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How Martin Soler used a direct-to-consumer Facebook PR strategy to open Seven Hotel at 80% occupancy during low season

by Josiah Mackenzie on January 22, 2011 6 Comments

Pie chart, in blue the Booking Engine traffic

Some month ago I posted about the importance of a booking engine. At the time it was based on the fact that we (WIHP) had analysed the average time spent on a booking engine often exceeded the time spent on the website.

And that fact hold. Over 50% of the time spent (and pages viewed) by clients is on the booking engine.

This means booking engine’s better be easy to navigate and fast to close the sale. The design factor is key, anything complicated and your chances of loosing the sale multiply per second.

We recently did the test, taking the former booking engine from a hotel which wasn’t much of a design feat and then putting on a properly designed version of Synxis on the same hotel. Almost one for one the conversion rate increased on average about 25% increase.

Why? because those customers that you would previously have lost to booking.com or expedia suddenly find the booking process so much easier that they decide to book with you.

So if you think any booking engine will do the trick… take another look at that idea. You need something well designed, smooth, and quick. If you have to pay a little more for the booking engine, it wont matter you will make that money up with increased direct sales.

Hotel Abruzzi in rome

One of our clients in Rome (Hotel Abruzzi) was facing low season and instead of doing the usual thing of seeing his occupancy levels crash or lower his ADR to about a third of the usual rates he did something new and risky.

We had the idea of trying out a Pay-what-you-want rate in a hotel. None of our clients (independent hotels) had tried anything like this before and not many of them had the courage to risk it.

Faced with monthly bills and banks knocking on their doors your average independent hotel owner is pretty ADR dependent (or RevPAR for those that have realized it’s value).

Hotel Abruzzi decided he could face the challenge and so we went to their Facebook page and announced a new idea: See the article on Facebook here.

The idea isn’t just a pay-what-you-want but rather a “monetized review” of the hotel.  As the guest leaves the hotel, he/she fills out a review form of the hotel and puts a value to each point he wants to pay most for.

See the form by clicking on the image to the right.

And unlike what we would initially think, this worked out great. Most people being honest people they did an honest review and paid a price comparable to what the hotel was selling on their site.

Of course there’s no safety net here. You could have those guests that just pay almost nothing and leave, well it’s a risk. But just like on review sites, if you do a good job, you’ll get a great reward!

Google Places

If you want to start a heated discussion with an independent hotelier, talk to him about Tripadvisor. People either love it or hate it, and those that don’t do either, ignore it.

No doubt, hotel reviews on the internet has forced hotels to up their service level and care. In the past many could get away with mediocre service and mediocre rates. Now that’s not the case anymore, cheap or expensive, hotels need to service their customers and leave a great impression.

TripAdvisor's Logo

But what’s the future going to look like? Will we still have a single site directing so much of the public opinion? Well unlike sites like Google and Facebook that actually perform functions, Tripadvisor provides raw information. And many other sites provide similar information too.

This is where the future of hotel reviews (and other review sites as well) is likely to shift. For the end user, the best experience would be to have a glance on the hotel on a single page. Something similar to Google Places but with a better view.

And that’s where I think hotel reviews will go. Additionally, false reviews will not have such an impact on such a system since a single comment wont have such an impact.

Paypal versus iTunes - mobile shopping

Could iTunes becomes the new Paypal? In mobile shopping, it is quite hard to imagine someone pulling out their credit card in the metro and entering it on their mobile to complete the purchase of their hotel room. Not too many people would feel comfortable with that.

But what about all those people that have an iPhone who already have an iTunes account. All the booking engine would need to do is connect to iTunes, the user puts in his password and the purchase it done.

I can’t imagine that our Apple friends haven’t already started planning to change iTunes into “Apple Financial Services” or something like that and become a direct competitor to Paypal. If they do it would be that much easier for us to sell our hotel inventories to mobile users.

And all those potential guests that are wasting their time waiting for a bus or the metro could spend it searching for and booking their hotel rooms.

Maybe that’s all part of iTravel.

Hotel USP - what's in it

Aside from a very over-used marketing term, USP just means: Unique Selling Proposition or Unique Selling Point.

It is what makes you different from the rest of the competition.

A USP is not a catch phrase or a marketing tag-line. It is also not your marketing slogan. The USP is what separates you from the others. Why are you better than the others.

The tag lines and slogans are worked out afterwards to communicate that USP to the end user.

Now what many people get wrong when they try and figure out a USP is that they are not taking it from the end-user’s viewpoint. A USP has to be a benefit to the end-user. For example that your hotel has been the home of some famous person is NOT a USP. Because it just doesn’t appeal to the end-user as a personal benefit.

There are three main factors that you should analyse to work out your USP they are:

1. Location

2. Comfort

3. Value for Money

With a careful study of these three points you will be able to determine your USP.

And remember, USP is all about customer perception – it’s not necessarily an objective statement of your hotel, it’s how the customers perceive your hotel that counts.

Shopping for a Hotel, not so direct

At WIHP we’ve been analysing shopper trends like many marketers do. Something that struck me recently was just how much shopping goes on before someone selects a hotel.

The average internet user checks out at least 6 hotel websites before doing their booking. The average internet user takes over 24 hours between their first search for a hotel to their final reservation. The billboard effect from OTAs plays an important role as well since most of the hotel searches happen by typing in the hotel’s name.

An independent hotel’s hope for success in what is the largest online business (travel) isn’t the highest unless they have a strong online presence, which must consist of Social Media + Search Engine Optimization + Design, and these elements must all coordinate around the most important message of all – added value.

If there is one message that has to shine through on all your marketing it is VALUE FOR MONEY.

Martin Soler is the VP Production at WIHP which is one of the leading European Hotel Marketing agencies producing websites, online marketing strategies, social media campaigns, pay-per-click campaigns. WIHP also does yield consulting, branding strategies and hotel reputation management with its divisions staffed by hoteliers, marketing experts, designers and SEO professionals.

Tripadvisor Link - worth 1000 euros?

I noticed quite some hotels have not purchased the link to their website on their Tripadvisor page, which was understandable at first. I purchased the link for some hotels I was consulting to see the result.

Of course like everything new we thought this would be an avalanche of visits and bookings. After all we all know how important good or bad reviews are, so wouldn’t a link be great?

Well it didn’t really change things on the bookings to the websites we put it on so overall I can’t say it changed the range of direct bookings.

However looking into it more specifically here are some figures:

Hotel A, hotel located in the top 20 hotels in Paris, 6.3% of the direct bookings on their website over the last 2 month came from Tripadvisor. I’ll clarify here that Tripadvisor is the first contact those guests had with the hotel.

However Hotel B, which is also located in the tip 20 hotels in Paris only had 2.4% of their direct bookings come from Tripadvisor.

Hotels located much lower than that in the Tripadvisor ranking had much less impact.

Now that is when looking for Tripadvisor as the first referrer. This means no prior contact with the hotel.

But the value of the link goes further than that. It’s not about using it to bring brand new customers, but rather to increase your hotel’s chance in getting direct bookings…

The booking process currently goes something like this (and part of this is estimated):

Search Engine -> OTA -> Tripadvisor -> OTA or Hotel Website

If you want to increase your chance of getting taking a larger market share towards your website, then do everything you can to add your website link on the Tripadvisor page.

But that strategy (to pull in as much traffic as possible towards your site) isn’t just done on Tripadvisor, it’s an overall strategy you need to adopt in all your online marketing.

Facebook for Hotels

Running the Social media campaigns for some 60 hotels currently and more coming every month we’ve gotten to see a few points that hotels should follow when in comes to doing their Facebook page especially independent hotels.

1. Have a Facebook page.

If you’re not sure whether you should be keeping a Facebook page then think again. Open your page and start filling it. But realize that if you failed at keeping a blog before, you will probably have a problem keeping the Facebook page up-to-date. So it’s a decision to make, you will need to go check it at least once a day and you’ll need to add content several times a week. It will take time, but it will also give your hotel a “human touch” which is in your control.

2. Answer!

People are going to start asking questions, availability, rates, email addresses and more. So be there to answer them at least once a day and probably more. This is going to be more and more important. And don’t be afraid to answer conversations directly to the “broad public”.

3. Don’t just talk about yourself, don’t just talk about others.

Just talking about your hotel and things happening within the hotel is boring, but just talking about museums and things to do around the hotel is uninteresting. You need to balance both. Balance your internal informatin with travel and tourist tips from your city. This leads me to the next point.

4. What would you like to read.

If you were looking at the Facebook page of a hotel in another city, what would you like to see? What would help you decide if you were going to book that hotel? What additional information would you get from their Facebook page which you wouldn’t find on their site? These are the questions you need to answer for yourself when you sit down to animate that page.

5. Check the stats.

You’ve got the insights, check them daily and see what is most consumed as media, if you are getting the right type of people on your page, how they are growing and more. Then use that to change the media you are uploading on the site, change it to fit the public you are looking for. And the most important point, are you getting visits from your Facebook page to your site? Set up the Facebook tracker and monitor that which is what you want.

But don’t think it is going to be a walk in the park, getting a page started is quite some work and to keep it alive takes some work too. So be prepared to put that work into it, if you can’t find someone who can because doing a half-job isn’t going to cut it either. Hope this helps.