“Hotels don’t really need social media, it’s that your guests want it," said sps:affinity CEO Martin Kubler at the Hotelier Great GM Debate 2016.
Delivering a presentation on 'Personal engagement in the digital age', Kubler said: “Forget about marketing, it’s become more of a communication channel; people will send you restaurant reservations, price enquiry of your rooms and tweet about your hotel as well.”
Guests prefer to communicate via social media because: it’s fast and they are not too inclined to speak to hotel staff from their room
He warned: “If you don’t have a social media presence, guests will choose not to communicate with you whatsoever.”
Kubler also gave a few pointers on ROI; he noted: “Talking about return on investment, you have to consider if you can measure the ROI of guests using social media to communicate with a hotel from pre-arrival or even the pre-booking stage? It’s very hard to put a price on it but it is certainly a clear channel for hotels to push people to review its services.
| Advertisement |
“Even in a digital age, it’s not easy to measure ROI. The success of social media is linked to data handling and as hoteliers, we have traditionally been poor with data handling.”
Kubler explained that operators need to use Google Analytics and Facebook Analytics to see where the guests are coming from.
“For this to be successful you need cross-department interaction. The revenue team, sales and marketing team and digital team need to sit together to analyse in a way that shows impact from digital channels.
“There is a lot data from social media. You also need to know what you measuring and why you are measuring," he said.
Kubler advised hoteliers not to get too focused on ROI from social media as “it can stifle creativity".
“Go back to when social media started; there were no rules and that’s how it should be. You can do a lot of creative stuff,” he concluded.
Search our database of more than 2,700 industry companies
