Bloggers are hoteliers' best friends. With a little help.

The Spanish Hotel Chain Magic Costa Blanca has launched the first (to my knowledge) Blogger Card i.e., a special package for bloggers, including discounted rates, priority check-in and other benefits.

The line between public relations and private manipulation is always been quite thin...however, I think this is yet another sign of the increasing importance of building a strong online reputation by leveraging the power of social networks.

More and more, the reputation of a brand is the result of a pulviscolar network of references, reviews, blogs etc, that have direct impact in sending traffic to a website or in diverting clients from it. The overall concept of online visibility clearly needs to be extended towards a 360degrees online reputation and public relations approach: all the different points of contact that travel operators establish with their target (search engine rankings, social networks reviews, press releases etc) need to be related and carefully considered within a holistic approach to online reputation.

It is a new challenge for travel operators and consultants alike.
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Google ergo sum?

In the last days, there's has been a lot of SEO buzz about AC Hotels's disappereance from Google listings. Last week, if we typed the command site:www.ac-hotels.com the response was negative: Google did not report any information about this website, while it was still on in Yahoo and MSN, although very few pages are indexed.

Today the site re-appeared in Google, with 23 pages indexed (mostly in pdf and swf files). Now, the question is: why did AC Hotels's website disappear and re-appear from/in Google?

Let's start with a quick look at the website: there is no track of professional search engine optimization. The site has been developed in Flash: it means that Googlebot (Google's spider) cannot see the content, not a single word. It is like reading an empty page, which is, in fact, an ossimoro.

Nevertheless, Google can see title and metatags written in HTML, which are more or less the same for title, description and keywords, i.e. “AC Hotels: Hoteles AC en España, Italia y Portugal”. One of the basic rules for any knowledgeable SEO specialist is that the keywords in the metatags need to have a correlation with the website content (coherence) e there should be no keywords stuffing in these metatags. Looking through this specific case, it is like saying that "AC Hotels are in Spain, Italy and Portugal" without actually providing any information (content) supporting such argument: the obvious consequence is Google pushing down your rankings and overall indexing.

The several domain names owned by AC Hotels are also a problem: all have the same style (Flash, same title and metatags, no textual contents), that is plain duplicated, useless content from a Google's perspective. Again, there is no track of search engine optimization as they are all copies of the same website, with no redirect to the main site: as a consequence Google wasn't able to determine a central, main site within a network of duplicated domains.

In the last days, Google has probably analyzed the site and decided that, while the overall optimization was not very well executed and the website was so ill-structured to result kind of blurred to the bot, there has probably been no intentional misbehaving in cheating the spider (Googlebot). This would explain the temporary exclusion, which didn't end up in complete banning.

At the very end, what happened to AC Hotels's web site demonstrates that Google can penalize you not only beacuse of a website's over-optimization, but also because no professional SEO has been involved in the website's promotion on search engines.

In order to achieve significant results, an effective SEO strategy must involve the website’s content, optimising the texts, HTML, information distribution and site architecture in order to make the website content more visible and relevant. And now, if we type "ac hotels" in Google, we cannot find the official site: indexed, yes, but where?

So, the final question is: if your website does not appear in Google, does it really exist?
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PhocusWright ITB Berlin 2007: latest trends and highlights

We just came back from ITB Berlin where we attended the latest PhocusWright Conference on Travel Technology for the tourism and hospitality industries. Here are our conference highlights.

Travel Metasearch growing fast
Paul English, CTO and Co-Founder of Kayak.com shared some impressive numbers on the fast growth of metasearch: Kayak is now reporting some 15 million searches per month. In January 07, the ComScore Report 2006 showed a 163.3% monthly unique visitors's growth for kayak.com whilst some problems in the OTAs appeal start to show (visitors are decreasing for Expedia Inc, Travelocity and Priceline.com.). More travel options from an extensive range of travel providers, rich filtering and personalization tools and the choice on where to buy (supplier or agency): these unique selling points are definetely bringing value to consumers.

Human Digital Assistant for online bookings
H-care showcased a user-friendly platform for multimodal, multi-channel and self-service customer care. The platform (HDA - Human Digital Assistant) combines high quality real-time animation, 3D rendering, state-of-the-art voice synthesis and integrates seamlessly with existing infrastructure to deliver a human-like assistant capable of managing customer relationship and provide customer support. One of their clients, Telecom Italia, has recently launched radical new HDA driven Customer Care, capable of managing more then 35.000 call per day. The digital assistant can bring great opportunities for up-selling and decreased customer care costs for travel and hospitality operators.
As reported by Umberto Basso, CEO H-Care, "the possibility to offer a human-like proactive, multichannel and multimodal customer experience will create a new generation of customer care services".

Best practices in CRM and one-to-one marketing
CEO Simon Lehmann revealed Interhome's case study and described how the company successfully implemented a one-to-one marketing system based on customer's profiles (i.e. requested catalogues, number of bookings, feedbacks, preferences..) and external surveys (buying habits, hobbies,..). The purpose of the project was to benefit from the existing customer base by segmenting it and offering highly relevant products to different targets. They have now acquired the ability to offer individual, tailored-made holidays based on customer data and personal preferences. Here are some results: ten times less cost per booking, up to 30% booking response, 30% higher revenue per booking (due to optimised ranking of offers), annual catalogue production costs cut by 500.000 €, significant additional revenues generated by cross-/upselling (car rentals, ski passes, excursions, ect).
Here is a reminder to all fellow marketeers: before thinking of flashly 2.0 ideas to get new customers, try to give the right products to your existing ones.

A new star is born in hospitality
Onestarisborn is a new and unique hotel concept, with a paradox product and service proposition (luxurious and budget), tailored to the needs of the modern-day traveller. The company will open 35 new properties across Europe in the next years. More information on this topics will come soon in this blog with an interview to Onestarisborn's CEO Michael Levie.

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