HotelMarketing.com’s most popular of 2011

I just received the list of most popular articles from hotelmarketing.com and am republishing it here. I couldn’t find it on their site and emailed them to publish it but am not sure if that’s going to happen any time soon since they also announce that they’re on holidays until January.

Looking through the list is quite interesting. I wrote about it in a  Google+ post (which has limited distribution) so am republishing the content of that post here:

Just went through the hotelmarketing.com‘s list of most popular articles in 2011. An excellent list, reading through the list alone is a great analysis of what’s happening in the hospitality world. Here’s my analysis of the scene: Feel free to add yours.

1. Hoteliers are more and more worried about their dependency on OTAs. Rate Parity problems, Cutting availability to OTAs being flagged and more.

2. Hoteliers still haven’t figured out how to yield results from social media. And nobody blames them. The stats talk for themselves: while social media brings lots of visits and can be used as a branding strategy the conversion of those visitors is much lower than on search. And what should we talk about?

3. Hoteliers want more direct. OK that’s nothing new, it’s the eternal problem of every industry, how to increase direct sales.

4. Hoteliers are searching for new marketing ideas. The posts with catchy headlines like Google+ will re-shape search… andGroupon and Expedia… are high on the list indicating that new ideas are definitely on their mind, even if many are just not mature yet. It leads me to believe that the common phrase that hoteliers are not up-to-date is just wrong, they are probably more careful and aren’t going to invest heavily into stuff that doesn’t work.

5. Big names still work best. I guess this isn’t limited to hotels but if there is Facebook, TripAdvisor, Google, Kayak or other big name in the headline it just gets much more readers. That’s just one of the PR laws, big names sell.

It’s probably more revealing as a trend to see what posts were most read and shared than the content of the posts. It gives a great crowdsourcing of hotel marketers interests (at least those that read hotelmarketing.com).

How do they find us?

I’ve been doing some research lately to find out how the customers that booked on the hotel websites heard about the hotel. We (me and our analysts at WIHP) reached out to over 6000 guests to gather their information. The hotel base we selected was about 100 hotels located in Paris, Rome and Barcelona. A selection of independent hotels varying from cheap to luxury and including Boutique. A pretty wide variety of hotels but all of them independent and in the smaller category of about 30-50 rooms.

We used the classic question “How did you hear about us?” and to be quite honest I was expecting something rather different from what I found. We already know that about 90% of the bookings done on a hotel’s website are done by people who search for the hotel on their search engine, the question that we wanted to answer was how did the guest find out about the hotel.

After some months of surveying the guests we started seeing the answers roll in and they were very interesting, here we go:

Hotel Marketing Survey - how did you hear about us - by WIHP

Survey Question: How did you hear about us?

24.1%  Friends or Family
20.2% OTAs
17.2% Other
16.0% Tripadvisor
11.8% Repeat Guest
2.7% Travel Agent
2.7% Blogs
2.0% Facebook
2.1% Magazine
1.0% Travel Guide
0.1% Twitter

Amazingly (or not) Friends or Family is the leading reply, Google found exactly the same in their survey which you can find here. While I didn’t expect that to be the top answer it obviously makes sense and we’re back to the old marketing and PR law that word of mouth is your best advertising. However here is where the Social Media Marketer needs to realize that his role is to leverage that and yield it to the maximum, sure Social Medial will also create new customers via totally different channels but your social media campaign is all about Friends and Family and do it right, it’s a massive revenue generator. All the staff participate, they’ve got to make sure the guest don’t just feel “good” they’ve got to feel GREAT! and Social Media manager better be concerned about that and do something about it if it isn’t the case.

OTAs (Expedia, Booking.com, Orbitz etc) come second and here is where the hotelier who tries to shut off the OTA is a fool, and his goal shouldn’t be to exclude them but include them intelligently so it generates bookings via the OTAs and spills over to the website, it needs to be a win-win partnership. The article I wrote in February about shifting from OTAs to Direct bookings is still the best way that partnership will work and remain healthy for both parties.

The category “other” contains too many variable replies and while we’re analysing those too I wanted to mention that Google search is included in here. I mention that because some hoteliers will think they their SEO strategy is to be found through all manner of search terms and thus pull in new customers. For your average independent hotel that’s a bad strategy. You will end up with a tremendous bounce rate and eventually Google will notice your site isn’t about “Boutique Hotels in London” and will push down the ranking costing you the double in work. The best strategy for an independent hotel is to build a proper website and get popular through all the regular channels. Additionally I purposely didn’t give the option “Google” or “Search engine” in the survey since sure they found the hotel on Google, but they knew the name before they Googled it.

Tripadvisor comes fourth which is quite interesting. Some time ago I was all over telling hotels to buy their link on Tripadvisor, however about 50% of the hotels that participated in this survey didn’t have that link and oddly enough some of the hotels that didn’t have the link and were very low on the overall chart (1100 out of 1800 hotels) had about 20% of their guest come from Tripadvisor. What I learned from this is that your ranking on the site is not as important as the reviews. Having the last 5-10 reviews all positive and great is more important to your revenues than tearing your hair out because you lost 10 places on their site. Which is great news – because now you know you can always do something about it.

While I am not going to cover the rest of the results, I am sure you understand the figures as well as everyone else, I did want to mention that Facebook with 2% is quite interesting. Facebook is definitely on the rise as a travel marketing resource and I recommend hoteliers to embrace it as a means to reach millions and help them on their buying process.

Feel free to comment and ask questions I’ll do my best to answer them.

Do’s and Don’ts for a Hotel Website

Hotel Chateau Frontenac Paris, adding menu items without confusing the user.

Working at WIHP I come across lot’s of hotel websites both good and bad, there are some points that I find commonly misunderstood by hoteliers and some web designers which make for ineffective hotel websites that don’t sell as much as they could. I started writing this as an article about hotel website design, but as it turns out I’m going to make a list of DO’s and DON’Ts or rather Don’ts and Do’s as I am listing it here. While some of this may go against established viewpoints, I am not writing it as a series of opinions, this is based on over 12 years of trial and error in the highly competitive market that is Paris.

To start with let’s get one thing straight. A Hotel website is there for one purpose and one purpose only – to sell inventory directly for the hotel at highest possible profit to the hotel. What a website isn’t is a medium to flatter a hotelier’s ego, it isn’t there to impress people with fancy animations, it isn’t there to be liked by Google, it isn’t there for any other purpose than to generate maximum bookings at the highest possible profit to the hotel.

Now that we got that straight let’s go over some do’s and don’ts of common points I have noticed together with other professionals at WIHP.

Don’ts

Don’t create a website for Google, Google isn’t going to sleep in your hotel!
It’s a classic we keep running into, some hotelier has been “advised” by a “professional” that the website needs lots of keyword heavy text and lots of information on the home page in order to be well indexed in Google. So they make a horrible website that guests try to avoid. Get this straight – someone who is booking a room in a hotel isn’t interested in a description of the hotel’s history and or something like: “This is really a boutique hotel because it was renovated with a specific boutique hotel design and therefore is getting some of the best reviews as one of the top boutique hotels in the city”. That is making a website for Google rather than for your guests. Sure your SEO guys will complain, but they’ll just need to get better at their jobs.

Don’t focus on animations, it’s distracting.
We all want a sexy website, with fancy animations that look great. We want to show the world that we have the latest technology in the world and we’re up to date, skip it – it’s a distraction! Your guest knows what he wants – even if he is seeing an average of 12 websites before he choses his hotel it isn’t because he doesn’t know what he’s looking for. On the contrary, he just isn’t finding it and your animations are making things worse.

Don’t present the entire city, you’re trying to sell your hotel.
I can’t count how many times I’ve landed on a hotel website only to be searching for the “Rooms” menu option so I could get to see the rooms and find out what the hotel was really like. Some people seem to think the hotel needs to present every single corner of the hotel and then every single corner of the city. Sure it’s great to show your bar but why in the world are you telling him about your Concierge, Shopping, Things to do, Events, Shows etc on your main menu? You aren’t the local tourist information you’re trying to sell him a room. Waste his time and he’ll go somewhere else, like an OTA for example (they understood this long ago).

Don’t go cheap on your booking engine, it’ll cost you the sale.
Unfortunately too many hotels think the Booking Engine is something they can relegate to the cheapest on the market. What would you think of your reservation office telling the potential guests “Hm let’s see I think I can accept your reservation but you’ll have to hold while I check with the manager and my supervisor, after that I’ll run a credit check and you can call back in about 15 minutes” you’d fire the lot of them. That’s what a bad booking engine is doing to you. Pay a little more, get something that’s efficient.

Now that we’ve looked at those points, the contrast will probably seem obvious but let’s go over them.

Do’s

Hotel du Quai Voltaire Paris, Showing the USP in 3 seconds. This Hotel has been the hub for artists for almost two centuries, yet, that isn't their USP on the contrary people don't sleep in a museum they've got one across the river.

Create a website for users. As I mentioned in my earlier post about USPs you need to present 3 factors in 3 seconds: Location, Comfort and Value. How do you do that? Visuals, large ones, show don’t tell. People want to see the room, see the location, see the rates and that is what will close your guests to come. Use great and large photos, as I mentioned in my post about hotel photography – guests want to see your room, your hotel and what you have to show, if a photo tells a thousand words, then you don’t need to write a lot. If your site is pertinent, Google will show it, so focus on the people. They’re the ones that will sleep in your hotel.

Make your website fast and to the point. As I mentioned just above you have 3 seconds to make the sale. The potential guest knows what he wants, show him your hotel, if you fit his criteria you’ve got the sale. So make your website fast, add some animations if you want but only if it helps the three second rule, the WOW effect of your website should be your hotel not the animations.

Navigation must be simple. Menus need to be simple and easy to navigate. There are essential points of the hotel that need to be shown, such as the rooms, the location and how to book. Sure you can add more but add intelligently because your guest needs to know how to book or where to check your location without being rocket scientists. Remember you’ve got lot’s of competition and they may sell faster than you.

Invest in a good booking engine. The booking engine comes at the most crucial moment of the sale. Now is the time the guest needs to pull out the credit card, all the reasons in the world why he shouldn’t pay are going to creep up. You can either help yourself make the sale with a fast and smooth booking engine or help him find reasons not to pay by having a complicated booking process. Test the booking engine before you sign a contract. How smooth is the booking process, get your parents to try it can they figure it out? Try some people to see if they find it annoying, smooth, easy or if they just leave.

As a hotelier, you have one objective to keep in mind – is it effective? demand from your web-designer that he produce a site which converts and is measurable in increased revenues. Simple analytics can provide you with the information. While we have developed a sophisticated hotel analytics system at WIHP, you can already start measuring by installing e-commerce with Google Analytics. Track your conversions, how many visits create how many bookings etc. compare with your friends that have similar hotels, are you better, worse etc.

This list isn’t everything but I hope it gives enough to make hoteliers think and maybe review their design.

Explorotel – rethinking hotel search

There’s a project we’re working on at WIHP which I am quite excited about. It’s in beta, even though it produces quite well already, and we’re constantly adding features and correcting little things with it. It’s called www.explorotel.com.

The idea came about from a few different viewpoints, one a few of us had been booking hotels for vacations and found that existing OTAs are everything but user-friendly. If you don’t know what hotel you want to stay at and if you don’t know the city you are going then locating a hotel can be a drag. For example, you find a hotel in a city that is within your budget, the location seems OK, then you click on the hotel’s page to look at the photos and to your horror, the place looks like it was the set for an Alfred Hitchcock movie. When you click back your search criteria are gone and you can start all over again.

And this can go on for hours until you find the hotel you want. That was the user viewpoint.

Then came the programmer viewpoint, some of the engineers at WIHP are speed-freaks, and correctly so. They were tired of seeing sites that took forever to load the first page and wanted something well structured that could build into something large and remain fast on load. So they went to town as well.

And then was the hotelier viewpoint, the cost. They needed something that would give them a good return on investment. So we worked out two ways of subscribing to the system, one was a fixed price membership and for those that didn’t want to take the risk, the classical commission system.

We called it Explorotel because it’s sort of a new way to search and explore a hotel listing. The idea is that the user gets maximum control of the listing and can search with all the criteria he wants and in the end find what he is looking for.

For example some of us (me included) really want to see the room of the hotel before we book. Even more important than the location is the comfort of the hotel and will it be a proper comfort. We made a “photo search” tab where you put in your city, then price range and search for a hotel.

We also thought a fun and practical way to search for hotels is against the map of the city. But we wanted to do two things, one speed up map search – this is typically a tremendously long and complex loading procedure especially if you’re going to have prices showing immediately. And that was the challenge, to have dynamic pricing against the map of the city. While it isn’t yet perfect it’s pretty fast and works quite well.

Then we needed wanted help guests with reviews, real reviews from people that have stayed at the hotel and we figured that being able to sort the hotels by the type of guests or reviews would be helpful too. For example, if you’re looking for the best value hotel in a city, you can find it. If you’re looking for the cleanest hotel in the city you can find that too.

These are just some of the features, as you navigate through the site you’ll probably notice a whole bunch more. For example every page and search mode has a real url which means you can link to an exact search criteria and send it to a friend. You can also create an anonymous listing of selected hotels and share that with a friend. The list goes on, try it out and have fun. As a hotelier you can submit your hotel to the list by contacting us, however for the moment we’re only accepting hotels that have Synxis booking engine or Availpro.

We’ve taglined the project with “Rethink hotel search” and I think it’s quite appropriate since many of these are new ways to make hotels more visible on the internet and thus help both hoteliers and guests.

If you’ve got ideas you want to share feel free to comment on this article, we’re open to everything. It doesn’t mean we will implement them all but we’ll definitely look at them and get in touch with you.

I believe in booking engines

Pie chart, in blue the Booking Engine traffic

Some month ago I posted about the importance of a booking engine. At the time it was based on the fact that we (WIHP) had analysed the average time spent on a booking engine often exceeded the time spent on the website.

And that fact hold. Over 50% of the time spent (and pages viewed) by clients is on the booking engine.

This means booking engine’s better be easy to navigate and fast to close the sale. The design factor is key, anything complicated and your chances of loosing the sale multiply per second.

We recently did the test, taking the former booking engine from a hotel which wasn’t much of a design feat and then putting on a properly designed version of Synxis on the same hotel. Almost one for one the conversion rate increased on average about 25% increase.

Why? because those customers that you would previously have lost to booking.com or expedia suddenly find the booking process so much easier that they decide to book with you.

So if you think any booking engine will do the trick… take another look at that idea. You need something well designed, smooth, and quick. If you have to pay a little more for the booking engine, it wont matter you will make that money up with increased direct sales.

Mobile hotel shopping?

Paypal versus iTunes - mobile shopping

Could iTunes becomes the new Paypal? In mobile shopping, it is quite hard to imagine someone pulling out their credit card in the metro and entering it on their mobile to complete the purchase of their hotel room. Not too many people would feel comfortable with that.

But what about all those people that have an iPhone who already have an iTunes account. All the booking engine would need to do is connect to iTunes, the user puts in his password and the purchase it done.

I can’t imagine that our Apple friends haven’t already started planning to change iTunes into “Apple Financial Services” or something like that and become a direct competitor to Paypal. If they do it would be that much easier for us to sell our hotel inventories to mobile users.

And all those potential guests that are wasting their time waiting for a bus or the metro could spend it searching for and booking their hotel rooms.

Maybe that’s all part of iTravel.

Figuring out a hotel USP

Hotel USP - what's in it

Aside from a very over-used marketing term, USP just means: Unique Selling Proposition or Unique Selling Point.

It is what makes you different from the rest of the competition.

A USP is not a catch phrase or a marketing tag-line. It is also not your marketing slogan. The USP is what separates you from the others. Why are you better than the others.

The tag lines and slogans are worked out afterwards to communicate that USP to the end user.

Now what many people get wrong when they try and figure out a USP is that they are not taking it from the end-user’s viewpoint. A USP has to be a benefit to the end-user. For example that your hotel has been the home of some famous person is NOT a USP. Because it just doesn’t appeal to the end-user as a personal benefit.

There are three main factors that you should analyse to work out your USP they are:

1. Location

2. Comfort

3. Value for Money

With a careful study of these three points you will be able to determine your USP.

And remember, USP is all about customer perception – it’s not necessarily an objective statement of your hotel, it’s how the customers perceive your hotel that counts.

Consumer Trends and Hotel Shopping

Shopping for a Hotel, not so direct

At WIHP we’ve been analysing shopper trends like many marketers do. Something that struck me recently was just how much shopping goes on before someone selects a hotel.

The average internet user checks out at least 6 hotel websites before doing their booking. The average internet user takes over 24 hours between their first search for a hotel to their final reservation. The billboard effect from OTAs plays an important role as well since most of the hotel searches happen by typing in the hotel’s name.

An independent hotel’s hope for success in what is the largest online business (travel) isn’t the highest unless they have a strong online presence, which must consist of Social Media + Search Engine Optimization + Design, and these elements must all coordinate around the most important message of all – added value.

If there is one message that has to shine through on all your marketing it is VALUE FOR MONEY.

Martin Soler is the VP Production at WIHP which is one of the leading European Hotel Marketing agencies producing websites, online marketing strategies, social media campaigns, pay-per-click campaigns. WIHP also does yield consulting, branding strategies and hotel reputation management with its divisions staffed by hoteliers, marketing experts, designers and SEO professionals.

Booking Engine's more important than you think

From a long review of online bookings on hotel websites. With more than 300 hotels surveyed one very important important factor has become very obvious.

Your Booking Engine is more important than you think. In fact upward of 60% of the navigation by the customers happens on the booking engine.

If you booking engine can show the rooms, show them well, show the rates, have a streamlined check-out process you will increase conversions.

Complicated navigation, small or bad images, overwhelming check-out process hurt the booking process so much you are loosing sales.

You’ll be astonished how “facts and figures” the current bookers are. They don’t want the bling bling websites, they want the straight dope and an easy choice system.

Photography in Hotel Marketing

Photography in Marketing

When you’re promoting a hotel you’re promoting a place to stay. Someone is going to actually “live” in that space for a longer or shorter period.

No matter how many great words someone can write about the place – it’s not going to replace a photo. In fact from a recent study done, the quantity of large good quality photos on a hotel’s website makes the single difference on bookings.

In fact there are two key factors to a successful website. The first of which is photography.

Seeing the room, or setting the atmosphere with photos of details is the single most important part of your marketing.

If you don’t have amazing large photos of your hotel, get them taken quick.