Hotelier Middle East collaborates with Arabian Travel Market 2016 to find out how hotels can capitalise on the new digital era of sales
Paul: Encouraging direct sales and improving conversion rates come together?
Ali: So much of the experience. What can they find here that they cannot find elsewhere? Booking engines are all going to talk about the entire suite of companies and hotels. You have to tell your own story. What are you doing in your own site, telling your own story in a way that’s sticky? We need to make sure the internal accounting process sees a line here. A lot of businesses tend to look at cost of sale to an OTA, being a cost of sale. They look at search engine marketing being a marketing expense, even though both are channels to delivery. All the sophisticated players have a cost of sales discussion. In our region, quite a few people still look at these as different. We’ve bought them onto this understanding. Search is a channel for sale, OTA is a channel for sale. One can charge you 20% and the other can charge you whatever, and it’s about volume. As long as you don’t disadvantage one over the other.
James: Facebook lookalikes, Google, are actually great for helping you find the right kind of customers. The analysis around who are the right customers for your hotel? Who spends more, comes back more often, drives advocacy?
Kevin C: We see 50% of people who say price is the key factor. If the price is okay, you won’t necessarily go elsewhere. They often leave because they want to know more about the property, an unbiased view.
Paul: What makes a good booking process? How do we keep them there?
Meritxell: There is no standardised definition for conversion. Each travel agency must define its own methodology to define and measure conversation rate (number of visitors versus bookings, banners to booking ratio, newsletter view to click ratio) Basically we’re coming back to the beginning of the discussion: there is a trend between the relevance of the content, the quality of that content and the conversation rates. I am sure it happened to you all: searching for your next holidays you land on a page with different options. You see this amazing package with a nice hotel. You want to see the pictures, you click on the reviews, then you want to allocate it on a map. You like it, already 10 minutes looking at pictures, reading reviews, looking at that hotel. You want to book, you want to click on it, the price looks good, and then, suddenly, when you decide to click, the price is different. As a customer, the trust is not there anymore. Conversion rates are all about making sure that what you’re showing is relevant, the quality of what you’re showing is very good and that the flow is easy.
Technology has to serve the purpose of the traveller when looking for a trip. Your online site is the door of your shop. Conversion is not only about online. You have to make sure that lookers who were not converted online, do it offline. And you need to put in place the right tools (online and offline) to make sure that what you show is trustworthy. It’s about monitoring what the traveller is doing. If you monitor me online and I do not book, then you need to track me offline.
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