Speakers & Guests of Honor

Speakers & Guests
of Honor

Irwan Shah Bin Abdullah @ Wolfgang Sladkowski eTravel Entrepreneur

Irwan Shah Bin Abdullah @ Wolfgang Sladkowski, a German national has 15 years experience in the Internet Travel industry (eTravel).

In 1986, he left Germany to join Sino Dragon Industries in Hong Kong as an IT Director. Four years later, he was appointed General Manager for China based Sino Dragon Publishing Co., Ltd (www.sino.net) and two years later he joined the publishing arm of China Resources Group, a state enterprise under the Ministry of Foreign Trade & Economic Cooperation (MOFTEC) (chinaresources.com) in the People's Republic of China as a Senior Marketing Consultant and adviser in opening new markets for China Resources in Southeast Asia and the Middle East.

In 1994, Wolfgang teamed up with French investors to develop and launch AsiaRooms.com, which became one of the most successful travel portals in Asia in terms of revenues and profitably. Asiarooms.com was acquired in 2007 by TUI Travel PLC London.

During the 15 years in the eTravel industry, he held the position of Vice President Asia Pacific at AsiaRooms.com - Chief Operating Officer and Chief Technology Officer at New Jersey based e4asia Inc., Director of Information Technology at Cable & Wireless Compunet Corporation Limited, Senior Adviser to Mweb Thailand, the owner of Sanook.com, Thailand's largest website with 750,000 web visitors per day.

Wolfgang consulted in addition eTravel projects for hospitality companies such as Dusit Kempinski Group, Shangri-La Hotels, Lufthansa German Airlines, LTU Thailand, Varig Brazilian Airways, Bangkok Airways, Diethelm Travel, Shangri-La Hotels & Resorts, Imperial Group of Hotels, Central Group of Hotels, Holiday Inn & Crowne Plaza Group in Thailand and the People’s Republic of China. To protect his reputation within the eTravel industry, Wolfgang does not accept projects with inbound or outbound tour operators.

His specialties’ includes the development of multilingual travel content in any language, frontend and backend application development in PHP and XML, the development of large scale SQL Databases for the tourism sector in MySQL, Sybase and Oracle and the development of Mobile Applications in the travel industry.

He is a mastermind in SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and has always focused purely on free traffic.

Due to security risks of MS-Windows platforms, Wolfgang only develops Internet projects on UNIX operating system platforms.

Wolfgang is a Muslim convert since 1988 and is fluent in German, English and able to communicate in Thai, Malay and basic Pashto.

ABSTRACT

By now, many hotels and resorts have already joined on the Internet bandwagon. Many properties thought that once they join the Internet, revenues will flow in, but only to find out that the website is sitting idle.

During my past 15 years in the e-Travel industry, I have advised many Sales, Marketing, Revenue & Residence Managers on how to improve their Internet Exposure and Revenues on the Internet.

My workshop will deal mainly with the following subjects and if time permits with a long Question and Answer Session.

How to develop successful eHotel strategies from the start.
How to develop a Mobile Application in-house for your hotel and distribute it as a giveaway to Social Networks .
How to outsource multilingual content richwebsites and focus on emerging outbound markets, especially the P.R.C., Indonesia and India.
How to develop a Search Engine Marketing Plan for small and large hotels on a limited budget.
How to gain Top Rankings in Search Engines for your property at no cost. (Content is King)
How to deal with hostile reservation portals/overseas travel agents that discount your room inventories on the Web.
How to protect your web content (IP) of your property.
How to create an E-mail Marketing Plan for your hotel without spamming the world.
How to create a Social Networking Plan with the power of Facebook and other Social Networks.
How to focus via the Internet on the GlobalHalal Orientated F.I.T. market (Country Focus: Malaysia)
How to get your content removed from other travel websites.
How to improve your Google Ranking (Pagerank) from PR3 – PR5 for your property within 2 months.
Why your hotel should price room inventories on the Web at par with OTA’s and Inbound Tour Operators.
How to respond to User Generated Online Reviews.