Volcanic activity: Businesses winning the Iceland 'boom'

Using social media to match up the bespoke and stranded

    Hertz International, which is experiencing a seven-fold rise in demand for one-way rentals, is solving the same problem creatively. Hertz's president Michel Taride reports that 3,500 of the company's rental cars are outside the country they were rented in-a car rented in Rome, he says, ended up 1,300 miles away in Stockholm.

    To get the cars back to where they started, the company is using the web, Twitter and Facebook to match up stranded passengers with one another. "We hope our good service will surprise customers and that it will make them loyal to us," he says, adding that the company opted to cancel one-way drop-off fees, instead of raise them. For the short term, that is.

    Those that couldn't find a way home have sought refuge where they were stranded. But hotel rooms were difficult to find, especially affordable ones. Many hotels near John F. Kennedy International Airport reported 100% occupancy and at the 165-room Hotel Tryp Barcelona Aeropuerto only three junior suites, at 260 Euros a night, were available through the end of next week.

    But did hotels make a killing from the volcano? Not necessarily, since cancellations offset gains made by those that were stranded, according to one hotel executive who wished to remain nameless.

Some of the 'volcanoed' are getting VOIP'd

    Teleconferencing firms, on the other hand, got a boost as a result of the air traffic disruption. "I got volcanoed," says Paul Dickinson, the CEO of the Carbon Disclosure Project, a greenhouse reporting organization, who could not travel to Beijing from London to interview three job applicants. He ended up interviewing all three-and hiring one- via Cisco's TelePresence technology. "I realize now that you can even appoint someone remotely," he says. "That's pretty transformative."

    Cisco (CSCO, Fortune 500) vice president and TelePresence general manager Charles Stucki, who was stuck in London en route to Oslo, struck a new teleconferencing milestone: he closed the $3.3 billion acquisition of Tandberg, a Norwegian videoconferencing firm, via teleconference. Cisco also took advantage of Europe's volcanic moment to drum up new customers with discounted offers to try out the equipment. So far, the results haven't been tallied, says Stucki.

    Bridge-Talk, a video and audio conferencing firm based in Tel Aviv, got concrete results: 80 new clients, most of them Israeli executives who couldn't get to scheduled meetings in Europe and had tried out its services for the first time. "Many customers told us they will no longer travel unless it is essential," says CEO Scott Curzon.

    Even businessmen in Iceland see a bright spot in the dark plume spewing out of the ground. "Iceland has never had this much publicity," said Jon Olaffson, chairman and founder of Icelandic Glacial, a bottled water company, who had just made his way back to Reykjavik from Paris. "We will try to capitalize on the moment." On his to do list: a marketing campaign to promote his certified natural water from Ölfus Spring, a spring formed during a massive volcanic eruption more than 4,500 years ago. Bottled water from Eyjafjallajokull, anyone?