

Cancelling the reservation

Question 5: What is the purpose of these negotiated rates e.g. in a situation when you are making a reservation in Hotelzon data base?

"The company negotiated rates -page displays all the hotels and/or hotel chains that offer company negotiated rates and have already been defined for the company in question. List displays hotel chain, hotel name or number of selected hotels within the chain, negotiated rate code, possible corporate code and commission percent or net rate information. If company negotiated rate is available for all business units within a company, it is marked with “Yes” under the column “BU”."

Help tool, Hotelzon 

Question 6:  How many and what kind of reporting do you find in Hotelzon?

There are five reports in Hotelzon; who/where/when, Booking volume, Booking value, Exception policy and Benchmark reports.

Help Tool 2, Hotelzon

 
Question 7:

After I made the search with only the name Prince, I found many many hotels all around the world. When I added Thailand to the address box it got easier to find the right hotel because there are less options. The hotel they were looking for was probably Prince Palace Hotel because it was the only one that had prince in it (others had princesses or things like that).  

Question 8:

How much is: 150 US Dollars (USD) in Euros (EUR)? -102

How much is: 150 Euros in Swedish Krona (SEK)? -1566

How much is: 1 000 Thailand Bahts (THB) in Euros (EUR)? -20.50

How much is: 200 Norway Krone (NOK) in US Dollars (USD)? -35

Getting to know Hotelzon

Case: Hotelzon

On Friday's class we talked about Hotelzon, which is - to put it shortly - the leading hotel distribution technology provider online. The idea is to provide direct connections between the hotels and customers. Right from the start the whole idea felt a little hard to understand and because there are so many aspects to it, and the whole lecture and all the material was in English, it made everything even more confusing. That being said, after reading and translating and trying to understand things in Finnish the picture started getting clearer and clearer.

Co-operation

Companies like Hotelzon bring together so many other companies from different branches of the industry, so the co-operation between these companies are crucial for making the company work like it should. Pegasus solutions is one of the two most important partners of Hotelzon. It's a company that provides technology and services for hotels, for example reservation systems or electronic distribution services.

"Pegasus Solutions is the single largest processor of electronic hotel transactions, delivering advanced and affordable connectivity and distribution solutions to nearly 100,000 hotels worldwide. Pegasus connects hotels to crucial sources of business, facilitating almost $16 billion for its clients annually. In additional to foundational global distribution system (GDS) access and online connectivity, Pegasus delivers online, social marketing and booking solutions through its Open Hospitality division, industry-preferred global commission processing, and powerful reservation tools to convert and capture bookings. As a trusted partner in generating guest room demand and sales, Pegasus also offers hotels actionable business intelligence through its Pegasus View Market Performance reports to help hotels understand and respond to changing market conditions."

 -Pegasus Solutions

The other important technology partner is business services company Travelport. They have customers from all the branches of traveling industry.

"Travelport is a global, broad-based business services provider that serves companies in every segment of the travel industry. As one of the world’s largest travel content aggregators and distributors, and a leading provider of critical transaction processing solutions, Travelport powers the travel industry on a global scale by connecting buyers and sellers through agency, online and corporate travel channels.

Travelport is predominantly a global distribution system (GDS) business, which operates in approximately 170 countries and includes the internationally recognized Worldspan™ and Galileo™ GDS platforms. Travelport also owns approximately 48 percent of leading online travel company Orbitz^® Worldwide (NYSE: OWW), and is a joint venture partner in eNett™, a leading provider of innovative and integrated payment solutions tailored to meet the unique needs of the travel industry."

-Travelport 

KDS and Hotelzon co-operation

 

"KDS is a leading international provider of Travel & Expense (T&E) management systems for private and public sector organizations."

-KDS website 

In 2010, KDS and Hotelzon decided to start co-operating. Joining forces is very smart from both of the companies - KDS gets to offer their clients more - even better quality - hotels with reasonable prices. Hotelzon on the other hand hopes to increase their visibility and business through the co-operation with KDS. Together they can offer the best solutions for their clients, and even expand into new markets. 

Hotelzon's Blog

Hotelzon's blog section, (that can be found here) was pretty interesting and if I had enough time to read it more carefully, I'm sure I could have found a lot of useful information and things that are relevant to my studies, for example. There are many authors on their blog so the posts are variable and one thing that caught my eye was a blog post, 5 essential things to do after a trade show. There were photos from Matkamessut and the list was interesting to read. 

Playing with Travius

Travius was created to make networking easier for tourism related companies. It is used by more than 120 companies, mostly in Finnish Lapland. It can be used in orders, webstore managing, customer management etc. Here are my screenshots of the exercise. 

MTI Alumni days, different school day

MTI alumni days were held in our campus yesterday. At the same time there were entrance exams in Degree Programme in Tourism and also Green Campus event so there was a lot of people walking around in our campus.

The alumni meeting is organized to connect local business people to us, the students. MTI wants to keep in touch with their former students and also help MTI's students today to contact with different companies in a field or tourism.

Alumni day was fun because it was different from our normal school day. First we had coffee and some little bits to eat. The hosts had made cakepops witch were amazing! I think I'm going to find that recipe.. Unfortunately I don't have any pictures of those.We also had non-alcoholic drinks and they tasted like juice but were really pretty.

In the lobby there were also some info points about recycling. We were able to sign on their post list to get free items. I got a logo to put on my student overalls and a shopping list magnet.

Funniest part was a recycling point were we had a chance to do some crafts. I made a bracelet from soda bottle. It was cut to a ring form and the edges were taped. Then i covered it with orange string and glued some green sequins to it to make it bling a little. I'm going to wear it at the 1st of May.

We had also a seminar in auditorium. All the alumnis were there and they had a little presentation about a topic given to them earlier. All of the presentations were quite interesting and the seminar was nice overall. Most memorable was the presentation hosted by Santa Park's owner because he was so happy all the time.

Free stuff I got from the event. My "home made" bracelet, patch and a magnet.

The alumni day would have continued with some kinds of workshops but we left home after the seminars. Over all  the day was okay, but if I graduate and end up working in tourism business, I'm not coming to those kind of meetings unless I'm forced to.

Newsletter exercise

 Take a look at our new newsletter here.