Potential challenges
Frommers Unlimited director EMEA, Giles Longhurst, who is taking part in the social and mobile session, says you could suggest that filling your hotel has never been so easy in terms of routes to market, but managing yield while remaining competitive is key.
“The biggest challenges hoteliers face in marketing themselves online is the number of distribution channels they need to manage and optimise their business for,” he says.
“Hoteliers have always needed to juggle occupancy levels against room rate and this has only become harder with the combination of GDS distribution models, OTA demands, direct marketing via websites, mobile, newsletters etc. and now the group deals and flash sale sites.”
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Google’s industry head travel for the Gulf, Marie de Ducla, who will be leading a session on Google at ATM, says the biggest challenge for hotels has been summarised in one sentence in the McKinsey study about the travel industry published in February 2012.
“Travel suppliers must understand that the customer experience not only begins before the time of sale — and even before the time of search — but extends after purchase and travel.”
De Ducla explains: “Travellers have online access to an abundance of information from any device at any time. Our studies have shown that users search heavily before making travel decisions.
“For example, users visit an average of 14 websites before booking a hotel room* and more than 36%** of travellers have visited social media sites prior to making a travel reservation.
This means that the search phase (which includes search engine results, browsing travel websites, visiting travel reviews sites and reading social recommendations) is a very strategic phase where hotel (chains/operators) can really make a difference in influencing choices for travellers who haven’t made their decision.”
De Ducla believes that for hotels to be efficient, they have to find the answers to two questions: how to make their offer more visible and relevant in the search phase, and how to provide travellers browsing online with the best possible user experience once people are on their website, or mobile site.
Welcoming websites
One person who is passionate about the user experience on travel websites is Paul Richer, senior partner of travel technology consultancy, Genesys, who will be running a session called ‘Winning Online’.
Richer follows de Ducla’s reasoning and adds that there are two main challenges when a potential customer reaches a hotel’s website.
“The first is to convey sufficiently compelling information about the hotel so that the potential customer is persuaded to book,” he explains.
“This should include all the text information, images — perhaps photographs and video — that the potential customer will wish to see. The second challenge is to implement a booking system that is easy-to-use and puts no obstacles in the way of the customer.”
While these challenges may sound simple to overcome, Richer warns “there is plenty that can go wrong”.
“I have seen hotel websites that have lacklustre images, for example, room shots that are yellow from tungsten lighting, so looking very old, videos that are amateurish and boring and a navigation structure that makes it difficult to work one’s way through the information.
“Booking processes can easily become too complex, for example, presenting a bewildering array of room types and board plans,” he adds.
Of course all of these lessons now need to be transferred onto mobile sites as the rise of internet usage on the go is quite simply meteoric.
“On average, 73% of business travellers and 52% of leisure travellers own a smartphone***,” de Ducla explains. “The mobile queries relative to the hotel industry are rising very fast and in some countries are already standing for 20%****of the queries.
“Mobiles are often used to book a hotel room especially for last minute bookings, so it’s important for hotel chains to provide them with the best user experience with a mobile-optimised site.”
She adds that those that don’t have a mobile version of their website, should at least have ‘click to call’ ads that allow potential customers to call the hotel or call centre directly.
“By 2014, it is predicted that there will be more users accessing the internet from their mobile device than on desktop, and with the progressive adoption of 4G, the speed of internet on mobile phones will be as fast as high-speed broadband internet is on a desktop computer today.”
Allowing customers to access hotels through map-based user journeys is one way for hoteliers to immediately make an impact on their online mobile presence.
“This now forms a substantial part of the research process across the whole of the travel industry, but especially within hotel booking,” Longhurst explains.
As well as providing local information and building social communities, Longhurst believes that hotels must constantly engage with their customers “to ensure they remain loyal”.
Furthermore, hoteliers should be monitoring the competition while delivering a unique personality through communications, he asserts.
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