Tonight, I saw a commercial on TV promoting FREE wireless internet access at Marriott Courtyard properties.

It's about time.

Over the course of the past several years, the biggest complaint I hear from both consumer and business travelers is the fact that they have to pay for wireless access in hotels, or that it's simply not available.

At Wanderlust, we have a wireless network that is available to every client that walks through the door. It cost us less than $100 to set it up, and is used by every client when they come to the agency. In contrast, when I travel, I usually find that I have to pay a pretty stiff fee to use the wireless network at the hotel I'm staying at. Login, and they stick it to me.

Last week, I was at the Intercontinental Hotel in Chicago. I was paying for two rooms, and staying with a business conference group meeting at the University of Chicago's downtown campus. The reasons for two rooms was that my daughter is considering applying to the University of Chicago for college.Wireless internet access was a double digit premium in the hotel. It was free at the University.

Last night, I spent about two hours searching on Google for destinations in need of marketing help. I put myself in the consumer mindset and used every possible combination of keywords I could think of. Know what I found?

Not much.

Destinations and resorts are definitely losing the competition for organic search rankings. I hadn't the heart to drive up the cost per click by clicking on the sponsored link.

Yesterday, at the annual Camp Chingachgook board retreat, I had an interesting conversation with a fellow board member. Kathy Muncil, who runs a Best Western hotel and the Fort William Henry Resort and Conference Center in Lake George Village, congratulated me on the recent launch of Wanderlust. We both shared a nice laugh over the timing of the launch, in relation to the current state of the economy.

I asked her what she thought was the biggest challenge she and other destinations would be facing in the coming year, fully expecting her to echo much of what has been written in the travel press of late. Instead, she zeroed in on my favorite subject - telling the brand story. "We all have bed skirts and pillows and pictures on the wall," she said, "but it all comes down to the kind of experience our customers will have when they get here. We need to stop talking about amenities and learn how to tell that story in our marketing."

I couldn't agree more.

There are many arguments for a resort like The Sagamore to opt for an html over a Flash-based website. With a properly coded and optimized html-based site, Google and other search engines can index the content on every page. The result? If you have, say 50 pages of content on your site, you have 50 homes pages - each relevant to a different set of keywords and search phrases.

In contrast, if your site is built in Flash, it's a self-contained application. Google and other search engines see it as a single page, relevant to a single set of keywords and search phrases.* Most often, these Flash based sites rank high in Google for their brand name only. If the person searching for a place to go doesn't know the name of the resort or destination, its almost impossible to find it on the web directly. For obvious reasons, this is a huge disadvantage over the competition's sites written in html.

Another compelling reason to avoid building your site in Flash is the inability to reference any specific page. If an agent or sales person, or brand loyalist for that matter, wants to send a potential customer to a specific page on the site that holds the key to closing the deal, they can't. They can't email a link directly to the content, they can't bookmark it using one of the social media tools like Delicious, Digg, Technorati or StumbleUpon. The best they can do is send them to the home page, with instructions on how to navigate to the page with the relevant content. Most people won't bother.

However, there is an even more compelling reason to avoid building a Flash site. Since Flash sites are applications, they can become inoperable when Adobe upgrades the Flash player. Let me illustrate. Earlier today, we were discussing the sale of The Sagamore Resort on Lake George to Ocean Properties. I had visited their website a several weeks ago when the deal closed to see if anything had changed. They still had the same Flash site the previous owners had built.

Last week, I had to upgrade to Flash 10 player on my computer to accommodate a recent upgrade in the software we use to manage the agency. When I pointed my browser to The Sagamore Resort site today with Flash 10 installed, this is what we were served:

A Flash detector error page. This is classic. Not only could I not view any content on the site, but there was no way given for me to contact The Sagamore Resort to let them know that their Flash site has been rendered obsolete by the release of Flash 10.

Most consumers would simply give up. Since it was after 5pm on a Friday, we went to a computer still running Flash 9 and found an email address to let them know. On Monday morning, we'll call them to make sure they got the email.

* At the time of this post, Google has announced that it will, in the near future, begin indexing the content of Flash sites. While this is a step in the right direction, we have no idea to what extent the content will be indexed, when it is complete. And it does nothing to solve the issue of not being able to point someone directly to the page with the relevant content. For the foreseeable future, destinations and resorts with Flash sites will remain at a significant disadvantage over their competitors.