Hotel Blogs - When Hotel Marketing gets Social

Hotel Blogs in a busy week

Hotel Blogs has been very quiet lately. I have been away most of the week and the time I have left in the evening is dedicated to video editing of my trip in Oman and Dubai + hotel videos + Rugby World Cup.

I will have a lot of new video content to share with you next week. Stay tuned !!!

New Poll: where would you go instantly to find a hotel for a weekend breakaway in Rome?

Liverpool and its much expected new hotel

Liverpool - home of the Beatles - is currently seeing the end of the development of a 2 year project: Hard Days Night Hotel.

This hotel will please the Beatles fans with lof of pictures and themes which will remind them on the legendary music band. The hotel will comprise of 110 rooms with 2 suites (Lennon and Mc Cartney), a brasserie and a bar called "Bar 4".

You can't book any rooms yet but the website says that the booking functionality will be running soon in September. I wonder how much they charge the different room types. My guess would be around £150 per night.

For such a development, wouldn't it have been interesting and relevant to open a blog updating Beatles fans about the opening of this new hotel and share the progress of such a project? Just a thought...

 

Accor recycles their old brand Pullman

It looks like Accor is revising their strategy towards their different hotel brands. We have seen recently the emergence of new brands and Pullman is one of them.

The group Accor has re-used this old brand to make Pullman their upscale hotels brand designed for business travelers. Pullman used to be these luxury trains where you could dine and sleep in cosy cabins for long journeys. By the look of their website, rooms will be equipped with the latest technology to fit young business travelers' expectations. I can't wait to test this new product later on this year.

The first Pullman hotel to see the light will apperently open in December this year somewhere in Europe. The group has announced that the chain will include about 250 hotels by 2015.

Technorati Tags: pullman, pullman hotels, accor

Top 10 Small Luxury Hotels

Life on Top has elected their top recommended Top 10 Small Luxury Hotels in the World. One of my favourite hotel brand Oberoi featured among the top 10 hotels.

Life on Top is a blog which aims at sharing what's new in the luxury world.

Big Thank You to Tish and Leo

Out of the 5 invitations, 2 guest authors accepted the challenge to write on Hotel Blogs during my absence.

Big "Thank You" to Tish and Leo who have contributed nicely to this blog. I can see their posts have created some good interests and comments. Interviews was quite a good idea as well, especially with companies like Groople and H2C...

This is something I will definitely repeat on our next holiday break.

Back 2 Reality

After 2 weeks in Muscat and Dubai, I am back in London enjoying the end of the summer.

What a shock I had last week when I moved from 35 degrees (Dubai) down to 18 (London). I guess I got used to the heat!

During our vacations, we stayed at two fanstactic hotels: The Chedi in Muscat (Oman) part of the Singaporean GHM hotel group and the Grosvenor House (part of Starwood Hotels & Resorts) in Dubai, UAE.

But we also visited the Shangri La's Barr Al Jissah hotel in Oman and Jumeirah Madinat, Royal Mirage and Le Royal Méridien Beach Resort & Spa.

I have got plenty of video footage and pictures to show you. Stay tuned !

(did I miss anything important whilst I was away ? any gossips ?)

Web reputation: everything you wanted to know but were afraid to ask!

The abundance of travellers’ sites, social network sites and blogs of any nature (especially those that favor bad company stories over happy customer tales such as http://consumerist.com) has put much pressure on hoteliers about the need of monitoring their reputation on the web.

There are very easy and rudimentary ways of monitoring what is said about your hotel. Using technorati watchlist and google blog search will allow you to monitor all the blogs in the world and google alerts will send you an email everytime your name is used in a web site. 

However, much more needs to be said and explored on that topic. I have asked Brendan May, Director of Client Services at h2c consulting and Research Analyst PhoCusWright Europe Inc., to share with us his opinion about web reputation.

Hi Brendan, thanks for taking the time to answer these questions.

Leo Stassi (L): Can you help us define “Web reputation”? and can hoteliers ignore it for the moment?

Brendan May (B): Web Reputation: “Reputation is the opinion (more technically, a social evaluation) of the public toward a person, a group of people, or an organization. It is an important factor in many fields, such as business, online communities or social status.”  (Wikipedia) – Fundamentally, that definition holds for “Web Reputation” in that the web is only a medium that allows people to communicate their social evaluation faster, and broader than previously.  In other words, there is nothing new here, other than the range.  Word of mouth was always important to hoteliers; it will always be important to hoteliers. 

Rather than putting the web reputation in a negative light, I like to think of it as an opportunity for hoteliers.  In the past, hoteliers have spent lots of money trying to figure out what their guests think.  Now, all they have to do is go to TripAdvisor.  That being said, I think hotels should review, and more importantly respond to what is being said about them.  This not only allows them to improve, but also gives reassurance to a potential guest that the hotel cares.

L: What do you think are the tools to monitor it on the web? And how can they be implemented in the hotel?

B: TravelCLICK has launched an interesting product that will allow someone to monitor much of what is being said, from one central login.  This could certainly help, but the most important tool is a web browser.  Go out there and find it yourself. Just as you would walk around the hotel as a manager, walk around the internet. That being said, there is a limit to what one person can manage without support or training. H2c consulting has developed an Internet Distribution audit, that provides a benchmark (to their competitive set) for hotels to allow them to understand what operational and strategic requirements should be met. The difference is that our analysts provide the insight that is missing from a “tool”, that allows the hotels how to really gain competitive advantage. In addition, we provide training to help the hotel better understand, and learn how to solve these challenges themselves. 

L: Who should be in the hotel in charge of monitoring it?

B: In the hotel I think this should go to Sales and Marketing, but the GM has to back it up.  I believe though that the chain should have the ultimate responsibility as in all marketing and PR communications.

L: Do you believe UGC can help industry to de-commoditize the hotel product?

B: I think User generated content can help the industry inspire travel.  If a hotel is not outstanding, essentially a commodity, then the reviews of the property will not change that, whether they are professionally or user generated.

L: Do you think they will (positive ones) drive more direct booking?

B: Without a question, positive reviews on big portals like TripAdvisor drive more bookings to that property. That is an undisputed fact.  The interesting piece is, do positive reviews create demand?  I believe the answer to that is also yes, but less so.

L: What do you think of hotel video guides ?

B: It remains to be seen if they will drive enough bookings, have enough traffic to be profitable.  Video as a supplement will be successful, but not as a stand alone.  It will of course strongly depend on high speed internet penetration.

L: Do you think that user generated content can become as much popular as the “classic” reviews?

B: A balance will be found between user generated and professional reviews.  Those reviews that reflect the needs of potential guests best will succeed.  I think a mix / a balance will be found eventually.

Leonardo Stassi (Guest Blogger and Student at IMHI-ESSEC MBA)

Social network site for group travel planning

Try to imagine the following situation:

You are in the stage of planning your wedding, you are Greek and your future wife (whom you met at the international business school you attended 5 years ago) is from Morocco. You (along with your beautiful Moroccan wife) have decided to marry in a nice little church in the outskirt of Leeds (Great Britan), invite all of your classmates of the university and all of your relatives spread around the world.

How can you arrange airport pick ups, accommodation, and special requests from all the people you have invited? 

You have two choices. You can either decide to arrange everything on your own and you are far from guessing how stressful, time-consuming and mistakes-prone that decision can be, or you can use GropeVine, the new social network for group travel planning created by Groople.com.

Groople (Groups + People = Groople ) is an online group travel agency and its CEO, Mike Stacy, has accepted to explain to Hotel-blogs.com’s readers why they decided to create GroopeVine and how it works.
 

Hello Mike, : - )
Thanks for taking the time to answer a few questions about GroopeVine!!

 
Leo Stassi (L): Why did you decide to introduce a social network site?

 Mike Stacy (M): For a couple of reasons:

1. The process around planning, communication and coordination of group members when it comes to putting a trip together for multiple people is very difficult and time consuming.

2. There is a real information void when it comes to deciding where to go, what to do, where to eat, etc., with your group.

Planning and booking a group trip is quite different than planning and booking an individual trip, which is why we created and built our company, Groople.com. At Groople we give our customers the power to easily create and customize their own group page, which they can use to communicate and collaborate with members of their group during the planning process of their trip as well as after their trip. We also give our customers the ability to share their trip with the public and to search on actual group trips that others have taken. What better informational source is there when you’re the one coordinating and planning that perfect group trip than looking at what other people have done for, say, their own family reunion or girlfriend getaway?

L: Where did you get the idea for GroopeVine?

 M: The idea is came from the great people we have on our team and we refined our thinking by getting lots of feedback from our customers

L: Are you planning to introduce any “Facebook-friendly” application?  

M: I don't want to give too much away here but the very short answer is yes.

L: How do you think Groople customers will benefit from GroopeVine?

 M: We think, and our customers have told us that this is really about saving them valuable time. No more inbox clogging emails and phones calls going back and forth regarding the details of the groups upcoming trip. GroopVine is the only place where customers have all the easy-to-use tools at their fingertips that will allow them to coordinate all the details of their group trip. With GroopVine, customers are able to create and customize a group trip page. On that page customers can:

1. Easily enter the details of their trip.

2. Invite guests via email.

3. Upload photos as part of the trip planning process or to share with the group after the event. The photos can also be viewed in slide show format.

4. Easily construct a schedule of events for their trip. GroopVine’s event schedule supports recommendation/voting/commenting, in addition to organizing the final event schedule.

5. Have a threaded discussion where each member of the group can add his or her own comment(s).

6. Personalize the group’s homepage (header, color scheme, drag & drop of page items to re-order, etc.).

7. Create a personalized group homepage url.

8. Freely add more information on the page (using wiki). For example, if group members are paying separately, the group leader can create a due date schedule for payments.

9. Add short video clips to the group page.

10. Receive RSS support.

11. Utilize social bookmarking capabilities.

12. Easily create a poll on where or when the group can go, or on any topic that the group leader would like to get input from the group on.

13. Clone other people’s trips as a starting point in building their own, or just copy the whole trip.

14. Add a weather section that shows the weather in the group’s destination.

15. Add links to websites that are relevant to their trip.

16. Easily share information with their group, and book hotels, airline tickets and rental cars.

17. Make reservations for hotel, car or air.

18. Import their travel reservations. Hotel reservations made on Groople.com are automatically integrated into the group trip page. For reservations made through other channels, customers can input the data in the travel wiki.

L: Which target segments are more actively using GroopeVine?

 M: We're seeing all of our customer segments, sports, small to medium size corporations, family, friends getaway, etc. actively using groopvine.

Leonardo Stassi (Guest Blogger and Student at IMHI-ESSEC MBA)

I am not sure whether I’m in Paris or Berlin, but I am staying in a Holiday Inn!

I have recently started thinking that because of the development of hotel video guides and user generated reviews, “hotel brands” are bound to loose their reason d’être in the low and middle scale market for the new generation of leisure travellers and unmanaged business travellers. I have taken a look at the reason travellers would choose a branded hotel against an independent property and have realized that this reason has disappeared. I know..some of you will think that I have written this post from the cosy bed room of a mad house, but I will explain to you my line of reasoning.

Let’s take a look at WHY a traveller would go to a Courtyard By Marriott or to an Express By Holiday Inn rather than going to an anonymous middle scale hotel. The reason is simple and straightforward: Standardization.

By the 1950s Holiday Inn not only opened their first motel, but also opened the door to consistency and uniformity. Although the format of standardization was primarily a management tool to control and ease the process of development, it met the need of travellers for reassurance as it ensured recognized and consistent standards of facilities. These standards are one of the basic benefits of brand value and the reason behind guest patronage. The hotel brand reduces the uncertainty associated with the booking process. If you are going to sleep in any Holiday Inn of the world you can confidently expect a room that is not less than 25 m2 with a King size bed, a large desks with ergonomic chairs, task lighting and a powerful shower in the bathroom.

Leisure travellers and unmanaged business travellers will be able in the near future to make the best informed decision in the travel planning process than ever. Travellers can read peers’ reviews (tripadvisor) enjoy the contextual appeal of visiting the hotel (trivop.com) and directly experience the human reassurance provided by a salesperson (estara.com). The sum of the values that these companies deliver eliminate the information asymmetry in the booking process, in other words the promise once fulfilled by the brand is not necessary anymore.

Leonardo Stassi (Guest blogger)