Seven future hotel tech advances

During the first of my carefree college years, my freshman dormmate, Kyle, left our room for only three reasons:

1. to occasionally go to class;
2. to occasionally visit the dining hall on the off nights he didn’t order food; and
3. to frequently use the restroom.

For the other 21 hours each day, he confined himself in our phone-booth sized cell of a dorm room, firmly planted within the warm glow of his then-state-of-the-art, 17-inch, flat-panel computer screen. This self-inflicted house arrest would have rendered the most stable of personalities certifiably nuts, yet good ol’ Kyle remained as jolly as Santa Claus on his way down a chimney.

I’ve encountered such unabashed optimism in other technophiles throughout the years, something I’ve attributed in part to the dulling effects of long-term exposure to binary code on the brain’s sensory receptors most responsible for despair. More likely a reason for this upbeat demeanor, however, is the cohort’s focus on future capabilities. While the rest of us are slogging through the depressing realities of today, IT-minded folk like my roommate Kyle frequently have their targets set on the anything-is-possible promises of tomorrow.

This refreshing mindset was certainly on display this week during LodgeNet’s 2009 Customer Technology Symposium in Atlanta, where some of the best and brightest in the industry gathered to discuss and share ideas about how hoteliers can reap the benefits of improved guest experiences.

Craig Mathias kicked the event off with a discussion of future trends in interactive technology and their implications on hospitality.

Mathias, who serves as principal for technology advisory firm Farpoint Group, discussed the need to be infocentric—that is, focusing on the importance of information rather than the devices that deliver that information. Those devices, he argued, are so varied and run so many different operating systems and software that they create nightmare compatibility issues for IT professionals. There’s also an issue with carrying them; while we might like our iPods and cell phones and pagers and notebooks and tablet PCs and cameras, there are often not enough pockets in a single set of trousers to house them all.

In short, we need to think of hardware as being independent of the application. Mathias outlined a number of ways this approach could be applied in a hotel:

1. Check-in. “When I check in, I don’t have to talk to somebody at the desk. I authenticate using my cell phone or perhaps my USB key.”

2. Room key. Cell phones, USB keys, or other devices could act as room keys.

3. Profiles and preferences. We all make different preferences during the check-in process. Some of us request spacious king beds, while others like rooms at the end of the hall. Mathias longs for a time when a guest’s personal preferences follow him or her from property to property. Guests would simply upload their profile, and when they walked into their hotel room for the first time, they would find everything—including the thermostat, telephone directory, TV—set to meet their personal tastes and needs.

4. Charge card. Guests should be able to charge everything during their hotel stay through a cell phone or USB key through the hotel’s intranet site.

5. Dialing directories. When a guest enters a property, the hotel’s dialing directory should automatically be downloaded to their personal device.

6. TV as computer. “I want the TV in my room to be my screen. Give me a keyboard with a little touchpad on it, and now I can use that as a computer. I don’t have to carry a notebook with me.”

7. Check-out. “Finally, check-out. I don’t have to use the TV. I can just do it on my way down to the lobby using my handset.”

Innovative steps like those outlined about are about productivity, convenience and, most importantly, stickiness.

“If you let me do this at your hotel, I’m going to stay at your hotel,” Mathias said. “If you do this before your competitors do this, I’m much more likely to do business with you.”

If they create a level of stickiness anything like those forces that kept my roommate Kyle in our dorm room, then the industry’s woes, much like my college tenure, would be a thing of the past.

TripAdvisor Explains Guidelines for Marketers

There is a lot of speculation going around the hotel industry on how they should interact with TripAdvisor. Since this site is so important for hospitality & travel marketing, I went right to the source to clarify a few things. Here is my conversation with TripAdvisor Vice President Michele Perry.

Josiah: If a hotel has a poor reputation on TripAdvisor, what steps should they take to improve it?

Michele: When a hotel has a poor ranking on TripAdvisor, it usually reflects problems with the property — grounds, staffing, cleanliness, service, or something else. The most important step hoteliers can take is to read the feedback they’ve received on TripAdvisor, and take the necessary steps to improve problem areas.

If a new owner has just taken over a property with a poor reputation, they can go to their owners’ page and fill out the change of ownership form with details of the nature of the ownership change, along with documentation that the change occurred, and we can remove reviews from the prior owner’s tenure.

Let’s be honest: as hotel marketing professionals it’s often our job to increase ranking on your site. What are some ethical ways we can do this – that you approve of?

TripAdvisor popularity index rankings are significantly impacted by the quantity of reviews, quality of reviews, and how recent those reviews are. You can’t approach improving TripAdvisor ranking as you might search engine optimization, where you can purchase keywords and impact your listings. The most important thing a hotelier can do is provide a good experience for their guests.

From a marketing professional’s perspective, you can educate guests about TripAdvisor and encourage them to write reviews of their stay. The more recent reviews you can help generate for your client, the better their ranking will be (assuming they are running a solid business).

On every hotel’s owners’ page we provide links that can be added to post-stay guest emails so that hoteliers can ask their recent guests to submit a review – the link makes it easy for the guest to get started. Also on the owners’ pages are new “write-a-review widgets” that can be added to a hotel’s website in minutes, so that visitors can write a review without searching TripAdvisor for the right page.

Are there any specifics you want us to avoid?

While we encourage you to encourage guests to write reviews, any sort of incentive – a free night, a coupon off the next stay, a discounted meal, etc. – is strictly against our rules.

And, of course, reviews need to be the honest, unbiased opinions of real travelers who have had an experience with your property.

Do you have any recommendations for integrating TripAdvisor into our website and marketing materials?

We strongly encourage property owners to register at www.tripadvisor.com/owners, and to learn about all available monitoring, management and marketing tools. We have a variety of customizable widgets that allow properties to display current review data on their websites, and we also offer “recommended on TripAdvisor” badges for your site. Research consistently shows that consumers trust other consumers, so adding TripAdvisor content to your property’s web site through our products gives your customers the review information they want. More than 5,000 hotels worldwide have done this and the feedback has been overwhelmingly positive.

Registering as an owner also puts properties on our newsletter list, which means they’ll receive first notification of new metrics and tools.

What day-to-day actions should hotel management take to ensure their hotel has a great presence on your site?

First and foremost, take good care of your property and guests. Check TripAdvisor everyday for new reviews and use the feedback to make appropriate adjustments. Owners can sign up for daily emails of new reviews so that they can stay current easily, and respond to reviews quickly.

Properties have the option to upload a photo, and as many videos as they like. We encourage owners to take advantage of this, and to keep their listing up-to-date.

How should management respond to reviews? Select ones: negative or positive feedback? Ignore them all?

We encourage hoteliers to address negative reviews with a management response on our site; we often hear that how a property reacts to the criticism is more important to prospective guests than the negative comments themselves. Some hoteliers choose to respond to positive reviews, also. We consider this less essential, but it certainly gives travelers an even better sense of who you as a hotelier and your property are.

Choice, Expedia resume negotiations

Choice Hotels International and Expedia are at the bargaining table looking to hammer out an agreement that would get the room inventories at Choice’s more than 5,000 hotels listed again on the Web sites that Expedia operates.

Those Web sites, including Expedia.com and Hotels.com, have not had Choice properties listed in their inventories for about two weeks. In a previously released statement, Expedia said it pulled Choice hotels from its site because of the inability to reach a new agreement after numerous extensions.

Read the statement here.

The rift focuses on Expedia’s alleged desire to have last-room availability from the Choice properties to sell on its sites. Choice rejected the notion, prompting Choice CEO Steve Joyce to tell Hotels magazine that “Expedia wanted Choice to literally give up control of its inventory and pricing and wanted to penalize franchisees who did not give Expedia 100 percent access all the time.”

Anne Madison, Choice’s senior VP for Corporate Communications, said the two organizations resumed negotiations late last week.

Anne Madison“We are back at the negotiating table and having productive conversations,” Madison said Wednesday afternoon.

Choice’s No. 1 goal is simple: “The one thing that has to be maintained is franchisees have control over their own businesses,” Madison said.

The fact that the hotel industry is moving more and more into the online space makes it more important to have a cohesive and comprehensive online strategy and policy, she said.
“We’re an online society. That’s why you see all the major hotel chains building strong ecommerce presence with their own channels,” Madison said.

She declined to reveal data regarding Choice’s Web site, including traffic to the site and bookings made through the site, because it is proprietary information.

“We were the first to come out with a hotel reservations Web site in ChoiceHotels.com, and since that time it has changed dramatically.” She said. “We feel very good about the performance that we have online.”

Choice’s goal is to focus on the value that online reservations bring to its franchisees, according to Madison. She declined to specifically say if Choice franchisees could pursue individual agreements with third-party sites such as Expedia.com and Hotels.com.

“A strong part of an Internet distribution strategy is to have approved channels,” she said. “We have an Internet policy and strategy that go hand in hand.”

Several comment boards on industry Websites, including HotelNewsNow.com, have indicated strong support in the industry for Choice’s stance on the issue. Madison said the company isn’t interested in speaking on behalf of the industry.

“The most important thing is to do what’s right for our franchisees,” she said. “We are really speaking for our franchises, not the industry. We want to operate in the best interest of our franchisees.”

Expedia, a publicly traded company that is expected to release its third-quarter earnings report today, was unavailable for comment.

Valuable hotel communication is the name of social media game

The key to social media marketing success is customized, quality messages, said Kent Schnepp, chief strategy officer for search engine marketing firm EngineWorks. Schnepp talked about social media marketing strategy last week during a webinar for the Boutique & Lifestyle Lodging Association, based in West Hills, California.

“With social media marketing, we don’t want to just put out a bunch of noise,” Schnepp said.

“The signals need to be interesting and of value to the people you are targeting.”

Boutique and lifestyle hotels can use social media networks for customer service purposes, as well as for providing valuable information to prospective and loyal guests. For example, instead of sending out a multitude of promotions to social media networks, properties can become experts on their area, which in turn leads to bookings.

“Think of social media not as advertising your brand, but more about the experience of staying with you,” Schnepp said. “If you are top of everything going on in Vail, Colorado, for example, you are the resource that (potential customers) go to.”

There are several other best practices that hoteliers should consider as they form their social media strategies:

-- Explore the available social media sites, and determine which are best for the property to focus on. Although Facebook and Twitter boast millions of users, those social media sites are not necessarily the best audiences for all hotels, according to Schnepp.

“Consider what is right for your business, and not what the latest trend is,” he said. “One size does not fit all in social media; it has to be customized to your user.”

Hoteliers first must determine which social media services their target guests are using. For example, Schnepp uses sites such as tripadvisor.com when researching his vacations in obscure locales that offer saltwater fishing.

“I am so targeted that Facebook may not be the best way to reach me,” he said.

At the same time, many hotel companies and brands have had great success using Facebook. For example, Dots, a young women’s clothing line, has developed more than 11,000 relevant fans on Facebook.

“Their demographics are very strong on Facebook,” Schnepp said. “If they would have tried the same approach on LinkedIn, they would have failed.”

To find out which social media sites are popular by industry and to keep up with social media trends, Schnepp suggested visiting mashable.com, traffikd.com and doshdosh.com.

-- Speak the language of the users on each specific site instead of sending out a mass message to all social media sites.

“What works on one site may not work on others,” Schnepp said.

-- Optimize the hotel’s profiles on social media sites so guests can find the property’s sites on search engines.

“Social media marketers don’t realize how much (search) optimization can be done to their profiles,” Schnepp said.

For example, on Facebook, hotels can create a URL directly to their Facebook page, which will help the hotel’s Facebook listings show up in search engines. On Twitter, hotels should incorporate key words, such the property’s location, into the biography section. In LinkedIn profiles, hotels can use key words in the user name, create a URL directly to their LinkIn page, and add up to three additional links in the profile.

-- Track the performance of your messages on social media sites. Facebook has a proprietary tracking system, as does Bit.ly and TweetStats.com

-- Stay relevant.

“I want you to take advantage of relevant opportunities you encounter each day,” Schnepp said. To keep up the hot topics that people are talking about, Schnepp suggested using services such as WhatTheTrends.com, Google Trends, Google Analytics and Twitter.com.

--Keep it real. For example, Comcast has improved its customer service by focusing on solutions to customers’ problems on its Twitter page, ComcastCares.

“They have focused on valuable communication, not shameless self-promotion,” Schnepp said.

10 steps to improve search engine marketing

Last week, Kent Schnepp shared 10 strategies for online success via search engine marketing during a webinar aimed at helping boutique and independent hotels improve their online marketing.

Kent SchneppSchnepp is chief strategy officer for the search engine marketing firm EngineWorks Incorporated, which is based in Portland, Oregon.
Additionally, the West Hills, California-based Boutique & Lifestyle Lodging Association, which sponsored the webinar, is developing a booking engine so consumers can book boutique hotels in one place.

Schnepp’s strategies are:

1. Assess your company’s current SEM strategy and opportunity.

“Search engine marketing isn’t a silver bullet that will work for everyone’s marketing campaign,” he said. “When you consider what your online marketing strategy looks like, don’t necessarily rely on what other people in your industry are doing. Every SEM campaign should be customized.”

Therefore, hoteliers need to assess the current traffic to their Web sites from search engines and how much of that traffic converts to customers. Figure out what each conversion is worth by multiplying the hotel’s average daily rate by the average length of stay. Then determine the average cost per conversion or target cost per conversion.

2. Generate seed keywords and phrases central to your company’s business and offerings.
To generate seed keywords, look at your site and the keywords you’re already using in your Internet copy, such as “Belize resorts.” Then, note the keywords and phrases in a spreadsheet and look at the number of searches being conducted on those keywords during a period of time. Give the keyword an objective score to determine how important it is to your site.
Also, determine the competitiveness of those keywords. For example, when one searches for “Belize hotels,” there are more than 9 million results, whereas a search for “Belize vacations” produces about 877,000 results. “Belize vacations” in general is going to be a less competitive search term than “Belize hotels.”

3. Expand your keyword list.

Google provides keyword list tools, such as “Wonder Wheel,” which is a visual representation the number of searches on specific keywords and phrases. And several other services, such as Word Tracker and Dogpile, can help with this. KeywordDiscovery.com is a tool that is useful for going after international business, such as the European market.

4. Select your final keyword list.

To determine which keywords are most important to keep, figure out what the conversion rate likely will be on those keywords. Productive keywords have a high rate of search-engine traffic.
“For example, I would leverage ‘Belize luxury resorts’ over ‘Belize resorts,’” Schnepp said. “There’s more traffic that will convert at a higher rate.”

5. Analyze your competition and develop a strategy.

Use services such as SpyFu, KeywordSpy and Google, which list competitors’ paid and organic search rankings.

Then determine which online marketing channels are going to be most effective for the hotel company’s marketing campaign, including search engine optimization, paid search marketing and display ads, and social media marketing. SEO, which is labor intensive but typically less expensive than paid search marketing, can help companies obtain higher organic search engine rankings. Paid search marketing and Internet display ads should be run simultaneously to achieve immediate results.

6. Become a great writer.

“Whether it’s SEO, paid search or social media marketing, you have to write effective ad copy,” Schnepp said. “You can’t just go in and manipulate your Web site; it’s providing content that’s useful to someone.”

7. Track everything.

Track your Web site’s organic rankings, page views, traffic from search engines and time spent on the site. Also, track the bounce rate, which is when customers search for a keyword, visited the company’s Web site, then leave it. Track how you were able to get eyeballs on the new promotion, including impressions from display ads or paid search campaigns.

8. Test and optimize your campaigns’ performances.

When you’re looking at your traffic and success metrics, any good search campaign will run multivariant tests on the ad copy and landing pages. Once the data is segmented and companies determine which ads are performing at a better rate, they can fine-tune their marketing campaigns.

“You can make your marketing dollars stretch as much as possible,” Schnepp said.

9. Continually education yourself about search engine marketing techniques.

There are several useful Web sites to learn about search engine marketing, including new technologies and methods in the field. Engineworks.com publishes a daily blog about the industry, and SearchEngineLand.com is a good resource, too.

10. Repeat steps one through 10.

Hoteliers must continually assess, track and test their search keywords to achieve higher rankings and conversions for their marketing campaigns.

Driving a recovery depends on smart rate management

What happens to lodging when the economic environment improves?

Over the past several months, it has begun to appear that the overall health of the U.S. economy has begun to move slowly from the critical patient stage to the stabilization stage and very recently to slow recovery stage. No one, at this point, believes that the economic recovery will be either swift or robust. So if, indeed, we have an extended period of time before we can utter the word “recovery” with any confidence, what does that mean for the hotel industry?

First of all it means that we are in for an extended period of sluggish demand growth that certainly will result in ongoing pressure on room rates. With that said, the industry’s bottom line is likely to become more challenged in the coming months because it is likely to face the unseemly combination of declining revenues and increasing costs.

If the coming recovery plays out as most analysts predict and the overall economy improves with little or no real employment growth, then that makes the lodging industry’s recovery lag a bit more. Sluggish employment growth probably translates into a slower return of both the transient business traveler and attendance at meetings and conventions.

In addition, the hotel industry typically lags the overall economy when recovering from a recession. That is almost certain to be the case this time and one begins to wonder if the pricing “hangover” that the industry will feel will have an even longer effect.

Now, having said all that, the industry can do some things to help accelerate the pace of the recovery. The most important, of course, is room-rate management. It will come as no surprise to anyone who either knows me, has heard me speak or reads my blogs that I feel like at least part of industry’s current dilemma is self inflicted. While it is clear that room-rate realignment was necessary, the depth and breath of the decline in room rates was unnecessary. Not everyone agrees with this view, but I remain convinced.

If the industry is to capitalize on an economic recovery, regardless of it’s timing, now is the time to start planning for that day. In order for hotels to begin to reap the financial benefits of improving business conditions, they must at least attempt to climb up the room-rate ladder at a pace that approximates the swiftness with which they were able to negotiate the slide down!

Why Twitter matters most to businesses, not celebrities

Love it or hate it, Twitter is a force to be reckoned with. The best any hotel operator can do is go along for the ride and make the most of it.

It turns out businesses might have the most to gain from the online network that connects people with 140-character messages. The project started with posing the question, “What are you doing?” but it’s more about telling people what’s happening in real time, according to Evan Williams, CEO of Twitter.

The original question trivializes the possibilities, he said, during a keynote session at the Online News Association conference last week in San Francisco.
Williams said it’s the new relationships that businesses have with their customers that is the most exciting opportunity for Twitter. There has never been interaction on this level.
And for those that think the Twitter phenomenon will be short lived, Williams said the business model for Twitter is not designed to turn a profit, for now.

“We will build Twitter and grow it as long as we can pay for it,” he said. “To build a business on top of that is a different task.” The focus now is on incremental improvement and building a great company.

Some hotels already are taking advantage. Examples such as announcing special promotions via Twitter, promoting new amenities or events, and monitoring guest sentiment are just the beginning.

Here’s a great story about Gaylord Hotels & Resorts picking up on a guest comment made on Twitter. The Gaylord National Harbor guest was Twittering about craving cornbread. @gaylordpalms not only attempted to get the guest cornbread during their stay, they remembered it the next time she stayed at a Gaylord hotel! How’s that for customer satisfaction.

Thanks to Bonnie Buckhiester for pointing that one out.

If you’re not in the game yet, it’s time to get started. Start a Twitter account for your hotel and dedicate someone to manage it.

From another session at ONA09, here are some Twitter tips:

1. Create a Twitter dashboard. Use a downloadable application (or app as the technologically inclined like to call it) to help manage all of the people you follow and what they are saying. Tweetdeck, Seesmic Desktop and Hootsuite are the top choices.

2. Find local “tweeps.” Twitter is a great way to connect to the local community. You can find people based on their location in several ways. The first is Twitter’s advanced search feature at search.twitter.com/advanced. Other tools: TwitterLocal.net, NearbyTweets or Localtweeps.

3. Follow breaking news. Use Twitterfall to follow the Web in real time. Create custom searches to follow topics you specify and save them for later retrieval. You can also follow hashtags, phrases and terms identified with a # that can be searched like keywords.

Source: JD Lasica, Socialbrite.org