Weddings: “Look, sweetie, they have the 17th available!” | By Ciara Crossan

For many hotels, weddings are an important source of revenue. Yet the way they market weddings to the prospective bride and groom has not always caught up with the way young people shop in 2013: on the web (where else?) Ciara Crossan, an entrepreneur from Cork, Ireland, asked hereself, "How could hotels reach out to this new breed of transactional web users – and impact their wedding revenues?" The result: her start-up company WeddingDates, a harbinger of other web-based services and apps being designed for the hotel industry in 2013.