The Huge Leap From Comments To Referrals
For years, I have received emails from many innovative companies with new systems and applications designed for Internet marketing and promotions. I investigate all of them. As a marketer of hotels on the Internet, I am constantly seeking ways to improve hotel sales via online marketing. Very few of these new ideas get my blood flowing with anticipation …until now.
Last week, I heard from a young company called URefer.com. Our phone conversation brought me back to my hotel sales days, when I first learned that obtaining business referrals was paramount to building future group business. Their new concept takes us from the passive position of simply receiving comments from past guests to the pro-active position of soliciting actual business referrals.
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URefer gives hotels the ability to offer incentives, and the means, for past guests and groups, to refer business to hotels through via the hotel's website. Through their referral engine, hotel consumers will have the ability to post and read actual referrals online.
Their system, which acts very much like a website booking engine, gives your hotel the ability to offer incentives for referrals, which are only rewarded when they convert the referral to actual bookings. URefer manages and monitors the entire referral-to-booking process and provides the hotel with the marketing data needed to seal the deal.
I believe that URefer has the potential to accomplish something we have sought for years; the ability to pro-actively solicit referral business on the Internet. It gives us the potential to link hotel websites within a company's portfolio to exchange transient and group referrals from property to property.
Their program gives hotels the ability to add still another marketing function to their proprietary website. It can provide hotels will the ability to solicit referrals and display those referrals to influence the solicitation of new business right on their websites.
URefer is only now extending its application to the hospitality industry, so I'm sure they are still learning about our industry's variances and quirks. It's a good time to go-to-school with them to guide them in developing ways to best serve hotels. In any event, their program has tons of potential to provide us with an innovative way to harvest referral business.
It's important to understand that I never have, nor ever will, accept compensation to recommend or endorse products or ideas. My standard is simple; I make recommendations in my articles based solely upon the merits of the product or service to benefit our industry.
Contact:
Neil Salerno CHME,CHA
Hotel Marketing Coach
Email: NeilS@hotelmarketingcoach.com
Website: www.hotelmarketingcoach.com/
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