Group Travel Scoop - Groople.com

The New Kid on the Block

Harry Potter got us all to read again. iPhone is getting us excited about cell phones again. In this fashion, Groople wanted to get us all excited about traveling again. It’s hard to get animated about the destination and the journey these days when you’re bogged down by a heap of mundane details. My fellow travel enthusiasts here at Groople knew there was a better way…a way to get us thrilled about being “on the go” ago again. But how? Long story short and many inspirational walks through the park and upside down yoga training later we know we came up with the answer.

Moving straight ahead to the point- I’d like to sing the praises for a moment of our newest service, GroopVine.

GroopVine is a social networking site dedicated to group travel. In the vain of sites like myspace, but instead of comedians and music you will find resources galore to aid you in group travel planning. The site really is very cool. It’s one stop for all things group travel- ideas, creating a trip page, and shopping. Let’s take a more in depth look into those three concepts:

Ideas-

GroopVine makes it easy to find ideas for your trip from the most reliable source possible, your fellow travelers. This way you know you’re getting real organic wisdom, not bought and paid "advice." GroopVine allows you to "copy" a trip of one of your peers and incorporate some of their travel genius with yours to come up with the perfect group trip. There’s some smart folks out there and there is no shame in sharing in their inspiration.

Creating a trip page-

this is the real meat and potatoes of GroopVine. It’s a free webpage planning tool that gets you your own web address to act as a central planning headquarters for you and your group. It has all the tools one could need to plan and execute a truly fabulous group trip. First off, it is what’s known as a "wiki," it allows all invited persons to edit the content, so planning can become a group process. It’s practical in that it has booking engines to shop for hotels, cars, and airfare. Beyond that practical aspect, it has all sorts of bells and whistles that make it very fun. One of my favorite options is the ability to change the color of the trip page to literally hundreds of different choices. You can also upload photos, videos, weather info, rss feeds, tons of extras!

Shopping-

GroopVine directly interfaces with the powerful Groople.com hotel search engine which brilliantly displays the most relevant hotel results tailored to your group type. Not to mention, GroopVine takes advantage of Groople.com’s exclusive deal with Avis and Budget car rental as the only online provider of discounted group car rentals. Don’t forget about the discount-minded air travel searches GroopVine employs.

Are you sold??? Probably not quite yet…and that’s only because you probably haven’t logged in to check out what the fuss is over. Check it out and you’ll see why I’m sipping this fine glass of Crystal. And singing "he’s a jolly good fellow(s)" to the minds behind GroopVine.

See you there.

The New New 7 Wonders of the World

As many of you fellow travel aficionados know, recently announced was the new 7 Wonders of the World as voted on by millions of online voters. This announcement came to us on 07/07/2007, or 777. 7’s are wild!

I’m sorry to report to you that this online contest was slightly misguided… I say this based on at least two factors. One, this was really the 8 wonders of the world contest…how so? Well they snuck in The Great Pyramid of Giza as a grandfathered automatic selection but still selected 7 more sites. Making the Great Pyramid some sort of multidimensional structure existing both in and out of the 7 new wonders at the same time.

Beyond that, I have questions about the results because clearly they got it wrong! I’m mostly kidding but I would like to submit to you the Seven Wonders of the World that we here at the group scoop selection committee would have chosen.

Review.

The Ancient 7 Wonders of the World:

The Temple of Artemis, The Hanging Gardens of Babylon, The Colossus of Rhodes, The Mausoleum at Halicarnassus, The Lighthouse of Alexandria, The Pyramids at Giza, The Statue of Zeus

Review.

The elected new 7 Wonders of the World:

The Great Wall (China), Petra (Jordan), Christ The Redeemer (Brazil), Machu Picchu (Peru), Chichen Itza (Mexico), The Roman Colosseum (Italy), The Taj Mahal (India)

Peer Review.

The Group Scoop 7 Wonders of the World:

We here at the group scoop selection committee agree with most of the selections of the online voters- The Great Wall, Petra, Machu Picchu, The Colosseum, The Taj Mahal to be specific.

Here is where we part ways with the online voters. First, Angkor in Cambodia should have made it. Angkor Wat is the closest thing to an Indiana Jones style relic of man made majestic architecture existing. No finer example of architectural style and exotic setting is to be found in the world. So replace Christ the Redeemer which is an interesting yet somewhat pedestrian wonder with Angkor in Cambodia.

The second bit to change is to include at least one example of a modern, as in right now, wonder of the world. I can think of no better example of this than the newly deployed Palm Island in Dubai, UAE, the Palm Jumeirah. Palm Jumeirah is truly a man made wonder…the last frontier of man made construction, literally creating land. This island represents the first major combination of art and land creation, while it will not be the last, it is the first. And History loves the first. So does this space. Hence, replace Chichen Itza, which is impressive but too similar to the Great Pyramid. Replace it with a true trail blazer, the Palm Jumeirah.

Now we have that settled.

Your Vegas Convention

I’m going to assume that word of mouth and advertising has taken care of the why you should go to Las Vegas for your convention. With the why taken of, let’s take care of some of the what and the how. Here comes some background and advise on planning a convention in Las Vegas.

First off, Vegas is busy, busy, busy. Whenever you have your convention in Vegas you will not be the only convention in town. Always expect people and lots of ‘em. There is no time of the year when the occupancy level of Vegas hotels drops below 80%, even on weekdays. That is not to say that there aren’t good times to go if minimizing the amount of people is a concern. Better to go on the 80% occupancy days than the 99.9% ones. The slower times of year are Jan, Feb, June, and Dec. June jumps out as a time of year with the best combination of weather and smaller crowd numbers. The busiest month of the year is March for both conventions and crowds in Las Vegas with 20 major shows, 220,000 delegates, and 3.4 Million total visitors.

Group Scoop Trivia Tangent -  Las Vegas Historical Visitors

• 1976 9,769,354
• 1986 15,196,284
• 1996 29,636,361
• 2006 38,914,889

Just because Vegas has a lot of Conventions and is busy already does not mean it can’t handle more. It can. The city already has 133, 000 hotel rooms available and more coming online all the time. Vegas has four major convention facilities: the Las Vegas Convention Center, the Cashman Center, Sands Expo Convention Center, and the Mandalay Bay Convention Center. The city is also peppered with smaller facilities that are able to accommodate events of all sizes and needs. The agency in charge of coordinating conventions in the Las Vegas is the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority (LVCVA). The LVCVA website contains information covering all the conventions logistics you’ll need.

More generally, tips for attending a Las Vegas Convention are the same as advise for attending conventions in other cities. Except the idea of staying onsite is especially pertinent in Vegas because the hotels are so large and inclusive they provide no excuse to miss out on the networking boost from staying onsite. Another idea is to pick a hotel along the monorail as Vegas is fairly large and walking to off site activities may not be an attractive option. If you have any delegates with special needs ask for your hotel’s ADA consultant as no city provides for special needs rooms better than Las Vegas.

Another important tip…use a travel expert to set up your convention. A resource like Groople.com can really save you time, money, and make life easy. Not that this space isn’t biased…but right is right.

My final piece of advise is to brush up on your gambling skills. Many of your delegates will likely indulge in Vegas’ main attraction- be prepared! Here’s some help:

General Gambling Advise #1          General Gambling Advise #2          Sports Betting Advise

"Always bet on black."