Hotels urged to focus online marketing on tablets

Digital development and marketing experts have said that hotels should be focusing their online efforts on tablet devices.

Many hotels are seeing that mobile is of growing importance, they agreed, but said that a lot have been persuaded to invest in a digital platform for smartphones, but higher revenues can be generated from tablet users.

“I was wrong when I was telling people mobile is the most important a year ago – it’s now tablet,” said Richard Gregory, COO of Latitude, a UK-based digital marketing agency.

“These customers are more valuable than people on desktop devices. How that changes when we get more entry level tablets on the market it might balance out, but right now there’s a big opportunity there. So it is worth it in terms of time and effort,” he added.

Google’s head of travel for the Gulf, Maria de Ducla said: “People who own tablets have a higher income and we have seen that the average market price of hotels for people who have tablets is high, so it makes sense to work on their presence, and increase the amount they’re spending, on tablets.”

Christoph Heyn, senior manager, global e-commerce and mobile strategy for Ritz-Carlton agreed: “We see that especially leisure travellers tend to use their tablet devices to discover our hotels online. As a result, we actually see a higher ADR for reservations made through tablets compared to the ADR originating from desktop computers.

“We designed RitzCarlton.com specifically in a way to provide tablet users with a rich and intuitive experience – an investment that pays off since the traffic from tablet devices is steadily growing for our website,” he added.