SFO*MEDIA 

CondéNet has acquired HotelChatter, Jaunted, and the rest of SFO*MEDIA. The deal was announced today and we are thrilled.

Extremely exciting times for us…

HotelChatter was featured on the Today Show’s cheapskate travel segment on March 18th. Travel & Leisure features editor, Nilou Motamed, expertly walked Matt Lauer through some of the web’s best stops for planning vacations.

Read all about the Today Show segment here, or check out the video here.

Back on February 9 HotelChatter’s Juliana Shallcross was a panelist at the LA Times Travel and Adventure Show in a seminar about online booking tips and tricks. Her first hand report:

This was the first travel panel I ever participated in and I was extremely nervous. Luckily, I had the best moderator (Jen Leo of the LA Times and awesome travel guru) along with Johnny Jet (aka John DiScala) and George Hobica of AirFare Watchdog, two men who have the airfare booking and general travel booking business down pat. I learned so much from all of them.

I hope I was able to part some wisdom on the attendees myself. If nothing, then I did make them laugh with a few of my stories and when I spilled ice all over my lap. Clumsiness is always a crowd pleaser.

SFO*MEDIA publications registered our biggest traffic month ever in November.

Jaunted and HotelChatter logged over 800,000 unique visitors for the month, according to Quantcast, the open Internet ratings service.

While SFO*MEDIA is the largest independent travel blog publisher, what is more impressive to us is to track how we are doing against some entrenched formidable travel media titans. For instance, SFO*MEDIA’s web traffic is larger than that of American Express’s Travel & Leisure.

Go ahead and triangulate the data using your favorite Internet ratings site:

·Quantcast

·Alexa

SFO*MEDIA had an incredibly busy summer. Recent news includes HotelChatter getting well deserved recognition from the Guardian for our pioneering work into hotel web video.

Meanwhile Jaunted was busy braving a freak tornado at JFK and publishing the first Virgin America flight review. USA Today asked us what our favorite part of Virgin America was, our response? The cup holders.

Finally, the last week of August we held the first ever SFO*SESSIONS at the new office in Charlestown, MA. Our organization is geographically mixed in every way, which made having a day long session in a physical location incredibly beneficial. A view from the new office is above. Bonus points if you can identify the tourist attraction in the background.

We are set for a busy fall as well, so stay tuned.

Sorry to go so long between updates, but we are having a busy summer.

So where are our travel publications showing up these days? Well, it was recently revealed to us that none other than Stephen Hawking is a Jaunted reader. How cool is that? Ditto goes for Dave Barry.

As for HotelChatter, she made an appearance on Good Day New York on Wednesday July 18th.

Other projects? SFO*MEDIA wrapped up consulting work on Starwood’s SPG blog in June, thelobby.com. We helped them start the blog back in April 2006 by providing guidance, advice, and team building. Back then blog consulting was new, these days it is nearly ubiquitous.

Passing along a couple of recent SFO*MEDIA publication press mentions:

· Jaunted in TIME Magazine.

· HotelChatter in today’s NY Times talking about “Hotel as Lifestyle”.

· LA Times calls HotelChatter “A terrific resource for travelers”.

BudgetTravelOnline.com will mark its first year of success with a special event at Tribeca Cinemas in New York City on Wednesday, September 13, 2006 at 6pm. To celebrate, they are hosting a panel discussion with “some of today’s most intriguing travel bloggers”, including Gridskipper.com, Gadling.com, HotelChatter.com and Flyertalk.com.

It is being billed as a free-wheeling discussion about the impact of a new independent travel voice.

In New York this week? Interested in attending the event? Be our guest. Just contact us and we will do our best to help you get in.