Tag: live-tweet

Categories
Tips

What did 32,633 readers choose as the best in travel? Answers here.

This is the 21st year of the Condé Nast Traveler Readers’ Choice Awards, one of the year’s biggest events for the magazine (full results will be listed in the November print issue.) Readers gave collective feedback on 9,168 hotels, resorts, cities, islands, cruise lines, airlines and car rental agencies.

Thanks to Consumer Travel Editor Wendy Perrin, I was flown to New York City (on JetBlue – hurray for seatback TV and satellite radio plus legroom!) to live-tweet the event on my Twitter stream (here are the awards-related tweets on Twitter’s search engine, using “#rca08” which is a “hashtag” used to track a single topic.)

Not all winners were announced at the ceremony (only those who were able to send representatives to the event) but here is the complete list of awardees by poll ranking and here they are on a Google Map. I’m confining this post to those announced the night of October 15, as I typed like a maniac and grappled with a few WiFi and power issues.  My blogging compadres from Jaunted were also there somewhere, but I missed them in the crush.

Since I’m interested in how tourism organizations use social media, I’ve also included URLs to any official blogs that I could find.

Cities

Islands

  • Best Caribbean/Atlantic island: Bermuda (other finalists were St. Barts and St. John.)
  • Best Pacific Island: Maui (other finalists were Kauai and Bora Bora.)

Hotels

  • Best US hotel: The Peninsula Chicago (other finalists were the Elizabeth Pointe Lodge, Amelia Island FL and the Stephanie Inn, Cannon Beach OR.)
  • Best Asian hotel: The Oberoi Udaivilas, Rajasthan India (other finalists were the Peninsula Hong Kong and another Oberoi property, the Amarvilas in Agra, India.)

Resorts

  • Best Resort in Asia: Four Seasons Tented Camp Golden Triangle in Chiang Rai, Thailand (er, no, this is not really a camp for kids, and when I did a currency conversion of their rates from Thai baht into US dollars, I saw a figure of $2,152.89 per night, not including tax or tips. Wow.) Other finalists were the Four Seasons Bali at Sayan and the Oberoi Vanyavilas, Rajasthan.
  • Best Resort, Atlantic Ocean: The One&Only Ocean Club, Bahamas (with an annoying all-Flash Web site that drove me nuts auto-playing music and not providing distinct URLs for each property.) Other finalists include Pink Sands, Bermuda and The Reefs, Bermuda.
  • Best Resort, Mexico: A tie between the One&Only Palmilla and The Tides, Riviera Maya
     (the other finalist was the JW Marriott Resort and Spa in Cancun.)
  • Best Resort, Caribbean: The Ritz-Carlton Grand Cayman (other finalists were Curtain Bluff, Antigua and Petit St. Vincent Resort, Grenadines.)
  • Best Resort, Hawaii: The Four Seasons Maui at Wailea (other finalists were, um, two other Four Seasons properties….at this point I’m wondering, are there NO awesome places that aren’t chains? OK, it was the Four Seasons Hualalai on the Big Island and the Four Seasons Lana’i The Lodge at Koele.)

Continue reading “What did 32,633 readers choose as the best in travel? Answers here.”

Categories
Blog

Live, from New York, it’s Condé Nast Traveler!

CNTraveler Readers\' Choice AwardsYes, the annual Condé Nast Traveler 2008 Readers’ Choice Awards will be coming to you live from their big awards ceremony on the evening of October 15, because I’m going to be there to “live-tweet” the event on my Twitter stream.

That woman in evening attire at the New York Public Library XYZ swanky Manhattan venue (details to follow on ceremony location) who is supersonically typing on her laptop? That will be me.

Hopefully my Merlot and crudités won’t get dumped onto the keyboard.   🙂

I’ll be sending up-to-the-minute accounts of who won which award for hotels, cruise lines, airlines, islands and cities across the globe. I’ll tell you how the crowd is reacting, what the award winners say and any other fun tidbits that come across my radar.

Over 30,000 people vote in this survey, and I also plan to write a blog post about the woman behind the questions and the methodology used to determine the winners.  This isn’t that guy who won a fake wine award; this is a carefully vetted process with input from savvy readers.

Last year, for example, the readers of the magazine and Web site chose Sydney, Australia as their favorite city worldwide, and San Francisco as their favorite US city. Here’s some more of the 2007 list on BootsnAll’s Business Travel Logue.

I plan to do as many on-the-fly interviews as I can, with a focus on two areas:

  • The magazine is pretty upscale, and you know that’s not how I travel. How can a budget-minded person, especially with kids, take advantage of the companies and properties that are chosen as winners?  Is there room for us at the Gucci table?  I think there is, Wendy has convinced me that there is, and I’m going to find out how for you.
  • I’d like to know what the high-scoring companies are doing to establish a presence on the Web in social media. Do they blog? Are they on Twitter? Facebook?  Are their personnel on LinkedIn? How do they reach out to customers in a Web 2.0 manner?

I’m actually not the first to live-tweet for Traveler — that honor goes to my friend and fellow travel blogger Pam Mandel of Nerd’s Eye View, who did a fabulous job of live-tweeting the recent World Savers Congress (here are most of the posts that everyone tweeted to cover that event, so you can see what it looks like.)

See you in New York in October….