It's always gratifying to hear that somebody from outside your industry is offering you plaudits. John Murphy, president of ReachMail, an email service provider that competes with companies like Constant Contact, has developed an admiration for email marketing as practiced by travel industry suppliers.

This massive market presents ultimate opportunity for luxury brands.

The recipe for press trips, a longtime staple of tourism marketing, has been pretty cookie-cutter over the years. Invite freelance travel writers to visit, herd them into a van and drive them around to attractions from dawn to dust. But as more and more bloggers join the fray, progressive destinations are evolving media familiarization trips to be more interactive -- and generating outstanding results along the way.

Last year, Americans took 1.9 billion trips for leisure and business purposes, generating more than $758 billion in direct expenditures. This number was expected to increase this year as more families ditched the "staycation" and took to the roads (and skies).

It's overwhelming for the average hotel manager, even the most tech savvy, to keep track of the latest technology, and more so, to do something about it. But sometimes an innovation emerges that calls out for action because of its potential power -- if not immediately, then soon.

In social media, quality needs to trump quantity.

With social media successfully connecting consumers and brands, it might be tempting to cut email -- an older, less glamorous marketing tactic -- from next year's budget. But recent research findings caution against putting a travel brand's subscriber-based electronic newsletter, a high-performing workhorse, out to pasture.

It's summer. The only double-dip I want to be thinking about is one involving an ice cream cone and some chocolate hard shell. But right now that phrase, "double-dip," and that other word, recession, are causing all travel marketers to take a hard look at Q4 and ask how we keep people traveling despite another dive in confidence and investment balances.

The lines were out the door and down the hall at one session of the Meeting Professionals International World Education Conference in Orlando recently, the largest annual gathering of meeting planners. Many planners were shut out of the session which was titled, "Smart Phones = Smarter Meetings." It was run by James Spellos, a meetings technology guru who is founder and president of a consultancy called Meeting U.

Logos take on new importance with evolving media.