Relactions was invited to speak at Hotel eMarketing Conference 2008 in London, with the keynote speech “Optimising your website to maximise conversion”, and I had the chance to follow a number of interesting presentations and participate to four different round-tables. The Conference was interely dedicated to the hotel industry and to analyse what strategy some of the best in class (the major group/chains) are undertakening to maximise their online marketing activities. Here are my personal conference highlights:
1) Taj Hotel says: “Take the Web to the consumers!” – Ashok Lalla, Director of Internet Marketing Taj Hotels Resorts and Palaces
Ashok Lalla, Director of Internet Marketing Taj Hotels Resorts and Palaces, introduced a new perspective of/on online consumer’s behaviour. Since the Internet has forever changed the shopping and buying patterns of worldwide travellers, it is not possible anymore to stick to the traditional marketing segmentation. As surfing and buying behaviours can be extremely diverse, even within the same socio-demographic segment, using traditional marketing persona to infer buying behaviour can be extremely risky and lead to the wrong marketing decisions.
Buying habits are not defined by income, status or demographic segments anymore and are becoming more and more situational, and marketeers should accordingly shift their focus moving from consumers segments to consumers avataars: according to the specific travel motivations, a person can be user, consumer, producer, member of community, participant, and relate to the brand in different ways.
Mr Lalla also gave some suggestion on new ways to face the challenges of the web 2.0 environment:
- Abandon recommendation engines. Create referral engines: use the power of consumers to co-create a brand and spread the buzz, build emotive networks and remove the anonimity of recommendations engines.
- Loyalty marketing is giving way. Adopt the customer advocacy prism: go beyond rewards and recognition. Turn customers into evangelist and brand advocate.
- Redifine SEM: SEM is not search engine marketing, SEM is Special experience for me.
- Think beyond revenue management: a good marketeer should look at the customer value management, that does not mean giving customers the best deal, but giving them the best reason(s) to come back. Therefore, make the experience abundant and remember: while price completes the transaction, brand completes the heart connection.
2) Undertaking the impact of social media on the hotel buying decision – Daniel Kerzner, Regional Director of Starwood Hotels and Resorts
This presentation was particularly useful in highlighting some practical examples of how a hotel chain can aknowledge the power of UGM in influencing buying decisions and turning it into a asset. Whilst the hotel industry often focuses on the fear for the negative impact of users’ reviews on revenues and brand, some examples were provided on how Starwood is actually using consumers’ opinions to improve its product and communication strategy.
After all, the Web is a kind of gigantic focus group where real-time opinions and conversations are exchanged, where any product is dissected under any angle by any consumer segments…so why not listening to the consumers and learning from them what the perceived strenghts and weaknesses of a product are?
The result of analysing what the actual USPs of a hotel are according to its reviews on Tripadvisor and OTAs can be surprisingly different from what a general manager or a marketing expert thinks, and help to effectively improve the product and product proposition. Starwood did just that, changing, for instance, the communication strategy for one of its property in Paris, in order to have the website content focus on the single thing that any customer was enthusiastically talking about and that was previously almost ignored: the view.
3) From BAR (best available rate) to BAC (best available content) – Annalisa Ballaira, CEO Relactions
Annalisa Ballaira, CEO Relactions, introduced the new concept of Best Available Content, which means ragaining control of the direct relationship with clients by providing trustworthy, rich and usable contents in addition to the correct price. The best rate AND the best content is what can keep hoteliers ahead of competitors and vendors alike, engaging customers to navigate and buy on a hotels’own website, helping reducing distribution costs and increasing loyalty rates.
A post of this subject will follow soon on this blog..
4) Monitoring and exploiting social networks and user generated content – Martin-Verdon Roe, Director of Sales Europe, Tripadvisor
Martin-Verdon Roe, Director of Sales Europe, shared some impressive numbers on the fast growth of Tripadvisor. If you think they were big, well, they’re much bigger.
On April 2008, the total number of reviews posted on Tripadvisor was 15 millions, up from 2.9 millions in 2005, 5 millions in 2006, 10 millions in 2007. Whilst some suggestion for the hospitality operators on how to monitor and address negative reviews should hopefully be familiar to most hoteliers, I found interesting the fact that the average score of the reviews is now 3.7% and most of the posted review are actually largely positive (40.6% have 5 as score). Martin also confirmed the emerging “trend” of using Tripadvisor as a R&D platform, paying attention to customers’ evaluations and suggestions for product improvement.