Best unpublished hotel rates for Twitter followers only! Here's how:

Best rate guarantees on hotel websites? Bah, humbug. The best promotions, rates and last-minute deals are not showing up on the OTAs, hotel websites or even Metasearch sites any longer. The best rates and promotions are found on Twitter. Yup, you read that right. I’ve been doing a little poking around on selected hotel sites and found the following:

• The Charles Hotel, Boston: “Another deal for our loyal followers - breakfast for two w/ any reservation booked now for 4/26-4/29.Mention TWI”. 719 followers www.charleshotel.com
• The Iron Horse Hotel, Milwaukee, WI: “Threadless t-shirts! Book by June 20, get 25% off our regular rate & $25 to spend at Threadless.com http://tinyurl.com/c2gvz9 “1,201 followers
• The Westin Bonaventure, LA: “Last chance! First person wins 1 room night + dinner this Fri. or Sat. http://ow.ly/3Bv8 #LAprimetime” (only through Twitter link) 100 retweets and mentions some from industry bloggers with followings of nearly 200,000 people.
• Lancaster Arts Hotel, Lancaster, PA: “Stay this weekend at the ARTS, 3/20 and 21 and get 20% off your stay! Just mention this tweet! See lancasterartshotel.com for details!” www.lancasterartshotel.com 1,151 followers
• Hotel deLuxe, Portland, OR “Yes, a fantastic 25% off for our loyal Twitter followers. DM me if you'd like to book a room.” 733 followers
• Broadway Hotel, NYC: “Hip NYC hotel without the hefty price tag. For your next trip, use discount code "Twitter" to take 10% off a 3 night stay at Broadway!” 455 followers
• Courtyard Marriott, Boston: “Book us online at Marriott.com using promo code "ZS7" and get a "twitter" discount!!” 272 followers

Granted, some of these are promotions – but the best and cleverest are getting retweets in the tens of thousands…and website traffic is considerably up, according to Compete and Hitwise. Upstream traffic is coming from Twitter.

So the next time I hear a travel supplier saying “Bah, humbug” to Twitter…let me remind them of the hotels who “get it”… and are getting additional bookings!

How hotels can earn thousands in incremental revenue: Free "rock star" faculty!

How many of us would have loved to have taken courses from leading scholars at Universities such as Harvard, Yale, Oxford, Stanford or MIT? Now hotels can promote weekly courses to hotel guests and the local market, free of charge. Imagine broadcasting on your big-screen TV lectures by Stanford’s Guy Kawasaki “The Career Path to Becoming a Venture Capitalist or an Entrepreneur”; or JetBlue’s former CEO, David Neeleman, discussing “Seeing Failure as an Opportunity?” The dizzying myriad of courses and rock-star lecturers include Carly Fiorina, addressing “The Dynamics of Change and Fear,” Michael Dell, explaining “Overcoming Some of the Early Mistakes of Dell, Inc.”, or hearing about “Financial Markets” at Yale, by financier Carl Icahn.

Academic Earth offers 1,500 video lectures from hundreds of the world’s top scholars covering economics, entrepreneurship, history, law, medicine, religion and the sciences, among many other topics. And they’re all free.

So think about how you can get local groups to participate in weekly “courses” of mutual interest – and spend money in your bars and restaurants, while attending these educational forums. If this takes off, you could end up hosting a different group every night of the week! Now that’s incremental revenue!

Website: www.academicearth.org
Contact: hello@academicearth.org