A new kind of booking site, Hotelied, offers luxury hotels the opportunity to target discounts towards influential travelers with a large social media influence. Hotels probably hope that by offering these deals, the discounts will be outweighed by the exposure and publicity. I am quite sure it\u2019s been done already between bloggers and hotels. Some bloggers are quite clear in their communication about these deals. But now we have the website Hotelied where travelers have to create a profile and link to their Facebook, Twitter or Linkedin. For people with a lot of fans or followers a great opportunity to gain some profit. But on the other hand, could this mean that the social media becomes less social? It seems that hotels can kind of buy \u2018good reviews\u2019 from influential travelers. Am I too suspicious and could we consider this as a win-win situation for the hotels, the booking site and the travelers? And assume that all those fans and followers will be able to read between the lines, what do you think? ^Marjolein van Spronsen<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"