The Hotels vs OTA Paid Search War – Get Your Defensive Strategy Right
Here’s another great guest post by the team at Mirai Espana, this time by Pablo Delgado and César López. This post examines how 3rd Party Retailers / OTAs capture business intended directly for hotels…and how to approach / fix the problem. Also evaluated is the value OTAs CAN add, i.e. via generic and destination level searches.
How Online Travel Agencies (OTA) or 3rd Party intermediaries get the customers that are searching for you on the web
PART 1: The problem
In Continental Europe, hotels with registered trademarks can prevent intermediaries from using their brand names in Google Adwords. Doing this means that more users end up on their own websites. In spite of the advantages, most independent hotels don’t take the necessary steps to benefit from it.
Did you think you were first in line? Others are cutting in front of you.
Your 1st place is barely visible
Love the new Max Travel Time feature on Google Hotel Finder
Must say that this approach is far superior to the standard OTA method…guessing Google’s dominance in the local search space combined with tons of great underlying data will make this an invaluable feature to the fast evolving Google Hotel Finder “experiment”!
RoomKey.com – What’s the value proposition for customers?
There’s a lot of buzz in the industry about the new meta search engine launched by 6 hotel giants…there’s clearly a great value proposition here for hoteliers… but what about the customers? I still don’t see any clear differentiators that would have customers used to popular OTAs switch over to using this site (no packaging options and limited choice are just two simple hurdles).
Launching this new brand in a cluttered distribution space and competiting head-on with OTAs on search at sustainable / advantageous costs is another story altogether.
It’s still early days of course…but what do YOU think? “Hit” or “miss”?
Interview – Expedia’s Alex Gisbert on the recent Partnership with Yahoo! in Europe
An email Q & A with Expedia’s Alex Gisbert – We talk to Alex about the recent announcement about the Yahoo! – Expedia partnership that introduces Expedia’s travel booking & packaging engine on Yahoo! sites across Europe.
[Hotelemarketer.com] It’s great to hear about the recent partnership between Yahoo! and Expedia in Europe – could you tell us a little more about the deal and how this impacts the consumer in particular?
[Alex] Expedia is providing a travel booking engine on Yahoo! Travel sites across Europe (UK, Ireland, France, Germany, Italy and Spain) in addition to a deals module which will be updated in real-time with the latest offers from Expedia.Through this deal, consumers will benefit from the rich editorial content provided by Yahoo! along with our sophisticated search technology and inventory of over 127 000 hotels and more than 450 airlines. We know that all travellers have very different priorities and these can change depending on the occasion, their schedule and their general travel preferences so we are constantly expanding the range of filters we offer so users can find exactly the right accommodation offering for them – in the last couple of months for example we have added both a green/sustainable hotel filter and an LGBT (Lesbian, gay, bi-sexual and transgender) friendly filter. The combined strength of the partnership brings users both inspiration of Yahoo!’s content and the ability to refine this choice according to their preferences and book with assurance that you are making the right choice by checking their choice with a variety of mapping options, reviews from previous Expedia customers and photos.
We understand that consumers use a variety of tools and sites when planning and researching their travel online and we want to make that process as simple as possible for travellers so we believe it’s important to work with sites like Yahoo! where we can offer relevant complementary services to save travellers time in their research. It’s very much about bringing our service to the user wherever they are to save them time. To take another example, earlier this year we launched a specialist IE8 travel browser with Microsoft in the UK offering the user ready access to a number of Expedia’s services such as hotel deals, lastminute deals, currency tracking and a co-branded weather tracking so that users can keep up to date with the latest deals, currency and weather changes whilst carrying on with their normal browsing activities.
Hotel Internet Marketing by 2013 – Are we on Track?
I came across a piece I’d written about 17-18 months ago on the future of hotel internet marketing. The article talked about 5 broad tech trends that I thought would radically alter the way we approached digital / internet marketing for hotels back at the end of 2008. I thought it’d be fun to take a re-look at the article and see how far we’ve actually come in the last year or more and if those predictions still hold water… here goes:
1. Choice is king.
The clear winners of the online distribution race will be suppliers and 3rd parties that provide the most choice to the customer. “Experience building” will become key to the looking and booking process online. This will mean that successful suppliers (hotels) will have to break down elements of their inventory like rooms, dining, sports, spa and supporting services into individual units that can be booked and packaged both internally and externally. The more elements you provide to what I like to call the “Experience Engine”, the better the choice available to customers to personalize and tailor their experiences. This creation of experience units will also allow tourism industry suppliers to collaborate more effectively online, as well as spur the evolution of 3rd party providers who provide superior experience engines, taking destination marketing to a whole new level.
Transparency, the Internet and good hospitality – All the hotel’s a stage…
We accept the reality of the world with which we are presented. We’ve become bored with watching actors give us phony emotions. We are tired of pyrotechnics and special effects. While the world he inhabits is, in some respects, counterfeit, there’s nothing fake about Truman himself. No scripts, no cue cards. It isn’t always Shakespeare, but it’s genuine. It’s a life. - Christof (Ed Harris): The creator of The Truman Show
You may remember the above dialogues from an old big screen favourite, The Truman Show, released in 1998. The movie is above an insurance salesman who discovers his entire life is actually a TV show. While the comedy and irony of the script is quite entertaining, who amongst us has never felt like they were being ‘watched’? Whether it’s the TV version of ‘Big Brother’ or something out of the catacombs of government surveillance, the world’s become a big stage…but just who’s watching who? And what in the world does this have to do with hospitality?
You’ve got to agree that the way hotels work today are far removed from the inns of yore. Consumer access to information and improved transparency, at least in the shadowy world of pricing, has made many a ‘Basil Fawlty’ squirm and shudder. The Internet has been a great equalizer, but how far have we come…and what can hoteliers expect in the future?
Hospitality Bloggers and Experts – Thoughts on Hotel Internet Marketing in 2009
Very early on this month, a colleague (thanks Lola!) sent me a copy of Peter Kim’s collaborative compilation of thoughts by bloggers on Social Media. I loved the format and the power that collaboration could harness…bringing together the thoughts, ideas and best practices of those defining the field.
The following document was subsequently born – I reached out to about 18 prominent industry bloggers, writers and industry leaders in online hospitality marketing. 6 came back…here are their thoughts on the main trends the hotel industry is likely to see this year, plus tips on how hoteliers can survive and thrive in the recession. The contributors include:
- Professor Dimitrios Buhalis, Deputy Director at the International Centre for Tourism and Hospitality Research (ICTHR), School of Services Management at Bournemouth University.
- Todd Lucier, creator of Tourism Keys Internet Marketing for Tourism blog, podcast and learning materials
- Patrick Landman, Hotel Revenue Management, Online Distribution and Internet Marketing Guru and the Founder of Xotels
- Jan Tissera, President, TravelCLICK International (Europe, Asia Pacific, Middle East, and Africa regions)
- Guillaume Thevenot, French Londoner based at Amadeus and founder+editor of Hotel-Blogs.com
- Jitendra Jain (JJ), Online Marketer at Starwood Hotels and founder of The Talent Jungle Network, YoungHotelier.com and HoteleMarketer.com
Please feel free to share this work as required: http://d.scribd.com/ScribdViewer.swf?document_id=11403251&access_key=key-23o5j75xc4uxljxk4vfw&page=1&version=1&viewMode=list
The new era of Hotel Experience Marketing – Choice is the new King, All hail the King
Following on from the earlier articles, Back to the Future: Meet the hotel guest of 2020 (September 2008) 5 Future Developments that will revolutionize Online Hotel Marketing (October 2008), here are some thoughts on the role of Choice in successful Hotel Marketing of the future. I presented these ideas at the recent Revenue Management and Pricing Middle East Conference in Abu Dhabi…
As we mature into the Web 2.0 world and slowly inch our way to a more Semantic web, technology has made collaboration, connectivity and finding what you want easier than ever possible before. Combine available technology with the challenges posed by the recession and the timing for a Revolution of “Choice” is absolutely perfect!
Today, hotel guests have the option of various online tools that aid transparency, search and booking. However the research and booking process can still be pretty clunky and fragmented. I believe we need to move beyond the era of Search and Booking Engines to building superior “Experience Engines“.
The Revenue Management and Pricing Middle East Conference
Just finished attending and speaking at the Revenue Management and Pricing Middle East Conference, which was held at the Beach Rotana Abu Dhabi and organized by Eyefortravel. The turn out was decent…about 50–60 professionals from Abu Dhabi and Dubai, mostly Revenue Managers and some Sales & Marketing managers, General Managers and Owners. The crunch seems to have had its effect elsewhere though – a source from Europe claimed that a similar event there had a dismal turnout, as hoteliers scurry to cut costs.
Some good presentations, especially a couple that touched on the big picture, trends and also challenged participants to prep for the future. Total Revenue Management emerges as a clear winner in terms of what hotels SHOULD be doing to prepare and fully yield their products. Technology challenges still remain the biggest hurdle to successful revenue management, CRM and distribution. I enjoyed Sarah Allen’s presentation on Generation Y – particularly some of the changes that are happening which are impacting our human capital strategies, and how, as an industry, we need to shift our mindsets into a new way of doing business to keep ahead of the competition. Another good trend overview was provided by Margaret Bowler from HRG (Grabbing a hold of the corporate segment opportunity).
Hotel Referral Marketing – Hotel Guests are a key Distribution Channel of the future
Article published under the name “The million dollar hotel marketing idea that’s been staring you in the face!”
I’ve been racking my brain for the last few weeks over what to write about. The interesting thing is that it’s not lack of choice that’s been the trouble…it’s too much of it! From the excitement caused by US underdog Barack Obama’s win and the promise of a brighter political future… to CNN’s Wolf Blitzer causing a buzz with his first-ever “holographic” interviews in the newsroom, there’s been plenty going on to keep techies and armchair futurists abuzz. And while CNN’s holograms weren’t really holograms when you cut to the chase…one development is very real…the advancing global recession that we’re slowly coming to grips with.
Hospitality media has been filled with reports about dropping profits margins, especially in hard hit areas and suggestions to hoteliers on how to best tackle the market situation, i.e. tough it out, work smart and dust off your selling shoes. What surprises me, though, is that while the hotel industry continues its distribution war with online 3rd parties with super-deep advertising pockets, it still continues to ignore its most lucrative booking distribution channel…its guests!
