Travel Blogger Buzz – November 27, 2012

Monday was a very busy day in the travel/miles/points/prepaids/Bluebird/morecreditcards/Bluebird area we so enthustiastically cover here at TBB. Our tagline should be: “We waste our own time reviewing travel blogs so you don’t have to”. Catchy enough? We tried very hard to work “Bluebird” in it, believe us!

A kind reader brought to our attention a great article written just a few days ago titled “Bloggers vs The Community In The Great Mileage War” which appeared in the Gadling website. The writer Grant Martin makes some excellent observations and raises some serious questions. We think it is a must read. Heck, if you were going to read Chris Elliott’s brilliant pieces, you sure can read this and get so much more out of it if you really care about the community. And we certainly do here at TBB! We have been trying to separate ourselves from this crazy group for many years but… we just can’t!

Excerpts: “Built for a wider audience, the blogs bring enormous traffic, often leading to a change in terms or cancellation of the deals. Think of it like a trampoline. If two or three people discover the trampoline and take a jump, everyone has a good time. But if the entire town is invited, the trampoline breaks” [I think this is clearly happening and not much can be done effectively to stop it. Is this “game” (or “addiction” as some prefer to call/diagnose it) moving away from “let’s all take it easy and not hammer a deal so hard so it can last longer for all of us” to a “crap, all the bloggers are posting it now, go heavy on it asap as it is sure to die any minute now!”]

“It’s a grey area. On one hand it seems that the credit card companies have so much influence over the bloggers that they’ll post anything that they think will drive traffic. But on the other hand, public data is public data, and if they want to do the work to build the articles then traffic should dictate success. Whether they can do it with class is up to each blogger respectively. My guess is that when the axe man (ie FTC) comes calling all dues will be paid.” [ I think the comment “whether they can do it with class is up to each blogger respectively” is completely on target! And, sadly, lots of travel bloggers fail miserably at that…which is, most likely, directly NOT correlated with their pockets.]

Anyway, this is heavy stuff. Time to have some fun!

Gary Leff and Chris Elliott are not the best buddies. We admit, Chris Elliott comes up with some pretty far out stuff and lately we think he has lost his mind as Gary outlines in his blog post yesterday. Our request to settle this with a fistfight was not met with approval. Maybe next time, we are certain Chris is working on another outrageous article.

Is anyone following Donald Trump on twitter? We admit we do so. The reason is we want to laugh about the amazingly idiotic things he rants about (and you thought our rants are bad, huh?). This is a list of the 50 stupidest tweets by Donald Trump What does that have to do with travel? Absolutely nothing! It is our blog and we can post whatever we want! What did you expect, a bunch of wife pics or something? You Sir who keeps emailing about posting my wife’s pics please stop now, thank you!

Kathy, who writes Will Run for Miles, wrote an excellent post about safety when traveling!

Here at TBB posts like this drives us to be even more insane than we really are! This post has 14 credit card apps embedded in the body of the post. Yes, 14!!! Can we have a bit more class por favor? But that did not upset us so much. What really threw us off in dizzying hysteria was the mention of the super crapiola Royal Caribbean Visa Card! Thank God the link does not give you a commission (only 1 of the 14). If someone got this card maybe the blogger should pay a commission to the applicant! We recently took a Carnival cruise and naturally our ears perked up when we heard mention of a special offer on the cruise ship. After reading the details of the offer we determined that cruise credit cards should not be ever thrown out to the miles/points community, NEVER. As always, nothing personal, we call it as we see it. Please more cruise related posts!

A few nuggets from FlyerTalk:

84fiero: From the “quality” of much of what is written in many blogs, you could probably just write a program to auto generate each post. Pick that day’s CC and FFP, throw in some blurbs such as “overwater bungalow”, “amazing deal”, “limited time”, “FRA First Class Terminal”, etc and voila!

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