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Fishing in the Network

/ Fernando Gallardo / Leave a comment

fishing in the networkIn 2010, when Facebook had barely reached 400 million followers —compared with 1.2 billion it has today—, I wrote a prediction about the increasing power of this social network and the importance that I anticipated for the future of the hospitality industry. Now we already know how it is. Actually, without Facebook utilities, a tourist accommodation has no chance to exist in the next decade, simply because the tourist market is all digital and connected. Soon, travelers will choose and book their rooms on Facebook. And hotels will know on Facebook who their customers are, how they think and what they really want. Welcome to Planet Earth, welcome to Planet Facebook.

The future of search is social, I hazarded in a short essay about the use of social networks on the Internet and its so-called ‘Facebook effect’.  Could Mark Zuckerberg’s ecosystem dare to unseat Google’s digital culture dominance? Assaulting the algorithms used by the company of goggles, Facebook has come to optimize its search engine which allows displaying in real-time all that we are writing on our timeline. Continue reading →

Facebook Nation

/ Fernando Gallardo / Leave a comment

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Facebook is already the most populated nation in the world. More than 1,550 million people live connected to each other today, exchanging ideas, feelings, languages, aptitudes, products, services, economies…The demographic has been, is and will be a deciding factor in this world’s organization. And it is convenient to reflect and reconsider many clichés before it.

It would be necessary to discern first what we intend as a nation and how we feel as a country. If we adhere to a legal or historic scope, the concept of nation rises in the middle of the XVII century when the Treatise of Westphalia puts an end to the Thirty Years’ War, in 1648. But the maturity of the State nation is not consolidated until the end of the XVIII century, coinciding with the end of the old regime and the fall of the French Revolution, when the first theoretical formulation of the differential event with its adjacent political movements are elaborated. It would be certainly necessary to synthetize here the foretold End of History, by Francis Fukuyama, equidistant  to the renationalization that seems to be observed in certain areas of Europe as a consequence of what Samuel Phillips Huntington defined as the clash of civilizations, especially that of radical Islamism against the West. Continue reading →

The Future of Advertising on Facebook

/ Fernando Gallardo / Leave a comment

pecesIt is a fact that young Mark Zuckerberg is now an authority. To put it another way, and if his name is not sound familiar to some, he is the president of the most populous country on Earth: Facebook. Just for having designed it, his predictions about the world we expect to live in the next few years deserve to be respected. According to this young entrepreneur, some personalized experiences are much more attractive than TV Continue reading →

Bad service in the night

/ Fernando Gallardo / Leave a comment

The example described is a sign of the poor, uneducated and inhibited care of female customers present in most tourist establishments.

In one of the existing accommodation forums on Facebook, where the tourism trade is a clear channel of opinion in which to consult or communicate union troubles, the following text jumped to my screen. It was published a few days ago and the author does not need to be disclosed:

A couple interns call around midnight to ask about availability and will be arriving at the hotel around 2 a.m. Russians. At 4:15 a.m., one called her from the room and it went like this:

Riiin Riing!
– Reception, goodnight.
+ Hello, good evening, look, it’s that I have a female … hhhmmm … URGENCY and I need help.
– What is it? Can you be a little more specific about it so we can help?
+ How do you say … A female emergency, you know what I mean?
– Well, honestly, if you don’t specify the urgency, I cannot offer more help.
+ Hhhmmmm … An urgency on … hhhmmmmm, “the period.”
– OK, I understand, we could provide a towel in any case, if you want. Can you wait until tomorrow to buy tampons or pads in the nearest pharmacy?
+ And there is no woman that you can call or you can help me that’s awake at this hour?
– Well, honestly, it’s 4.15 in the morning and I don’t think I’m ready to wake anyone for that urgency.
+ Okay, and the closest pharmacy?
– Well, actually, you go there in any case.

And so, at 5 a.m. they went to the nearest pharmacy to buy tampons.

I don’t know if such situations occur repeatedly in hotels, but it has happened and its resolution should make us think very seriously about what you would expect from an emergency night experience at a hotel.

The receptionist showed a remarkable lack of reflexes, but concedes the benefit of their nocturnal biorhythms differing empirically from those who have daylight hours. Another obvious shortcoming is the receptionist’s limited empathy with women Continue reading →