May
18
2012

This Week In Hotels

Again a lot of activity happened in the week. The stock market is excited about Facebook’s IPO and as it continues grows there are companies that leverage its social graph are seeing significant traction. Checkout Gogobot.

1. Gogobot has leveraged social graph to contribute to its growth and since they launched the Iphone app the growth has been even more significant. Gogobot helps in travel planning with recommendation from your friends and its community. It also has reviews built right into it.

Continue reading →

May
17
2012

Challenges and Opportunities For Hoteliers: A Discussion With Tom Costello

Tom Costello is the founder and Principal of iGroupAdvisors, a business performance improvement advisory company, located in The Woodlands, Texas. 

What do you see as the main challenges today in the hotel space?

The main challenges that I see in the hotel space are a couple.

1. OTAs vs. Brand – Based upon what has transpired over the past three years as it relates to online distribution and with the entry of Room Key.com, I anticipate that the brands will continue to face an uphill battle with OTAs and will most likely see that their percentage of guest rooms distributed through third party channels and the cost of doing business with them will remain unchanged for the balance of 2012 and throughout the entire year of 2013.

Continue reading →

May
14
2012

RoomKey Adds Travelocity Whitelabel & TripAdvisor Ratings. What Do You Think?

When Roomkey was launched the idea was to take away bookings from OTA’s and get more direct bookings. The six brands behind it bought a lot of inventory to the product but it  still wasn’t comparable to some of the big OTA’s.

Roomkey has seen some success in getting traffic to the site, about 2 million visitors came to the site in March. Their main strategy is focusing on people who checked a  room rate but are not going to book, they get a pop under and when it is clicked it leads the visitor to Roomkey.

Continue reading →

May
12
2012

This Week In Hotels

Here are some of the articles from around the web that you should read over the weekend.

1. If the guests know, like and trust your Hotel there is a higher percentage of direct booking. And very often these guests is also the most loyal guests to the Hotel.What can your Hotel do about this?Develop The Hotel Social Media Hub with all your Hotel departments and employees involved

Hotel Social Media Hub

2. Hotels are failing to meet guest expectations due to a lack of technological understanding, according to industry experts on an International Hotel Investment Forum (IHIF) panel.

Hoteliers admit failure to grasp technology

3. What has 2012 delivered marketers in the way of awesome infographics? This post has rounded up the best of the best — the ones that are chock full of information, excel at data visualization, and deliver brand new data to marketers. Take a look at the favorite marketing infographics so far in 2012!

The 10 best marketing infographics of 2012 (so far)

 

May
9
2012

Why Are We Not Innovators Or Early Adopters?

When you look at certain industries they always seem to be doing work at the cutting edge. And, when I say cutting edge I mean work that impacts your daily life or completely changes a user experience. I will use smartphone as an example because a lot of us will relate to it. When Apple introduced the Iphone it jump started the smartphone industry. It impacted internet usage, music consumption, buying patterns and multiple other things. This is only one example, but the point is, you can see the impact everywhere.

Continue reading →

May
7
2012

Reputation Is A Driver Of Revenue

Sharing information online is one the most common activities anyone does on the internet. It can be in the form of a Facebook status update or it can a Instagram photo. This has been made easy due to the amazing growth in smartphone adoption and the growing trust in wisdom of the crowd. According to Nielsen, 92% of the people trust recommendations from people they know (friends and family) and 70% people trust online reviews. 

Continue reading →

May
4
2012

This Week In Hotels

This week a lot happened in the hotel world. Here are some of the highlights.

There are advantages to the location of the hotel whether it is a central downtown location or close to local attractions. A study by Cornell looks at the effect of location and pricing.

The effect of location on pricing 

Continue reading →

May
3
2012

Study: Intuitive User Experience Leads To More Direct Bookings

As most consumers do shopping on various sites for comparisons and getting the best deal, price remains as the biggest factor for not completing a booking, this is according to Iperceptions, a web analytics company. They found this during their study of Q4 2011 for worldwide visitors to travel and hospitality sites.

Price as a barrier can be related to the budget of person shopping. Since, that person is looking for the best deal they could have moved on to another site which offers something in their range.

Continue reading →

May
2
2012

Recommendations: People Trust Friends, Family and Online Reviews

The popularity of social media and other online channels has lead to enormous amount of data generation. This data includes people recommending places, business & services etc.

Neilson conducted a survey to check on how this data sharing and recommendations are effecting everyone trust level. This was a big survey covered above 50 countries and about 28000 people. The last time they did this was in 2007.

Continue reading →

May
1
2012

Email Marketing: A High ROI & Mobile Marketing Strategy For Hotels

In the last few years the buzz is focused on Social Media. There have been multiple discussions on how fast it is growing and how can it be leveraged from a marketing point of view. As hoteliers we tried of work on this and like of most businesses did not see revenue tied to this channel.

Social Media became a communication, customer service, conversation and engagement channel. Anyone who understood this is not a medium for selling but engagement had success with it.

Continue reading →