Tablet Hotels CEO and co-founder Laurent Vernhes. / Tablet Hotels

The online hotel booking market is relatively packed, and standing out from the pack is difficult for any brand. The leadership at thirteen-year old Tablet Hotels, takes the position that each new entrant that may promise something new or unique is actually either a validation of its model or an opportunity to further evolve.

Tablet Hotels features a limited number of hotels in nearly 900 destinations around the world. In a market like London, for instance, you’ll find fewer than 60 properties, as opposed to over a thousand on Booking.com. The promise of Tablet is a specialty property at the lowest possible cost, and it has a history of delivering.

In addition to the listings, Tablet’s site also offers a magazine and a series of travel guides that offer a mix of inspiration and information that it hopes will help guests make smarter decisions before and after booking.

Skift sat down earlier this month with Tablet Hotels CEO and co-founder Laurent Vernhes in the company’s New York office.

Skift: Can you talk a bit about the origins of Tablet Hotels?

Laurent Vernhes: I got the idea to create Tablet out of need. I spent about ten years working as an expat in various parts of the world, but mostly Asia.

I was traveling every week to a new location. Some consultants in the U.S. will go to Cincinnati for three months, and then to Cleveland, and then to Kansas City, or something.

In my case, it was Bangkok, then Kuala Lumpur, Bombay, Jakarta. I was living in hotels, literally. When I decided to have that kind of career, my fantasy was to have a life like James Bond. I would have women all over in all of the cities

Very quickly, I realized it was not going to be like that.

Traveling for business is not that exciting. You have to work very hard to make it exciting. It’s hard work. I didn’t give up. I tried very hard to make traveling for business as a life exciting.

I realized that part of that was picking your hotels carefully because the region. Basically, there are two types of hotels. There are hotels that are commodity products; it’s all about amenities, price, location. Then there are hotels that have soul, some personality, something, whether it’s design, or it’s with service.

If travel is your way of life, it’s important to find a hotel that has soul. It can be a big hotel, a small hotel. It’s not the matter of size. It’s not a matter if it’s part of a chain or not part of chain. You just need to find a hotel.

I was doing a lot of acquisitions of small companies on behalf of a very big company when I realized that I wanted to be like the guys whose companies I was buying. I wanted to be one of those people rather than CEO of a large division or large entity within the multinational thing. There was no dream there for me.

The dream was to be one of these people that had that freedom of thinking for yourself and doing something about it. I wanted to be like them. I’d say that I wanted to be an entrepreneur. The most interesting thing for me was to create the product I needed. That product was, basically, the ultimate hotel guide, which would restrict your selection to hotels that have a soul of some kind and eliminate all the commodity versions of hotels.

Skift: When you stepped in a little over ten years ago, it was pre-flash sale, pre-Jetsetter type of thing. You had legacy, stuff like Conde Nast Johansens and Small Luxury Hotels and things like that.

Laurent Vernhes: Marketing companies.

Skift: There was probably some overlap in some of the properties. But, how did you step into it and say, “I don’t want to do that marketing thing?”

Laurent Vernhes: I knew these marketing companies. There is nothing wrong with them. But I knew why I couldn’t rely on them. I couldn’t rely on them because they were charging hotels to represent them. They were marketing companies. They were also not comprehensive in terms of their selection.

There are a lot of great hotels that wouldn’t be in these books because they just didn’t want to pay these companies to be in the books. They were not entirely reliable either because their business model was built up on having as many hotels in the book as possible. So they were trying to find this balance.

As a traveler, that was not getting me the answer I was looking for. In fact, their business model was not marketing to travelers but marketing to travel agents. That’s what they do. They go to travel agents and say, “We have this collection of hotels why don’t you…we have this seal of approval.” That’s what they do. They were not meant to be catering to travelers directly.

As a traveler, I wanted a guide that had total integrity in terms of the selection. Therefore, it couldn’t charge hotels for being in the guide. Otherwise, you defeat the whole idea. It couldn’t be funded by advertising because who is going to advertise on your site? It’s going to be the hotels. If you do that, then it’s the biggest possible conflict with your editorial mission.

That’s why we became quite innovative actually at the time. Since then we have a couple innovations. The innovation was to merge editorial and commerce. In our case, we are a hotel guide merged with an online travel agency, and that was really new. Only the Internet could allow that, and there is no conflict. You sell what you recommend.

In our case, if our users tell us, “This thing is going down. You should remove it,” we’ll remove it. The hotel didn’t pay us to be on the site, so we’re completely free to do that. We just sell what we think is great, and our users confirm our work, members or travelers confirm it’s great.

Skift: How do you keep that pure because that’s the challenge, right? You guys have a financial incentive to include as many things as possible, so how do you always come down on the side of the consumer?

Laurent Vernhes: No, but it’s not. The financial incentive is not to add as many hotels as possible. The financial incentive is to take as many bookings in these hotels as possible. It’s a big difference.

Skift: You talk about removing something. How often do you need to remove something?

Laurent Vernhes: On a regular basis. Currently, it’s around 1,800 hotels on the site. Over the past 10 years, we’ve probably removed over 300 hotels. Hotels go through — just like anything else in life — they go through changes.

Skift: You’ve been around for ten years. What’s been the key to your survival during that period? This industry has changed dramatically since when you started. Other people have come around and gone away.

Laurent Vernhes: The key to survival has been that integrity I was talking to you about. The soul of the curation was that we wanted to be the best hotel guide we could be.

Now the word “curation” is a big buzzword — curation, curation. We’ve been doing curation from the beginning. That’s what it was all about. I used to call it “editing,” being an editor, editing a guide. Now Jetsetter, in particular, uses that buzzword of “curation.” What’s new about that? Nothing is new, except they are pushing it because they are not doing it.

If you look at the hotels there, half of them are great, the other half…

Skift: Need to fill the rooms?

Laurent Vernhes: …are hotels that agreed to do these crazy private sale things. Because they are cold calling hotels, “Do you want to do this?” “Do you want to do this?” In that case, they need to supply a never-ending stream of private sales.

In a way, that’s the difference between copycats and the company that they are imitating. Often the company they are imitating has the soul, and the copycats don’t. It’s just opportunity. Often companies that are the true pioneers disappear because they don’t manage to turn that soul into a sustainable business at the other end.

That soul kept us going and kept us relevant to people. Then the question is how do we maintain our competitiveness as a business? Are we going to increase our competitiveness?

A couple of things. One is, in terms of features, people like private sales, so let’s give them private sales. Except we give them private sales just in the hotels we cover. We’re not going to go desperately looking for private sales from any hotel that will do it because that’s not our main business model.

We follow the trends. Now HotelTonight, I think, is very interesting, and we’re hoping to launch Tablet Tonight in the next couple of months — Tablet Tonight, Tablet Tomorrow, why not? We can. Now we have. The reason why we can do this is because, in the process of all these 10 years, what we’ve developed is something that’s not visible but critical, is the technology.

We have so much technology. It takes a lot of technology to make technology disappear. In other words, to make your user interface ever more easy to use, you need to build a lot of technology. A lot of this technology is creating ever more efficient ways to have access to the best availability and the best rates in the hotels we want. That’s the role of technology, to make that seamless, to make that easy for the hotels, to make the data easy to use from a user interface for travelers. It takes a lot of technology.

If you are creating “Tablet” now, we wouldn’t be able to…we would have to invest a very large amount of money in technology to just match the user experience. That’s something we didn’t have in the beginning. Now we connect the extranet, direct connects with all kinds of sources of inventory, they push inventory to us, all this stuff. If we hadn’t built that, we would be dead by now.

Skift: Have you guys built your own inventory system that the hotels tie into?

Laurent Vernhes: That’s what’s enabling us. Now, like this Hotel Tonight thing is really interesting. It’s giving a way for hotels to get rid of inventory. It’s great. Everybody loves it. Can we do it? Yes.

Skift: Are you taking the same approach that you took with flash sales where it’s: We see a trend, people like these deals, but we’re going to continue working with our core of recommended hotels? It’s the same thing where it’s like, people want to do it now, we’ve got the hotels and the relationships, just add the element of time…

Laurent Vernhes: We are doing it in the hotels we are selecting. It’s still within our universe of being a hotel guide, and we only features hotels we believe in because they are our hotels. They are unique and they have a soul. Within that, we stay within the guide, but we need to add all these features that help people get better prices and get what they want basically.

Skift: Your relationships with hotels, I’ve probably, over the past five years, I’ve probably booked through you guys, or my wife has, at least eight or nine times and whatnot.

Laurent Vernhes: Thank you.

Skift: I would say in almost all the cases, if not all the cases, we received an upgrade. We’re not Tablet Plus members or anything like that. What do you guys do? How are you delivering customers in a way that makes them want to give me an upgrade even though I paid a pretty cheap rate?

Laurent Vernhes: It’s a few layers, actually. We approach these hotels as partners because we are in there for the long-term with them. If you approach hotels as a commodity product, they are interchangeable. If it’s not this one, you say, “OK.” Put yourself in the shoes of Expedia. “OK, Starwood. You don’t want to do a deal with us. It’s OK. We’ll do this other chain. Same thing. What’s the difference? We don’t care.” That’s the way that they negotiate.

We don’t negotiate this way because we like this hotel because it’s so unique. We’re not going to tell them, “Tough luck. Let’s do a deal with the other one. We don’t care.” Because we care. That’s the whole idea.

Skift: There’s only one that you love.

Laurent Vernhes: We love this one, so we’re going to work harder in creating that working relationship. What I’m going to try to squeeze them at every opportunity. We think of it as a partnership. We have a good relationship with hotels, Where Expedia is just completely ruthless about the whole thing.

I think Booking is smarter. They do it in a more sophisticated way, but basically they are completely ruthless.

There’s nothing wrong with being that. But that’s not very consistent with what we are trying to do which is we pick these hotels because they are great. We need to think about it as a partnership not as, “Well, if it’s not this one, it’s the next one.”

Second, we want to be not just the best place to find the best hotels, but the best place to book these hotels. What do we do about the booking portion that means that you’re going to get treated better when you book through us than when you book through the same hotel on Expedia? Obviously some hotels are a mini-travel agent, online travel agents. What can we do to make sure the hotel is going to treat our client better”

The initial premise is that we don’t try to squeeze the hotel, and this goes a long way actually. The second thing is that we increasingly are doing proactive customer service. We are calling these hotels and telling them, “We have this client coming. It would be good if you did this and that.”

Our ambition is to be the best place to book a hotel, even better than booking the hotel directly with the hotel.

Skift: You mentioned Booking.com. How do you guys go about customer acquisition online. Booking.com spends a little bit of money. Priceline spends some money on search engine marketing.

Laurent Vernhes: Not as much as Expedia.

Skift: How do you guys go up against that and get discovered?

Laurent Vernhes: We can’t match their marketing money, unfortunately. We have something that they don’t have which is a high level of loyalty and that goes back to our product and our mission.

It’s fair to say people don’t have a personal relationship with Expedia. They feel more often like they have a personal relationship with Tablet.

We’re not a commodity site. We don’t write marketing copy about the hotel. When we write the descriptions, it’s not the typical description you would read on an online travel agency site.

There is one hotel that we put on the site, if they disagree with the description and we tell them if there is anything factually wrong about the description, let us know, we’ll correct it.

There is this hotel and they were unhappy with the way we were talking about their hotel. There was nothing factual about it. They just didn’t like the tone. This is our site. If you don’t like it, then we won’t talk about you. If you disagree then we shouldn’t display your hotel because clearly there is a disconnect here. So we removed the hotel from the site. That kind of integrity is what’s creating the loyalty. It’s helped us a lot and people see that in us.

Skift: What have you learned especially in the last year with last-minute bookings that has caused you guys to say, “OK, we need to do Tablet Today?”

Laurent Vernhes: We used to have a last minute section of the site. We dropped that. We dropped it for reasons of pure programming because that portion of the site was killing the site itself because the programming was so bad. It was doing well. So we had to remove it because it was diminishing our ability to scale the site. Now we’re coming back to it. For sure, last-minute bookings are a very significant portion of bookings. It’s a key battlefield in terms of prices and availability. We need to offer hotels, tourists, to give us the best availability and the best rates for last minute bookings.

In fact, if you think of bookings for today and tomorrow, already it’s about 12 percent of all of our bookings are tonight and tomorrow already. The behavior of travelers is strongly biased towards last-minute bookings already. It’s something that we haven’t done enough in terms of getting hotels to give us even better rates for that portion of the supply.

That’s what we’re building now.

Hotel Tonight has done that very effectively and very well. We need to match that or exceed that. In fact, so we’re going to do it for tonight, for tomorrow, and for the next 14 days.

Skift: What’s the launch on that?

Laurent Vernhes: I hope June. We launch about June-ish.

Skift: What percentage of your users are Tablet Plus members?

Laurent Vernhes: The percentage that’s interesting is what is the percentage of bookings made by Tablet Plus members, and it’s over 20 percent. That’s significant.

Skift: What’s your rate of keeping Tablet Plus members?

Laurent Vernhes: It’s over 80 percent. We’ve made great progress on that. Tablet Plus is where we experimented with a lot of proactive customer service. We email people before their stay. It’s unprompted. It’s gone a long way.

Skift: You guys survived the flash sale onslaught.

Laurent Vernhes: We did, and the flash sale flameout.

Skift: Was there a period during that when you guys were panicking or like, “How are we going to do this”? People weren’t talking about you as much as they were talking about everybody else.

Laurent Vernhes: We launched our flash sale too, so we got a bit of traction from having that too. We were not panicking because we were growing. I always thought private flash sales were a great marketing tool, more of a marketing tool than a production tool. As a marketing tool, it served us too.

But I was looking at these companies doing just that, and to me, the only way they were going to survive was if they ended up copying us or trying to. What I mean by that is, have something for everyday, not just be flash sale, but be a good online travel agency.

You’ve got to be able to turn that marketing gimmick into becoming a true online travel agency, a good one. It looks like they were not successful at making that transition because it’s actually more difficult to be a good online travel agency than to run a flash sale operation. It’s a lot more difficult.

Jetsetter, they had a ton of money, and they burned and burned and burned. I could see they were trying to switch to basically full-on copying us, but for some reason, they underestimated what it takes.

I had to calm down some of my colleagues because they were looking at this and thinking, “Oh my God. They are going to take over this whole thing.” I had to tell them, “Look, it will only survive if it’s a real business. Right now, all we know is that they are really good at spending a ton of money. The jury’s still out on whether or not they can build a sustainable business.” Frankly, when I was looking, I didn’t think they were.

If you’re patient enough, it’s a matter of survival. The question was how much more money they had to spend to make it to a level of sustainability. The problem with VCs is that the more money you spend, the less patient you are, the more you want your site to be dramatic.

Even if you get to some level of where it actually makes sense, but if it’s not comparable to the vast amount of money you spent, you let it go. I’m very familiar with these dynamics. I’ve done Tablet the hard way. No VCs, completely independent.

We never had that money to spend before. Now we have more money because we are a bigger business. Obviously, as you grow, you get the means to do things on a bigger scale, but we never had that “Oh, we have five million to spend on getting the word out,” ten million or whatever it was. They’ve gone through a lot more than that, but I don’t know how much was for marketing. Who cares? [laughs]

I know because I used to buy companies. I know about building a business, a real business. I know it’s not easy. You don’t do it just like that. It’s not as easy as just throwing money out there to get the word out.

Skift: You’re self-funded, no VC money. What’s your endgame? Do you want to retire and pass Tablet down to your children or is it something where you want to sell?

Laurent Vernhes: No. It’s a good question. Somehow, I bumped into creating a family business. That was not the objective. I mean family as in the family of people who started this business. I don’t mean the family with children.

Since we don’t have a large outside investor, it’s become a traditional family business, so the option is there to actually keep it that way. I don’t want to load my kids future with that future. “This is the future. Good luck with it.” No, I think they have to create their own future.

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Game on.

Priceline says it paid $522.4 million in cash and issued more than 1.5 million shares of common stock to pay for the right to meld the travel metasearch company into the Priceline fold.

Kayak will operate as an independent company, as do Booking.com, Agoda, and rentalcars.com, within the Priceline Group.

The CEOs of Priceline and Kayak co-founders had something to say today about the whole thing.

“We are delighted to welcome Kayak as the newest member of The Priceline Group,” said Jeffery H. Boyd, CEO of The Priceline Group.  “We look forward to working with the Kayak  team as they build their business and expand the international footprint of their great products.”

“We are excited to join the world’s premier online travel company,” said Steve Hafner, Kayak CEO and co-founder.  “We believe that The Priceline Group’s expertise and worldwide reach will help us expand our business globally.”

Paul English, Kayak CTO and co-founder added, “Our focus will remain creating the best place for travelers to plan and book their travel and providing an effective marketing channel for travel suppliers and online travel agencies.”

Priceline’s acquisition of Kayak kicks off the next stage in competition among global travel companies. It has mostly focused to date on the standalone hotel business, as Expedia and Booking.com duke it out in Europe, Asia and Latin America, but now travel metasearch has been added to the mix.

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Kirk, an Illinois Republican, told the Tribune on Monday that while he had met recently with Pritzker, whose confirmation hearing is Thursday, he had not made up his mind on whether to support her. She’s been making the rounds on Capitol Hill visiting with lawmakers before the hearing.

Kirk spoke briefly to the paper after making remarks to the Illinois Group, a Washington-based group that promotes businesses from the state. He returned to the Senate in January after a major stroke a year earlier and has just begun appearing at events in public. The group’s 25th anniversary was marked with an evening reception in the Dirksen Senate Office Building. Organizers said 200 people turned out to the event.

Speaking clearly but with some hesitancy, Kirk said he wanted to foster a “new optimism for our state” and “rewrite the feelings about our state after the Blagojevich mess.” He referred to the former governor now imprisoned for public corruption, including trying to sell or trade the Senate seat that Kirk won in 2010.

Kirk told the gathering that he was eager to see a new U.S. attorney appointed, wanted to make it a priority to get the Gangster Disciples off the streets and, with Durbin, was seeking federal funding to improve locks and dams on the Mississippi River and make the waterway a “huge, export drag strip for Illinois agriculture.”

Durbin, the Senate’s No. 2 Democrat, is a big booster of Pritzker, a Hyatt Hotels heiress who has helped fund his campaigns. He told the paper as he left the Illinois event that she would make an “outstanding” Cabinet secretary and he would do everything he could to advance her nomination.

When asked if he saw hurdles to her confirmation, he cautioned that Republicans are sometimes determined to filibuster or slow down appointments.

kskiba@tribune.com ___

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The timing was a coincidence, organizers said.

Riding a scooter with an orange windsock and white inflatable No. 1 hand symbol, Buddy Broniar, a vice president of UniteHere Local 1, the union representing Hyatt employees, joined his chanting comrades.

“Hyatt is mean spirited,” said Broniar, 72.

“Cheap and mean,” the demonstrators chanted. The union has been working without a contract for four years.

Most were on hand to protest the nomination of billionaire businesswoman Penny Pritzker to the Commerce Department in a continuing effort to call attention to a long-standing contract dispute.

Pritzker, whose family founded the Hyatt Hotel chain, has been on its board since 2004. She was nominated to lead the Commerce Department by President Barack Obama this month. Her Senate confirmation hearing is Thursday.

Hyatt and UniteHere have been embroiled in a bitter dispute over wages and benefits. Workers’ wages have remained stagnant as the two sides have failed to reach a deal.

Local 1 member George Means, 54, of Austin sported a rhinestone-studded black and gray Obama for President T-shirt. But he has no problem with the president’s pick. He simply wanted to show solidarity with the local in exchange for backing his cause for raises at Gate Gourmet in Schiller Park, where he is a liquor handler.

“I’m just here for Local 1. I just want to support the union,” Means said. “We’re all one.”

Lou Weeks, executive vice president of UniteHere Local 1, on Monday morning reiterated the union’s months-long request that the Metropolitan Pier and Exposition Authority, which owns Hyatt Regency McCormick Place, push Hyatt to provide the hotel’s workers with retroactive raises, which have been stalled due to the contract negotiation impasse.

“We’re quite frustrated with this body,” Weeks said. “For several months we’ve been respectfully asking that you to do the right thing.”

Jack Greenberg, the authority’s board chairman, said the agency has had conversations with Hyatt to push for a resolution and will continue to talk with the company.

The authority, which also operates McCormick Place and Navy Pier, “cares deeply for our employees,” he said. “We want them to be treated fairly and to be paid fairly,” he said.

In an emailed statement, Hyatt said its board members have been targeted by UniteHere while also accusing the union of spreading misinformation about hotel working conditions.

“We’ve offered the same wage and benefits terms that the union accepted at other hotels in Chicago,” Hyatt said. “It’s a shame UniteHere leaders are sacrificing the needs of those they represent in order to build their membership.”

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The Navajo Nation has opened its first casino in the state, the Twin Arrows Navajo Casino Resort, named after an old trading post, diner and gas station where red and gold twin arrows aimed at the ground remind motorists of what once was the “best little” stop on the interstate.

The tribe is looking to the casino to boost its economy and spur development in the area, and has infused the new business with bits of Navajo culture and tradition. Turquoise twin arrows in the logo, for instance, symbolize initiative and the journey of the Navajos through time.

“It brings jobs that we don’t have in the past, it brings revenue, it brings recognition to the Navajo Nation and Navajo people,” tribal President Ben Shelly said Monday.

A glittering chandelier greets visitors in the casino’s entryway, a depiction of the Navajos’ rise into the fourth world where humans came into existence. Stone walls and birch branches in the steakhouse represent the nesting sites of eagles — among the most revered birds of American Indian tribes, while the design on the hotel’s exterior hints at a culture of weaving.

The main entrance faces east in the same way as traditional homes on the reservation, to capture the rising sun. Navajo artists were commissioned to create artwork that hangs throughout the casino, and some of the rooms have views of the San Francisco Peaks, one of four mountains held sacred by Navajos.

Employees will be trained to let casino patrons know what it all means, said Derrick Watchman, chief executive of the Navajo Nation Gaming Enterprise.

“We tried to make it subtle but stand out so it prompts questions,” he said.

The Navajo Nation signed gaming compacts with Arizona and New Mexico a decade ago, clearing the way for the gaming industry on the nation’s largest American Indian reservation. Tribal members later approved gaming in a referendum vote after twice rejecting it. The tribe’s first casino opened east of Gallup, N.M., in 2008 and two others followed in New Mexico.

Twin Arrows employs about 500 people right now, the majority of whom are Navajo, but the workforce will grow to 800, Watchman said. Each of the tribal casinos follows Navajo law in that they give preference to Navajos in employment and are expected to become one of the largest employers of tribal members.

Twin Arrows, about 20 miles east of Flagstaff, is one of nearly two dozen tribal casinos across the state. Tribes that don’t operate casinos or haven’t maxed out on the number of slot machines they’re allowed under gaming compacts can lease those rights to other tribes.

The Navajo casinos are expected to generate tens of millions of dollars for the tribe that relies heavily on natural resources for revenue. Last year, the Navajo Nation Gaming Enterprise made its first distribution of revenue to the tribe at $5 million. That number is expected to increase to $30 million annually, Watchman said.

Shelly said Monday that he would issue an executive order telling tribal offices to first consider holding conferences and staff retreats at Twin Arrows before spending money in border towns to keep the money circulating on the reservation. Other plans for the site could include housing, an airport, shuttle service from Flagstaff and Tuba City, and an amusement park, he said.

As for distributing per-capita payments to Navajos, Shelly said “there’s too many of us.” But he said the tribe is looking at creating a fund in which the roughly 300,000 tribal members can invest and receive a portion of dividends each year from tribal enterprises, including casinos.

Twin Arrows opened earlier this month, with limited casino hours that gave employees an opportunity to train further.

The 267,000-square-foot facility has 90 hotel rooms and suites, a conference center, more than 1,000 slot machines and table games. The restaurants will feature Navajo favorites like fry bread and mutton stew. A spa, golf course, more hotel rooms, a gas station and RV park also are planned.

Once the casino opens round-the-clock Friday, Felix and Michelle Thompson said they’d consider having a date night there. The Flagstaff couple usually gambles at a tribal casino in Camp Verde but would favor Twin Arrows because it’s closer.

“It’s really nice,” Felix Thompson said Friday. “It’s a whole lot more than we expected — its size, its style, the service is immaculate.”

Remi Armijo of Flagstaff was looking for a wider selection of poker games and possibly a tournament.

“I guess they have to get established,” he said.

Copyright (2013) Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

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Expanding on the organization’s online tools, VisitEngland launched a free marketing guide Speak Up! aimed at educating hotels, tour companies, and restaurants how to communicate with this important customer.

The guide explains why accessible is a better term than disability friendly (it includes a broader customer base) and points out other politically correct phrases. It also includes case studies of different hotels’ facilities and marketing strategies. One of the best examples is this Gilbey Films video highlighting the extra measures that the W Hotel London takes to be considered an accessible business.

VisitEngland’s ultimate goal is to become a destination that is known as welcoming and accessible to travelers with disabilities and mobility challenges, a tourism market that the report estimates is worth £2 billion.

Other tourism boards, independent organizations, and even startups are also targeting this group of travelers that need to know specific details before booking a trip.

The full guide from VisitEngland is embedded below:

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This week’s SkiftSeedlings speaks to that breadth of opportunity by including everything from a media company looking to launch the world’s largest consumer travel event to a small device that tracks employees’ driving behaviors.

GET YOUR DAILY DOSE OF SKIFT: SUBSCRIBE TO OUR NEWSLETTER, RSS, TWITTER OR FACEBOOK.

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The back of the Burj al Dubai's gold-plated iPad. / Burj al Dubai

Guests at the self-proclaimed world’s most-luxurious hotel, the Burj Al Arab in Dubai, are being bestowed with a new privilege on arrival – a gold-plated iPad.

As lesser hotels struggle to provide free wi-fi, guests at the Burj Al Arab, one the world’s tallest hotels, are being offered one of the 24-carat devices, worth £6,715, upon check-in.

While the “bling” equipment may be deemed a little showy for some tastes, the iPads are specially engraved with the name of the hotel and contain software that acts as a “virtual concierge”, offering information on the hotel’s many services which include private dining experiences and a butler.

The hotel said it had introduced the gold iPad, “the ultimate in luxury accessories”, as a way of making itself stand out from its competitors. It also frequently refers to itself as a “seven-star” property.

The limited edition iPad is designed by Gold & Co. Guests need to return it on checking out.

The hotel has also recently installed iMacs into all its suites – an item that can also be found in much cheaper hotels however, such as the Mama Shelter in Paris. (Read the Mama Shelter review here ).

The addition will be welcomed by the kind of high-spending guests that frequent the hotel’s Royal Suite, a 8,395-square-ft room located on the 25th floor.

Inside are marble floors, mahogany furniture, Hermes toiletries, a private cinema and a rotating four-poster bed. Guests can also make use of a chauffeur-driver Rolls Royce or helicopter (at extra cost).

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The east coast of Barbados' 70 miles of beaches is rough and rocky along the Atlantic, but the Caribbean side on the west coast, shown here, is known as the Platinum Coast. Bob Downing / Akron Beacon Journal/MCT

There is a very fine line when writing a column like this. The risk of being branded as a pessimist is high.

I only hope that readers will focus on the message that I am trying to convey and perhaps apply some of the content objectively to look at issues in a broader, more holistic way.

When I heard Barbados’ minister of tourism recently predict that he anticipated long stay visitor arrivals in 2013 should reach the same levels as last year, I was frankly surprised.

Look at our largest single market alone, the United Kingdom, which has already experienced a decline of 15,631 visitors in 2012, when compared with 2011.

In the first week of May, Virgin Atlantic brought forward from October 27 their planned change of aircraft on the Gatwick/Barbados route, by substituting the larger B747 aircraft with smaller A330 equipment, on each day of the week, except for Thursdays.

This immediately cuts up to 1,134 seats weekly and, by the end of December this year, could amount to almost 40,000 lost seats.

Put another way, we will lose airline capacity of nearly 23 percent or around one in four of all our British land-based arrivals annually, which in 2012 totalled 173,519 persons.

It is also not unreasonable to conclude that at least 50 percent of those lost seats could have been used by the largest tour operator into Barbados, Virgin Holidays.

Has anyone considered the incredible overall loss of occupied room nights this will bring to our hotels and the devastating financial consequence?

Needless to say, it’s not just the negative effect on our accommodation providers, but the trickledown effect it has on restaurants, attractions, activities, car rental, shopping, taxis, etc.

And at a time when the government most needs higher tax collection, the loss of non reclaimable VAT on all these tourism offerings.

It’s vaguely conceivable that our policymakers imagine they are going to make up the numbers from other major markets, like the USA and Canada, but this is extremely unlikely. Out of these two sources, there was negligible growth in 2012.

But sadly so far, in the first four months of 2013, there has been an average monthly decline of 11.9 percent from the United States and 9 percent from Canada.

Of course, we do not have the winter climatic advantage for most of the remaining eight months, so this trend is hardly likely to change without extensive cost-effective “consumer facing” marketing and a dramatic improvement in destination visibility overall.

Yes! There are a few rays of sunshine on the horizon. The Thomas Cook double-drop charters from Manchester and TUI flights from Hamburg, but these do not commence until November, and clearly will not come anywhere close to making up the Virgin deficit.

This scenario regrettably paints a very gloomy picture, but personally I believe we must start to face this reality and implement measures needed to redress this situation, rather than repeatedly utter predictions, which are at best whimsical and almost impossible to achieve with the status quo.

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The Cheng family, which runs New World Group, made its fortune with the Chow Tai Fook jewellery shops. Its US$800m deal to take over the 18-property Rosewood luxury hotels group and buy five of its hotels is an example of the increasing power of Asian money in global property and hotel markets.

New World is one of a new wave of Asian family-owned groups seeking to take advantage of the huge growth in Chinese tourism, challenging big global groups such as InterContinental Hotels, Starwood and Marriott.

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