This week... Are travellers losing faith in user reviews? Google breaks its own rules and pays the price and Facebook launch Facebook Cards.

Another week has started which means of course it’s time for another edition of ‘This Week’. The year has only just begun and already lots of things are happening in both travel and technology. To make sure you don’t miss anything we’ve picked out the best bits of the industry news, we hope you enjoy!

CWT Digital News:

Big 10 Winners: We’re very pleased to announce Mundy Cruising is the winner of our Mobile Web App. Mundy Cruising are a cruise retailer specialising in the luxury end of cruising. We are looking forward to working with Mundy on this exciting new product.

Big 10: Our next Big 10 offers the chance to win a free Website Performance Audit which involves our team taking a look at the design, usability and online marketing elements of your website to identify how you should be directing your traffic, unique visits, time spent on your site and conversion rates. We will open up entry for this competition this Friday and the closing date will be the 1st February so make sure you get your entries in.  

Travel News:

Cruise News: Pilkington to leave CCS-6th Jan- Mark Pilkington is to leave his position of Head of Sales at Complete Cruise Solutions after a successful 10 years in the role. It has not been confirmed where Pilkington is moving to but it is believed not to be cruise related.

Have travellers developed distrust in user reviews?-6th Jan- A recent survey by Vision Critical which questioned 2,000 UK adults revealed increasing distrust with user reviews online. Most significant findings from the survey were that only 19% always trust reviews and a mere 20% trust holiday rating systems. A significant trend from the survey was that anonymity of reviewers can lead to distrust of the source, therefore making the review invaluable. At a time when so many OTA's are investing in on-site reviews these stats are an interesting consideration. If you want to read the full article you can do so here.

Expedia believes Hotel Finder is beneficial-6th Jan- There has been much speculation and debate over Google’s Hotel Finder and if it really does benefit the travel industry and according to a recent article, Expedia believes there is potential in the new tool. Expedia has started advertising on Hotel Finder alongside other big players such as Booking.com, Hotels.com and Priceline and have claimed that with lower CPC costs and less competition the channel is proving effective. Of course it is important to consider that travel sites are only considered to advertise on Hotel Finder if they ‘have substantial supply to participate’, implying that a wide range of properties is required. So although it’s good news that Hotel Finder is proving to have its benefits, it would seem that these benefits are only available to the big players.

Technology News:

Google breaks its own rules and demotes Chrome from search-5th Jan- Google were in the spotlight last week when they breached their own search rules by paying for links and sponsored posts on various popular blogs promoting the Google Chrome browser. The links were quickly picked up by Search Engine Land, a leading blog on SEM. Shortly after being discovered Google have publicly released a statement stating that ‘We’ve investigated and are taking manual action to demote www.google.com/chrome and lower the site’s PageRank for a period of at least 60 days’. Since this, Google has now disappeared from the top search rankings for terms such as ‘browser’ and the page rank of Chrome has now decreased from a 9 to a 6.

Facebook Cards to launch- 5th January- Facebook is now taking its business offline with new Facebook cards. After forming an alliance with Moo.com, the two created a joint venture in creating business cards which are based on your timeline images and posts. The cards are customisable and can use multiple images, quotes and posts from your Facebook. The idea behind these cards is ‘to allow Facebook users to have a unique stock of business cards to pair the right images for the right business or social occasions’. The cards will be available from 5pm this Thursday and Moo.com will be offering the first 200,000 Facebook users free 50 cards which usually cost £10.

That’s it from this week we hope you enjoyed our update, as usual you can keep up to date with us during the week by following us on Twitter and like us on Facebook. Hope you have a great rest of the week.