Three years ago we all held our breath as 2009 opened for business and waited for the ground to open up and send the travel industry hurtling into the abyss. And obligingly, it did. Having crawled tenaciously back out of the hole through the continuing uncertainty of 2010 and 2011 many of us had the same sense of impending doom as 2012 opened its eyes for the first time. Surely the financial market chainsaw that has been threatening to bring large countries crashing down like giant redwoods would finally start wreaking havoc in our secluded woodland of travellers and guests?

And then suddenly....nothing happened. I know it's early days but the signs are encouraging. The latest stats published by Pegasus and Travelclick suggest that the upward trend of recent months - in both corporate and leisure sectors - will continue for the foreseeable future. It is indeed strange weather; more like a tornado picking off specific vulnerable targets (whither Thomas Cook?) than the 2009 hurricane that demolished everyone's houses. And let's have a quiet moment remembering one of those tornado victims from outside our industry. Farewell then, Kodak. Not so much the victim of recession as the relentless juggernaut of evolving technology. Digital did for them. Ironically, the digital camera market is now itself under severe pressure as people switch to using their inbuilt smartphone cameras.

So whether the threat is recession, sovereign debt, geo-political upheaval, terrorism, technological revolution or plain old competitive activity, let's hope and pray we all ride the inevitable stormy seas with our sails intact. Happy 2012!

There is London and there is London Docklands. The former is the most vibrant, cosmopolitan, influential capital city in the world. The latter is a barren, God-forsaken wasteland where real life has had both the real and the life sucked out of it. Even the DLR trains seem depressed, shuffling around the network reluctantly and unreliably while their Jubilee Line cousins speed in and gratefully back out into the Metropolis. I contemplate this contrast every November when the World Travel Market rolls round again. As a Brit, there's always a feeling of local's embarrassment when accompanying the world's travel community as it negotiates the tortuous daily commute from comfortable West End hotel room, through Checkpoint Canary, to the gulag of Custom House. As many have commented, what hope for the Olympics?

Somehow the WTM itself - once a proud citizen of SW5 - has taken on the character of its surroundings. Arriving at Excel for registration last Monday morning, we weary travellers were (as usual) forced to descend an outdoor iron staircase into the bowels of this giant grey shed, then to endure a long walk along concrete corridors, through an underground car park, only to be faced with an endless line of fellow prisoners waiting to be strip searched and showered before being issued a pass. OK, I made up that last bit. But it was a really long line and there were only 3 people on the registration desk (sponsored by Greece perhaps?).

Once inside the halls, I headed directly for the Global Village where once upon a time the world's hotel groups gathered. Sadly these days it's more Village than Global. Most of the big chains have gone and their footprint has been gobbled up by OTAs, bed banks and channel management companies. Still, the silver lining of any WTM is in the silver hair of increasingly aged, long-standing industry friends and colleagues. WTM, for now, remains one of the best networking events in Europe. It's just a pity that even us Brits have to travel to another country to attend it.

Back in the good old days a hotel could abuse its clientele with relative impunity; anything from rubbery chicken in the restaurant to a rude receptionist, even the death or dismemberment of a guest could be swept under the (filthy) carpet with barely a ripple of interest to anyone beyond the unfortunate victim. These days, it only takes one unsightly pubic hair in the shower of an otherwise spotless bathroom to send the world wide web into a frenzy of uploaded images, self-righteous pronouncements about 'appalling hygiene standards' and tales of infants too traumatized to take a bath. Result? Plunging TripAdvisor ratings and plunging revenue as potential guests head for hair-free alternative accommodation.

The only remedy available for the hotel is to explore the new dark art of Reputation Management. So, for example, publish statistics from an independent research company demonstrating that 99.99% of the hotel's showers show no traces of pubic presence, or send the housekeeping team for 'Pubic Hair Recognition' training and post their certificates online to prove it. Hopefully some creative CRM will steer the ship back to profitability.

The only remedy until now that is...

...because an enterprising insurance company has just launched a policy called Hotel Reputation Protection Policy 2.0. The policy will cover losses of up to $35m caused by adverse publicity, including both lost business (measured by RevPar Index) and the cost of crisis management consultants. What a marvellous concept! But why stop there? There's no end of risk to running a hotel and all sorts of good reasons for not achieving RevPar targets. This could be a very lucrative seam to mine for insurance companies, so here's a few ideas to get the ball rolling..

1. Owners Expectations cover. Having installed flat screen TVs in all rooms, your owner now expects ADR to increase by a minimum 50%, an assumption based on the entirely reasonable commercial proposition that he wants his money back quickly and someone has to pay for it. The policy will cover the difference between real world RevPar and LaLa Land RevPar.

2. Bad Sales Team cover. Everyone knows that good sales people are worth their weight in gold and desperately difficult to find and retain. So why waste your time? Go ahead and employ the laziest, dimmest dreamer of them all who doesn't know her BARs from her elbow and let her fill the hotel with Groupons. We'll cover the difference in average rate between what was sold and what would have been sold had you employed the right person in the first place.

3. Unfair Competition cover. Results would be so much better if it wasn't for the fact that your comp set is comprised of higher quality hotels in more convenient locations that have been more recently refurbished. Not only will we cover you for the RevPar you would be achieving if those properties didn't exist, we'll also provide Competitive Impairment, a customized service that involves placing our own undercover operatives into your neighbours' properties and sabotaging their service levels. For example, our maids carry a secret stash of pubic hairs...

In a small cupboard at the top of my house lies a hidden treasure trove of extraordinary worth. Before anyone decides to look me up for a quick break-in, the worth is not monetary but personal. And the treasure is not pirate gold (though some is definitely pirated) but plastic. Vinyl LPs. About 500 hundred of them, lovingly kept, filed in alphabetical order. Over the past few years I've observed with wry satisfaction as this ancient but wonderful format has started appearing once again on the shelves of music stores, the medium of choice for young musicians seeking a warm authentic sound.

I mention this only because if old farts like me wait long enough, everything comes round again - fashion, music, travel systems....yes, I did write 'travel systems'. The ongoing dispute between American Airlines and Sabre (and Expedia and Orbitz, and...and...) may be new news but the underlying arguments are as old as my LPs. The latest falling-out is based on the first principles of distribution: 1)control your channels and 2)drive down cost. American wants to sell its seats and services 'direct to market' in its own unique, revenue-enhancing way; optimal presentation of the product and packaged ancillary services, all without the inconvenience of paying Sabre and its (in their minds) greedy GDS & OTA brothers a hefty fee for a decidedly sub-optimal presentation. On the other hand, GDSs & OTAs argue that not having the ability to present a full range of options to the consumer in a standard format will only lead to frustration and lost business.

So what to do? Well, I have an idea. Let's develop a technology that enables users to book travel by using a single portal into multiple supplier systems. I even have a name for it - a multi-access system. We could call it...errr... Travicom. Or SMART or START or DMars. If those names mean nothing to you then you'll just have to imagine that there really was a world before GDSs. A world where the travel community used dumb terminals to access the databases of airlines, hotel groups and car rental companies.

Are we returning to a new form of the old world? Much will depend on whether the GDSs get their act together and provide a platform that meets the changing demands of suppliers...at an acceptable cost. If they don't...well, you know what they say, 'what goes around comes around'... and that's on the record.

Why are hotel sales teams so unsuccessful at selling their IT needs in to their own organizations? I've come across a seriously scarey number of hotel groups where sales people are still managing their daily activites, contacts and reporting via Excel and emails. And before someone says, 'why aren't they using the PMS?', that may be a reasonable solution at property level but it frequently leaves regional, national and international sales managers out in the cold. Which means that the team as a whole is not connected.

Part of the problem stems from a faulty but stubborn equation that's been embedded in the collective psyche of our industry for far too long: Technology = Operations. PMS? CRS? CIS? Pick whichever TLA you like, but the reality is that systems designed to manage the hotel operation (or the finance of course) attract all the attention and all the investment. The Sales team is left to scratch around 'making do' with either a bolt-on front end to the operating system or a stand-alone generic salesforce application that was designed to sell....well, just about anything but hotel rooms.

If a VP Sales is brave enough to embark on the road to a proper sales solution, watch how quickly the combined forces of IT, Operations and Finance hijack the show and turn a simple need - 'I'd like to create a more effective sales organization please' - into an enterprise-wide technology gorge-fest. The end result (should there be one at all) is a system that can calculate the VAT on a Venezuelan tour group but leaves our long-forgotten VP Sales wondering if regional sales bothered to call on IBM last week.

Call me old-fashioned, but is not sales the lifeblood of any hotel group? Yes it is. So give the team the tools to do the job!

A General Manager is making one of those rare state visits into the sales department. The room falls silent."Who's he?" whispers one of the interns. The GM clears his throat and announces.. "At 2pm this afternoon the global travel managers of IBM, Accenture, BP, Exxon, Chevron and Pfizer will all be in the hotel. They're interested in including this property in their programs for next year and want to negotiate a deal." There's a brief pause while this momentous proclamation sinks in, quickly followed by excited chatter and a buzz of anticipation. "I'd love to greet them personally", adds the GM,"but this afternoon I have to review the plans for the new spa....so it's over to you." And with that he turns on his heel and leaves. All eyes converge on the Director of Sales. "Well, what an amazing opportunity" she says, "This is one for you, Jenny". Jenny the sales coordinator freezes mid-bite of her tuna sandwich and looks around slightly alarmed. "Me?...errr...OK then.. let me make some notes...how do you spell Exxon...?"

Ridiculous? Maybe the bit about the travel managers showing up at the hotel is a little unusual. But the scene is not so far from the truth when those same opportunities are presented to the property electronically via an RFP. Too many hotels are conditioned to believe that replying to RFPs is an administrative burden to be endured rather than a sales opportunity to be exploited. The task of responding is given to the most junior member of the team and provided that the bid response meets the deadline, not enough time or energy is devoted to the quality of the offer. Just because the client is sitting at a desk 2,000 miles away does not change the fact that a sales negotiation is underway that needs a serious sales approach to be sure of securing maximum business at an optimal rate.

So as 2011 unfolds and those RFPs hit the inbox, I recommend that hotel sales people imagine the corporate travel managers sitting in the lobby waiting to read their response. And, of course, make the whole process a whole lot easier by using Nexus. Happy New Year!

The phrase 'victim of its own success' has surely never been so true as in the current fiasco surrounding TripAdvisor. Well,'victim' may not be quite the right word...just yet. It would be hard to class them as victims when they've just announced an astonishing 44% increase in quarterly revenue vs Q3 last year to $139m. Parent Expedia claims that the site is the first ever travel brand to reach 40m unique monthly visitors in a single month. Impressive. Except that the gentle winds of mutual discontent that for a long time have been ruffling the feathers of hotel proprietors on the one hand and TA & their users on the other, is developing into a full-blown hurricane.

Hotels for their part are claiming that what was once an occasional fake bad review from a disaffected employee or scurrilous neighbouring property is now turning into a series of highly coordinated campaigns of deliberate sabotage and an increasingly common expression of competitive activity. Reputation Management company, Kwikchex, has declared war on behalf of the industry and is reckoned to have 800 hotels and restaurants lined up ready to 'name and shame' the fake reviewers. Far from taking this threat on the chin, TA has struck out with equal measure, claiming that fake positive reviews, penned by hotel staff, family and friends (not to mention the likes of Kwikchex and their ilk) are deliberately misleading customers with glowing reports of 'attentive staff' and 'dinners to die for'.

One glorious example of such sharp practice has just been uncovered in rural Ireland. According to the Belfast Telegraph, the following email from an un-named manager at the Clare Inn was sent to his staff:

"We have come up with a plan for everyone on this email only to post a review about their stay at the Clare Inn," the email read. "You must do this from your HOME PC or internet cafe, do not use a Lynch PC or the IP address will be picked up. I'd rather you didn't discuss this with your team. This is not something we would normally endorse but the reviews of the Clare Inn at the moment leave us with no choice.Please do not use hotel language or else our plan will backfire."

..and of course it has backfired now that the story is all over the free world. TA is responding to these shenanigans by posting red warning labels on the profiles of hotels thought to be guilty of bigging themselves up. The battle lines are drawn.

All of this of course is an inevitable consequence of the enormous influence that TA now has in the hotel bookings market. When a hotel business can succeed or fail on the basis of TA reviews is it any surprise that reputations can be bought and sold like an eBay auction? Quite where this leaves the poor consumer is at this stage unclear.Stripping out the fake good reviews and the fake bad reviews from the genuine articles is becoming as hazardous as choosing a hotel in the pre TA era. But such is the wonder of the web that no doubt as TA and its detractors wrestle themselves to the floor another player will emerge from the wings as the real, authentic, unadulterated, neutral, trustworthy hotel review site... who's your money on?

I blame myself for the error of judgment. I should have realised that this 'independent Mediterranean-style family-run property' was not going to be an ideal choice based on the Trip Advisor comment that said 'this could be a great hotel, just not in this country.' But downtown Houston was full for the NBTA Convention and I didn't want to be stuck out in the boonies with an almost-in-Dallas zip code. So I took a chance...

It was a Sunday afternoon; the mercury way up over 100°F; and the city streets were deserted as the taxi pulled up outside the hotel entrance. It was an anonymous looking building with a simple glass door and few clues as to its function. Then a figure emerged from inside. Dressed in old jeans and a t-shirt, he had the grizzled and emaciated appearance of a man who's eventful life has added 70 years to his 40 year old frame. As he paused at the entrance, I could just make out the slogan emblazoned across his chest - 'body piercing saved my life'. There was a reddish stain on his shoulder that looked suspiciously like blood. He started to walk across to the taxi. My heart beat a little faster. Was this man typical of the hotel clientele? Maybe it was one of those welfare hostels. Would I have to spend the night fully dressed behind triple locked doors clutching a kitchen knife? "Careful man" murmured the cab driver as he prepared for a fast exit.I opened the taxi door. "Good afternoon sir", said the blood-stained, grizzled 110 year old, "may I take your bags?"

The blood-stained, 110 year old grizzled doorman led me into the tiny lobby where I was checked in by a thickly accented man of Mediterranean descent. In the background, two weary women of indeterminate age absent-mindedly shuffled papers and yawned. I took my key and followed Grizzly up the stairs and into a room on the first floor. He seemed like a nice man so I tipped him generously, partly as insurance against any nocturnal axe-thru-door incidents. After he'd gone I surveyed my surprisingly pleasant room. There were two large windows...but these were covered by blinds that refused to open. There was a coffee maker... but it refused to make coffee. There was a wifi signal... but my laptop refused to connect.

I had three hours to kill before the NBTA opening reception. So I triple locked the door, sat on the bed and - kitchen knife in hand - waited for night to fall.

The final occupancy numbers won't be with us for a few weeks, but - surprise, surprise - to quote one African newspaper,'the World Cup has not been the cash cow many expected it to be.' Wow. Hold the front page. How many major international sporting events ever deliver guests at the levels computed in the febrile imaginations of owners and developers? Despite the usual surge in available 4 and 5-star rooms, it seems most fans were happy to settle for converted schools, universities and guest houses. And to make matters worse, Visa's list of big spenders - citizens of England, USA, Australia, France and Brazil - all packed up and decamped fairly early in the proceedings thanks to risible performances on the field....

...talking of which, there seems to be no meaningful correlation between the standard of accommodation enjoyed by the teams and their success in the competition. The French team were accused by a government minister of staying somewhere 'far too flashy', while the Nigerians booked themselves into a Hampton Inn next to an interstate. Both teams were eliminated at the group stage, though presumably the Nigerians will feel the more satisfied of the two: how can you be expected to defeat Argentina with only an 'On the Run Breakfast Bag' for sustenance?

Finally, spare a thought for the England team. Humiliated on the pitch by that footballing powerhouse Algeria, then embarrassingly exposed by Germany, their final ignominy was to have their underwear stolen by members of staff at the team hotel. Should've stayed at a Hampton.

Cast your eye across the British cultural landscape at the moment and you'll find one dominant theme - holes. They're everywhere. There are holes in the road. Quite a lot of them actually.. around 1.5 million, which is 50% up on last year in the aftermath of a Siberian Winter. The government is so concerned about the potential impact (literally) on the electorate that they've announced a £100m pay out to help councils fill them up again. Of course, that's £100m they don't really have because there's another big hole in the public finances. This debt hole is heading rapidly toward £1.6 trillion and means that next year British taxpayers will spend more on debt interest than on Defence.

And then there's the Lenny Henry hole. For those unfamiliar with Lenny, he's a Brit comedian who also happens to be the face of Premier Inns. The latest Premier ad campaign involves Lenny smashing a hole in a hotel room door with an axe, a la Jack Nicholson in The Shining, sticking his head through and shouting 'Here's Lenny'. This parody supposedly demonstrates the ill-effects of sleep deprivation caused by a bad night in a lousy hotel. Unfortunately for Premier, it's also demonstrated the ill-effects of broadcasting an axe-wielding Lenny Henry on daytime TV. Terror-stricken young children have reportedly been sent running and screaming for Mummy, leading the Advertising Standards Authority to ban poor Lenny from all children's programming.

I have some sympathy with Premier.. and Lenny. Let's face it, we've all had moments when we've wanted to smash a hole in a hotel door. Typically it's the door of the room next to us when 'nocturnal sounds' of one sort or another inhibit the serious business of falling asleep. Maybe Premier should consider a sequel with Lenny as the Terminator crashing through the walls from one room to another, ruthlessly taking out anyone shouting, moaning or talking on the phone too loudly, or with the TV on full volume at three in the morning. I'd buy into that. And with that kind of message Premier would soon monopolise the business traveller market. But I guess that's a hole other story...