I found this blog to be very interesting and useful. First of all, let me just point out that I had no idea how big of an issue traveling blogs are, but as I sit here and read these blogs concerning a certain person's traveling experience, I feel that it's an important topic to write about. I do believe that some traveling companies may feel that these blogs could be damaging to thier business, but in the long run I feel that the benefits of these blogs will outweigh any of the negatives. For example, I hope to move to New York City after I graduate and being the broke college student that I am, I need to start saving now for my living expenses. As I read the blog, I followed the link to Megg Mueller's blog "Hotel Hotsheet", which is found in USAToday, and saw that she wrote about how she went about finding a cheap hotel in New York being as there are so few. First of all, I didn't know that you could find a hotel that cheap and I know have a link where I can. I also didn't know that when finding a hotel, you could request a doorman which I thought was rather odd but still an interesting fact to know. I know have a link to finding cheap places to stay in New York as well as someone to contact with more information. I also noticed that the author of this blog, Josh Hallett, was "pleasantly suprised" to see that Kaye Trammell, a professor at LSU, was mentioned and quoted in the New York Times about these blogs about traveling. The reason why I was glad to see someone like Trammell quoted was because it showed that these blogs are credible and that this issue is important to write about.

I am new to blogging so I had to read the article in the New York Times a little slower than usual to make sure I understood exactly what the issues were. The essential idea of travel blogs seems wonderful to me. Hearing another person's experiences would seem to be one of the easiest ways to learn the tips and tricks. I just imagined reading another person's blog about their travels and being interested and amused. I could read about something that went wrong for them that I could prevent from happening to me. It seemed nice until I read on about Ms. Gradwohl. It is an interesting idea that a person who writes a blog for the public to see might not think about their bog getting that much exposure. As far as PR goes I think that it could go two ways which happen to be the two ways I mentioned. Travel blogs can be a very useful tool for practitioners but it can also do what it did to Ms. Gradwohl and potentially hurt a reputation. Overall, I do think that travel blogs will be and have been a very useful tool. It will change the travel industry as well as help it. I think it will help it because I saw in the article that a hotel chain has started its own blog which seems to be a good PR move. Companies and industries such as hotels can monitor the blogs and adjust themselves to please customers better.

As one of the sites mentioned in Elliott's article, we at InflightHQ were very pleased to see business travel blogs getting mainstream media coverage. Business travelers - particularly those who are moving on to a new city every week - are something of a vulnerable group. But that vulnerability can be reduced tremendously with information sharing, saving the travelers and their companies from both financial and emotional strain.

We hope that this article will attract more interest from the business travel community to the blogs that serve this population.

Wish I could ever get a chance to fly through norther part of Paksitan.