Net: Hotels.com provides great consumer value, excellent web and phone customer service and has one of the most rewarding loyalty programs I have seen.  The company shows how applying the philosophy and applications of Web 2.0, good customer service and a well designed and implemented rewards program can create customer loyalty.  Why book anywhere else?

When I tell people I write about Web 2.0, customer service and loyalty, I know some (many?) find these three subjects a bit random or at least unfocused.  Through case studies and other posts, I hope it is becoming clear that they are often critically linked.  A few examples:

·         The case study Another Dell Misfire showed how focusing on Web 2.0 and posting user reviews on your web site without engaging customer service agents can both de-motivate front line sales and service employees and actually lose potential customers. 

·         The case Customer Service Disaster Non-Recovery found that Kimpton hotels invested in a loyalty program, but appear to neither provide customers with a way to comment on poor customer service nor monitor and/or respond to the most popular Web 2.0 travel sites including Trip Advisor and hotels.com.

Consumer value proposition

Hotels.com is a business that appears to be investing in and performing well in all three areas, but before providing details about their Web 2.0, customer service and loyalty initiatives, it is important to understand that they are built on top of a very good consumer value proposition.  Although some of my greatest business successes have come from customer loyalty programs, one of the most important lessons we learned in the early days of AIR MILES Canada was “a good loyalty program will not make up for a bad consumer value proposition or an inconsistent brand.”  Put another way, a great loyalty program can lead a horse to water and get him to take the first drink, but if the water tastes bad, the horse won’t come back.”  We learned this the hard way by signing Safeway – an excellent grocer – as our exclusive partner in Western Canada and another chain – whose stores were so inconsistent that the brand no longer exists – in Ontario.  With our data we saw that non-shoppers were much more responsive to Safeway acquisition offers than the weaker chain and that new shoppers who tried Safeway were about 4X more likely to return there than they were to the Ontario stores.  This lesson is amplified with Web 2.0 and the increasing use of user reviews as customers can check out a brand’s reputation before trying.  

I originally found Hotels.com when looking for a deal on a hotel room.  Although I can’t remember the first hotel I reserved, I am sure that I believed I got a good deal; otherwise I would not have come back.  The business delivers on its core brand proposition – they find great deals on good (or better) hotels.  I had an amazing experience a few months ago when looking for a suite for our family’s trip to Prague to visit my nephew who was in film school there.  Through another site – possibly American Express – I found the Pachtuv Palace, which had what looked to be amazing two bedroom efficiency apartments in a great Prague neighborhood.  Through Amex Platinum Travel, I found what seemed to be a good deal, something like $550 a night, but thought I would check hotels.com to see if they even offered the property.  They did and had a much lower price of $400 per night.

Here’s how hotels.com uses Web 2.0, customer service and a loyalty program to make their brand even stronger and their customer loyalty – and therefore profitability – even higher:

• Web 2.0 – Like many in the travel industry, Hotels.com asks for and prominently uses Guest Ratings to help customers choose hotels.  Their search filters are very good and users can set Guest Rating parameters from 1.0 to 5.0 and sort search findings based on other users’ ratings. 

• Customer Service – One of the things I find maddening about many Web based businesses is their insistence on burying, hiding under multiple layers or just not providing a customer service phone number.  Amazon does this and so does Adobe.  As someone who created and ran a business with over 400 customer service representatives that was also among the first loyalty businesses with a Web site, I understand the microeconomics of Web based vs. phone and CSR based interactions.  I also understand that millennials and other generations increasingly prefer to use the web over the phone for just about everything.  But until everyone has 24/7 Web access and reaches the Internet uber alle state of being, many companies have an opportunity to gain market share by making it easy for customers to find their phone number.  I was pleasantly surprised to find that Hotels.com prominently displays their phone number at the top of every Web page.

Last fall, I discovered how great their service was when I had started to book a room online for a trip to London but ran out of time and had to shut down to drive to a meeting.  I called Hotels.com form the call and was pleasantly surprised by the following:

-          Very short wait time

-          Customer service agent spoke excellent English

-          When I told them I needed a room in London, they asked for a budget, star rating and area and within seconds found a great deal at the May Fair for $200/night.

-          They took my credit card and did not charge extra for a phone booking, something I have come to expect from other services.

• Loyalty – Hotels.com offers consumers a free loyalty program called Welcome Rewards.  It rates high on many of our keys to success for a profitable loyalty program, including the following:

-          Aspirational reward: Free hotel rooms up to $400 in value.  Anyone who is booking on Hotels.com would find free rooms, especially at this level, rewarding.

-          Attainable reward: Members earn a free hotel room after only 10 nights – that’s nights not stays.  This is nearly off the charts attainability and value.  Considering consumers can often find three star hotels for $100-150 and four or five star hotels for $200, a free night in a $400 room (hotels.com rate, not the rack rate) translates to between 20 and 40 percent back.  Compare this to the average value of a frequent flyer point at 1 percent back and you can see how strong the Welcome Rewards value proposition is.  If this doesn’t change behavior, nothing will.

-          Simple to earn and redeem: Once you sign up online, every time you book either online or by phone, you automatically earn credits toward the ten needed for a free night. When you are ready to redeem, you can easily do so through either phone or online bookings.

-          Awareness: Hotels.com prominently features their Welcome Rewards program on their home page and recently on TV advertising as well.  Their customer service agents are in the loop as well and promote the program to sign up new members. 

Dave Nichol – the brilliant creator and promoter of President’s Choice, the powerhouse store label brand of leading Canadian grocery retailer Loblaws, once defined loyalty as “nothing more than the absence of a better alternative.”  Although I was and remain a huge admirer of Nichol’s intellect, drive and accomplishments, I respectfully disagreed with his definition.  One of the ways I define loyalty is the presence of a value driven relationship that removes any interest in looking for an alternative from the consumer’s mind.  In other words, a loyalty customer goes there first. 

For me, at least, Hotels.com consistent consumer value proposition, their use of Web 2.0 and their top notch customer service and loyalty programs keep me coming back.  Why would you book anywhere else?

Net: I loved the original Kindle and the Kindle 2 is even better.  Thinner, more durable, faster user interface and improved battery life.  It pays for itself in 6 months if you switch from buying the paper versions of the Boston Globe, NYT and WSJ to the KIndle versions.  If you click on the link below to buy one, 10% of the price will go to the nonprofit job training program Year Up.

Click Here to buy a Kindle from amazon.com and 10% of the price will be donated to Year Up

Last summer my wife bought me an Amazon Kindle for our anniversary.  I was so impressed with the device – and felt that it was so poorly marketed – I wrote a long email praising the product and sent it to everyone on my email list.  I had never done this before for any product or service.  I turned the email into a blog post and posted it on Collaboration Evangelist under the CHU Recommends section.

The post was titled 4 Reasons why the Amazon Kindle e-reader is one of the best devices ever, will help you lose weight, save money and lower your stress level. I won’t repeat all of the praise for the Kindle here; the main points I emphasized were:

1. Although Amazon markets the Kindle as an electronic book reader, I find its real value comes from reading newspapers and blogs.  The Kindle automatically and wirelessly downloads newspapers and blogs to the device.  So anywhere in the country I wake up with the latest versions of the New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and The Boston Globe and the 10 blogs I follow on My Kindle. You never need to connect the device to your laptop.
2. It is very readable, even in bright sunlight.
3. The battery lasts for days.
4. You get new content by searching right from the Kindle, purchasing with “one click” on the device and are billed through amazon.com as if you made an online purchase.  No need to enter passwords, credit cards, etc. on the Kindle. Books download in 60 seconds.
5. It’s incredibly light, about as heavy as a Blackberry.
6. It’s a great value, as long as you cancel your paper subscriptions.  Although the Kindle 2 is slightly more expensive than the original at $359 and the cover is sold separately for $30, it is still a great deal.  Breakeven is less than 6 months if you switch from paper to Kindle versions of three newspapers.  Books cost about $10; blogs are around a dollar a month.

Improvements

As great as I thought the original Kindle was, the Kindle 2 is greatly improved.  Major improvements include:

Much thinner.  About half the thickness of an iphone (even without the maddeningly fat iphone booster battery).

Much more durable.  The battery cover on the original comes off easily.  This one doesn’t.  Note you can’t change the battery on the Kindle 2, but you don’t need to as it lasts for days.

Sleeker, cooler design.  Think ipod touch vs. 80 gig video ipod.

Improved user interface.  The addition of a joystick controller improves ease of use.  My favorite improvement is shifting the stick to the right advances to the next article, something that required multiple actions on the original.

Problems with the new version

The only complaint I have with the upgraded Kindle is it seemed harder to read when I first used it.  Thinking it was just my aging eyes, I asked my colleague Nicco Mele if he thought it was more difficult to read.  “Yes!” he exclaimed, obviously relieved that he wasn’t imagining the same thing I saw.  To get a third opinion, I took both models to Kinkos and ask them to scan the same page side by side.  Here’s what I found:

If you are reading this on a small screen, you may not be able to see the difference, and note, the scan appears much darker than the real screen, which looks very close to black type on white paper.  Although the Kindle 2 (left) has slightly less contrast, due to the increased grey scale that makes black and white pictures appear more clearly (which I don’t care about because the pictures are not great and only come in B&W – an easy trade off for weight and battery life), that’s not what causes decreased legibility.  The surprising finding is that the spacing between lines on the  Kindle 2 is much tighter, which makes it more difficult to read.  When I first looked at the side by side scans, I thought the Kindle 2 was set to a smaller font, but after measuring and counting both word count per line and lines per inch, I realized the problem was tighter spacing.

Although in hindsight I am embarrassed about this, I actually returned my first Kindle 2 because the decreased legibility bothered me so much.  I reversed my decision after a couple of weeks because I realized how much I valued the increased durability, improved size and faster scanning of articles using the joystick. After a few days, I couldn’t remember that the Kindle 1 was easier to read.  Maybe it was my 52 year old eyes after all?

Last point – Amazon is still missing a huge opportunity by not building in the capability to email articles to clients, colleagues and friends.  When I find something I want to share, I have to go online, find the article in the newspaper or blog, get the link and then email it.  How many more Kindle’s could Amazon sell if instead of a standard email, non-Kindle users received an email with “Sent from my Amazon Kindle.  Click here to learn more about the Kindle” in the signature line?   Although a great improvement over the original in many ways, the Kindle 2 is still not Web 2.0 ready.

Postscript – Amazon recently shipped the Kindle DX, which features a 9.7″ screen, larger than the  6.0″ screen on the Kindle 2. I was with John King from Perot Systems at a Year Up Board Summit last week.  John is even a bigger gadget guy than I and as soon as he saw me, he whipped out his brand new DX and let me play with it.  I am not going to review it, as there are several good reviews available including this one from Gizmodo.com, but my initial reaction was it was too big.  I like the existing size and – almost – everything about it.

If you click below to buy your Kindle 2 from amazon.com, 10% of the proceeds will go to Year Up, the innovative nonprofit job training program I have been involved with since its beginning in 2001.

Click Here to buy a Kindle from amazon.com and 10% of the price will be donated to Year Up

Net: Despite the fact that user generated ratings and reviews have been a mainstay of the internet since at least 1999, many large businesses fail to provide an easy way for customers to provide feedback and do not monitor and respond to customer comments on the Web.  I recently experienced this first hand from the Hotel Monaco in Washington, D.C. It is the first experience bad enough to earn a ” CHU Un-recommends.”

In our page Six Web 2.0 Imperatives for All Businesses, we emphasized the following points under Imperative Four: Build, Activate and Support your Communities:

• If you don’t provide a place on your site for customers to ask questions, it is highly likely that at least some of them will go to a third party site where they will be prime targets for your competitors’ marketing efforts.
• Whatever you do, make it incredibly easy for employees, business partners and customers to provide feedback. And go the next step by proactively asking for feedback. Then, make sure you authentically respond to their feedback.

A few months ago in the post “A car for a car, a coffee for a coffee, $10 for free porn?” I wrote about several positive experiences where businesses seized the opportunity to turn service failures into brand building recoveries.   This post is from a different perspective.

A few weeks ago my wife and I were planning to attend Rhodes Scholar and Oxford University reunions in Washington, D.C.  I went to Hotels.com to find a hotel room for the weekend.  They had what looked like a great price on the Hotel Monaco, a Kimpton Hotel in a perfect location.  I have stayed at other Kimpton properties and always had good experiences, so I booked the hotel.  [Hotels.com is a great business and will be the subject of a future post.]

I flew to Washington early in the day so I could take my fellow alum and Microsoft uber-lawyer Steve Crown to visit Year Up, the innovative work force development program founded and led by Gerald Chertavian, for lunch.  We had a wonderful tour and Steve had a great session with several students, sharing experience and advice from his years of success and answering all of their questions.   After our visit to Year Up, I went to check in at the Hotel Monaco.  My wife Patty was arriving later in the evening.

The Hotel is in a beautiful historical building that used to be a famous Post Office and appeared to have all of the usual Kimpton features – cool lobby, interesting bar, water bowl for dogs, etc.  I checked in and went to the room.  Although we had reserved a “deluxe queen,” room, it was very, very small.  It felt like there was less than 12 inches of space from the side of the bed to the window or the wall and a small desk was crammed into an alcove.  The room was a fraction of the size of the rooms we have had in other Kimpton properties.  Not exactly the venue nor the ambiance I had envisioned for a romantic weekend in DC without our kids.

No problem, I thought, I’ll call the front desk and get a better room.  All seemed good when the desk staff offered to move me to a “deluxe King” on the “first” floor.  It turns out that the first floor is subterranean, i.e. it’s the basement.  My initial concern was that the room would be noisy, being so close to the street.  The front desk clerk assured me that they were quite quiet, and it turns out that is true.  But as I descended the stairs to the “first floor” I started to notice a bad odor.   Despite my attempts to simultaneously act like a two year old and ignore the smell and try to convince myself that Patty wouldn’t notice, it was clear the first floor smelled like a damp basement with a mildew problem.  Nonetheless, I powered on to the room.  The room was actually nice, with a huge bed, high ceilings, decent bathroom, and more room for the desk.   The architect had done a great job making the half-windows to the sidewalk seemed larger than they were and let in a lot of light.  Best of all, the room was not noisy at all.  I thought I could still smell something but rationalized that the odor was just coming from the hall.  I cranked the AC on high, ran around the corner to get some candles to complete the romantic ambiance I was determined to create, and took off for the Rhodes event.

The event to honor Sir Collin Marshall, who was retiring as the Warden of Rhodes House, was held at the British Embassy and it was wonderful.  By the end of the event, Patty had arrived, checked into the hotel and met me and several of my classmates at a Georgetown restaurant.  The food was great, the company even better and we stayed at the restaurant until almost midnight.  On the way back to the hotel Patty said, “Did you notice our room is in the basement of the hotel, the hallway smells like dog pee and our room like mold? ” I briefly considered returning to my two year old mindset, but chose to say something like “maybe a little, but I bought a lot of candles” and quickly change the subject.

The candles and the AC helped cover up the smell, and we decided to not try and change rooms again given that the front desk told me the hotel was sold out with two wedding parties.  The next day, Patty discovered there was mold on the bottom of the shower curtain.  A definite first for me in a “four star” hotel or for that matter, any star hotel.  In addition to the smelly hall and room mold problems, the on-demand movies in our room were very fuzzy and the engineer on duty could not fix the problem.  And whoever cleaned our room on Friday night forgot to remove the mold, but did remove our wine glasses and did not replace them.  All in all, a pretty bad experience.

One of the good things about blogging about customer service is it can change your perspective from “this is terrible” to “this is great material.”  I don’t think Patty shared my enthusiasm for the experience, but she is a great traveler and never once mentioned how badly I screwed up picking this hotel.

But this is not really about our experience with the room, it is about what happened – or didn’t happen – next:

1)      I looked all over the room for one of those, “comment cards” where guests are encouraged to offer feedback on their stay.  Couldn’t find one. Lost opportunity number one.

2)      I went to the front desk and asked if they had a comment card.  Again no luck, but the nice lady brought me a piece of Hotel Monaco, a Kimpton Hotel stationary.  She wasn’t trained to ask if something was wrong with my room.  Lost opportunity numbers two and three.

3)      I went to the Kimpton Hotels web site and looked for a customer forum, request for feedback, or any place where I could share my experience.  Couldn’t find one.  Lost opportunity number four.

4)      In order to get free internet access, Kimpton requires you to join their rewards program.  This is an interesting approach and I have no problem with it, as you can opt out of program and hotel emails.  I did not opt out, in part because I was expecting to receive an email asking for feedback on the stay.  Over the past two weeks, I have received several emails from Kimpton, but none asking for feedback on my stay. Lost opportunity number five.

5)      I did receive an email from Hotels.com asking about my stay.  Finally, someone out there gets it.  I responded to the email, explaining the problems we experienced and almost immediately received a response apologizing for the experience and encouraging me to post a review of the property.  I am assuming that Kimpton has not asked their third party booking partners like hotels.com to share feedback with them.  Or if they do, no one from Kimpton responded.  Either way, missed opportunity number six.

6)      I posted reviews, including pictures of the moldy shower curtain, on tripadvisor.com and hotels.com.  Still no response from the Hotel Monaco or Kimpton hotels.  Missed opportunity number seven.

Maybe the eighth time’s the charm, but I won’t hold me breadth that they will ever find or respond to this post the way that both Dell and the Mayo Clinic have.

In addition to not heeding our advice to proactively ask for feedback, Kimpton is ignoring the second of our Six Web 2.0 Imperatives for All Businesses:

Listen and understand your business’s and your competitors’ presence on the Web.

I am sure that the decision to invest in cool physical plants, hip curtains and bed spreads, great bars and large dog bowls were deliberate decisions made by Kimpton executives to create their brand.  But they need to understand that the world has changed and the impact of bad customer experiences and word of mouth are no longer limited to the few people an unhappy guest might tell.  For many businesses, your brand is being shaped – positively or negatively – in conversations on the web.  I am fairly certain that investing in asking for customer feedback, monitoring conversations about their properties on the web and responding to customer concerns – both online and offline – would be far less expensive than all but the dog bowls and equally, if not important than their other initiatives to build and maintain their brand.

As a related aside, I couldn’t but help notice that two other enterprises I recently interacted with proactively asked for my feedback. Both Toronto’s YYZ Pearson Airport and the TSA security check points at Boston’s Logan Airport prominently post signs asking for customer feedback. Pearson goes even further by providing wired laptops staffed with enthusiastic young people in their terminals and giving customers a $5.oo Tim Horton’s certificate for completing the survey.  Interesting to note that both of these are government owned monopolies.

Questions for you:

1. Are you more like Kimpton Hotels or the TSA and YYZ?
2. Do you make it easy for customers to alert you to problems and give feedback?
3. Do you monitor what is being said about you on the Web?
4. Are you authentically responding and seizing the opportunity provided by the crisis of a customer service disaster?

4 Reasons why the Amazon Kindle e-reader is one of the best devices ever, will help you lose weight, save money and lower your stress level.

My wonderful wife gave me an Amazon Kindle for our anniversary recently and I believe it is one of the best devices I have ever used; so good that I want to recommend it to everyone I know.

So what’s so great about the Kindle and why should you try one? Four simple words:  Content, Functionality, Portability and Value.

Content:

Every morning when I wake up, my Kindle has the latest copies of The New York Times, Boston Globe, WSJ, and Washington Post.  It also has the latest posts from the 5 tech/web 2.0 blogs I follow and several political blogs. I have also downloaded several books and the Kindle will open to the last page I read, but I primarily use it for newspapers and blogs.

I recently showed the Kindle to Ken Dec, one of my partners in Underwood Partners. Ken is a marketing/branding genius and instantly recognized that Amazon has been marketing the Kindle as an e-book reader, where as I (and probably most of you will) use it primarily as an e-paper/blog reader.

Functionality:

Readability:

The Kindle is about the side of a medium paper back, although much thinner: 7.5 inches tall x 5 inches wide x 0.5 inches think.  The reading screen is about 5 x 3.5.  One of the reasons the Kindle is superior to other readers I have tried is that they have come as close to possible to replicating black ink on white paper (the most readable combination). Although the screen is not back-lit and therefore requires some light on planes, in bed, etc., you can read it in bright sunlight without any difficulty – say while your 9 year old son is warming up for a soccer game.

The Kindle has multiple font sizes, which can be changed by clicking two buttons once.  I found this to be extremely helpful the second day I had the Kindle when I took it to a hotel exercise room and found I needed to increase the font size to be legible on the recumbent bike (re: the “lose weight” comment above).  It’s also a god send if you forget your reading glasses.

Turning Pages:

To turn pages you push a bar on either side of the Kindle to go the next or previous page.  A “back” button takes you back to the pervious section you were on.

When reading newspapers the menu button will bring up a drop down window with several choices: front page, sections list, articles list.  This enables you to go to the section you want (e.g., Sports) or scroll through all of the articles in the paper or within a section.

Downloading Content:

One of the best features of the Kindle is you can download content anywhere in the country as long as you have any signal on the Sprint network.  Amazon calls their network the “Whispernet” and it truly works almost anywhere.  Newspapers, blogs, magazines all update automatically whenever there is new content and you have the “connect” switch on.  Although you pay for content (see below), you do not pay for the air time and don’t have to log onto T-Mobile or any other pay site. It literally works everywhere – even in my Dad’s nursing room home in rural West Virginia.

To add content you select “Shop in Kindle Store” from the menu and have your choice of 190,000 books, 26 newspapers, 18 Magazines and 940 blogs. All newspapers, blogs and magazines have a two week free trial, and books allow you to read a section before purchasing.  Books usually sell for $9.99, newspapers $9.99 per month and blogs a dollar or two.  All cost less than their paper versions. The download time is amazing – 200 page books in a minute or two.  All payments are made through your Amazon one click settings, so you don’t waste time entering credit card numbers and billing addresses.

Underlining and writing notes on pages:

When I was CEO of Loyalty (and before kids) I read several books a month and would underline important passages, making notes in the margin of business related books.  Our receptionist would type up the notes and sections and I would share them with our senior management team and clients.  The Kindle lets you do this without the receptionist.  With a couple of clicks you can highlight sections and also type notes using the keyboard at the bottom of the Kindle.  You  can then email or print the sections from your PC.

Portability and stress relief:

The Kindle weighs just 0.6 lb; slightly more than my Blackberry which weighs 0.5 lb.  With its small width and size it is easy to fit in a briefcase or just carry with you anywhere.  So here’s how it reduces stress. Carry it with you always and you can blast through a few articles or blog posts if you are:  waiting for the person in front of you at the grocery checkout lane trying to find her coupons, checkbook, etc.; so far, flight attendants have not yet figured them out so you can read during take-off and landings; the 15 minutes the traffic police keep you waiting to give you a ticket – no problem; your best friend who is always late for breakfast, let him take his time; etc., etc., etc.  And guys, the Kindle makes it easy to take 5 newspapers to the bathroom with you.

I also found it to be highly functional in my favorite NYC restaurant (Wild Edibles,3^rd & 35^th) where I was able to read despite having covered the 18″‘ square table with three appetizers,  drinking a beer  with one hand a eating sushi with the other, needing only a 5X7 inch space for the Kindle and one finger to navigate. It also came in handy after shoulder surgery when it would have been impossible to handle a broadsheet traditional paper.

Value

The Kindle costs about $350 from amazon.com and I assume you can try it and return for a complete refund if you don’t like it.  They can also be found on craigslist for around $200, but not often.   Even at the full price, the payback on the difference between the paper price and the Kindle price of the NYT, WSJ and Boston Globe is less than 6 months.

Improvements

The only things I would like to see on the Kindle are an easy way to forward articles to friends and colleagues and some kind of backlight, although traditional clip on book lights can take care of this need for now.  Without a “tell a friend” button, the Kindle lacks one of the basic Web 2.0 imperatives of making it easy for consumers to share/evangelize with their friends.  Look for that in a future version.

Click Here to buy a Kindle from amazon.com and 10% of the price will be donated to Year Up

Ultima Replenisher, Kiwi Strawberry, 90-Serving Canister

This is a very quick recommendation for a powdered “balanced electrolight drink”  I found at Baptiste Yoga.  Think of it as a better, cheaper gatoraide.  Better because it is sugar free and sweetened with the natural sweetner Stevia and is “Gluten Free, 100% non-GMO, no MSG, no caffeine, Vegan and no dairy.”  It also tastes a lot better, IMHO. Cheaper, because it costs less than $25 for a 90 serving container. You mix the drink yourself, it dissolves instantly and stays mixed for days.

Most importantly, it is by far the best thirst quencher I have ever used.  Baptiste Yoga is “hot yoga” and I found drinking this mix was the only way I could really feel hydrated after a work out.

I am sure there are interesting things you can do with this mix. The only one I have found is you can make a better, cheaper version of Red Bull by mixing it with iced green tea.  So, should we call it CHUBULL,  RED CHU, or RED UP?

ONE WARNING – I CAN ONLY ENDORSE THE KIWI-STRAWBERRY FLAVOR.  You are on you own for all others!

Year Up is the innovative workforce develop program founded by Gerald Chertavian that recruits and trains low income urban young adults for entry level technology jobs and places successful program participants in internships with America’s leading companies.

Started in July of 2001 with an inaugural class of 22 in Boston, Year Up now serves over 700 students a year in  programs in Boston, Providence, DC/The Nations Capital Region, New York City, San Fransisco and Atlanta.  Over 85% of Year up graduates are working at leading US companies including State Street, Bank of America, Fidelity, Putnam, American Express, Bain & Company, Providence Equity Partners, Digitas, and several State and Federal Government Departments.

Please visit the Year Up web site to learn more and get involved.  All Year Up students work with a mentor and mentoring is a great way to get started.

I was interested in the BMW X3 (27 MPG highway, as fast as my Porsche and great in the snow), but felt certain that new hybrid’s and diesels would hit the dealers with 12 months and didn’t want to lock into a 2 or 3 year lease, but no-one would offer me a one year deal.  In frustration, I called BMW finance and ask if they had people trying to get out of their leases.  The very nice lady on the phone told me something like “I can’t tell you where to go, but if you Google “lease assumptions” you might find something that will help you.  Her kind advice led me to LeaseTrader.com, now one of my favorite sites.

Lease trader is a market maker that brings people trying to get out of their leases and people looking for a short term lease together.  You can search for any vehicle, any price, monthly mileage, payments, months remaining, and distance from you zip code. For free, you can find cars you are interested in, with options and pictures.   But in order to communicate with the seller, you have to be pre-approved for a lease which costs something like $45 (a great business model and very good way to qualify leads).  I found a fully loaded 2005 X3 in Sudbury for only $450 a month.  The seller had put down a big down payment on a three year lease and his wife was about to deliver twins when I found him. To give you an idea of how good a deal this is, my lease is coming to an end and I called BMW finance to ask what it would cost to extend the lease for another year or two – $800/month!  Here’s a screen shot:

Best of all, the posts are very short and written for those of us without a degree or two from MIT.

Always worth a quick, fun read and usually where i turn first before getting into my heavier Web 2.0, politics, world events, etc. news.  I read it on my Kindle, but the pictures are much better on a computer.