Hotel Blogs - When Hotel Marketing gets Social

Don't steal my hotel brand online!

While politics discuss the possibility of regulating the Internet (check out the e-g8 summit videos), we in the hospitality industry has a huge dilemma to solve on the Internet.

We have to debate openly with all distribution players about brand protection online.

Recently a study conducted by MarkMonitor (brilliant press release by the way) reveals that the hotel industry is loosing more than $2.2B annually because of brand hijacking, spammers and fraudulent activities on search engines.

Everbread: what we should expect from this company?

It's been a long time that we haven't had any disruptors in the B2B travel sector.

For too long, the travel technology industry has been driven by mainly 4 actors (used to be 5 with Worldspan): Amadeus (Disclaimer: my former employer), Sabre, TravelPort and ITA Software (recently acquired by Google but yet to be completed because of this).

So when I heard that the rock and roll style entrepreneur Morten Lund decided to disrupt the industry and launch Everbread with a suite of solutions, i couldn't resist to have a positive smile on my face and welcome such a brave move.

First of all, the main 3 Global Distribution Systems (GDS) have been around for a while. They were all at some point in their life owned by airlines. They are all now owned by private equity funds (Blackstone for TravelPort, Cinven & BC Partners for Amadeus, TPG & Silver Lake Partners for Sabre).

They are all battling hard to gain market share in all over the world. Some do better than others in certain markets due to a/ their country of origin b/ their level of customer support c/ their loyal customer base

But they are all continuing selling their solutions with the dangerous game of incentives handed out to travel agents.

What does this mean for non GDS agnostics?

Basically if you are a travel agent and you are looking to offer Flights, Hotels, Car, there is a good chance you need to access inventory via the GDS and use their booking platform to make reservations for your customers. All GDS have proprietary front office systems that sit on your computers. Some agents use the graphical interface and others (majority of them) use what we call the "Black Screen" with codes that you learn over a a long intense week of training.

Some agents might decide to swith from one GDS to another besause of different reasons. And when comes the negotation to buy into a new GDS parntnership, the incentive comes largely into play in the decision making factor. It would mean that the GDS will pay the agent an incentive per booking. I know this can sounds weird in the technology sector, but yes GDS pay their customers to use their system. So you might ask how do the GDS make money? From suppliers like Airlines, Hotels, Car rental companies who pay a booking fee and more to be on the GDS. Also let's not forget that all GDS have expended their expertise to provide technology to suppliers as well (another good source of revenue for them).

This battle of who is getting which travel agent / travel management company / tour operator is totally flawed with this incentive model. In the economy crisis we lived not so long ago, some agents weren't interested to invest long term but more how I can make more money with GDS incentives. Such a short strategy in my eyes but hey I am not a travel agent.

Back to Everbread.

As Morten mentions in his video interview with Kevin May from Tnooz during Webintravel in Singapore last week, he thought to join the travel industry because it is the biggest industry in the world and there is a lot of money to make even though it is very competitive. Funny enough we don't know much about their product Haystack yet. No demo has been published online but I am dying to get a demo with their team at some point. Ultimately, Everbread aims to do a better job in travel search. Watch this space. Check out his first appearance at a travel trade industry event last week.

To be continued...

(Filip, I didn't forget your offer ;-)

Coffee with Morten Lund, 'Archangel' investor & CEO, Everbread from WebInTravel on Vimeo.

 

 

 

Do we need a meta meta search engine called Tripeedo...seriously

My favorite online travel trade publication Travolution has  announced the launch of another "Trip" company called Tripeedo.

Something that amazes me (still) these days is the lack of innovation or bright new ideas that come up in the online travel space.

I mean Tripeedo aims not to be another meta search engine but wants to sit above that ...meaning the start up founded by Andrew Dudly  aims to - I quote -  "allow for quick comparisons of metasearch sites, airlines and OTAs - so it’s metasearch on top of that. It’s a single point to launch searches to different sites, reducing a process that takes a long time to a few minutes."

I just don't see what problem Tripeedo is trying to solve. Meta search engines facilitate the search of multiple travel websites in one user interface. A site that compares meta search engines and OTAs is just nonsense. I mean who wants dozens of windows open in your browser.

I was doing a search in New York on Firefox with all OTAs and Hotel Chains websites. When Firefox discovered that 30 windows will be opened, it just declined it (Thank You Firefox by the way, you are brilliant!)). Also how could you really compare results if you need to navigate between different windows?

Anyway, another flawed idea that would never take off (again my opinion only). If I had $100,000 in the bank, I wouldn't touch this search problem, I would do something else. You can't keep up with innovation coming from big guys like Kayak with such a small investment.

As Julie Meyer said in the title of her article at City A.M. "Entrepreneurs must show an appetite for risk", I just don't see the risk in this new venture...

 

What people think of Bing?

The French Internet daily news site Journal du Net has asked its audience to answer to this question regarding the future of Bing.

So far 712 people have responded to the survey.

35.7% believe that we are so used to search on Google that we don't think to use another search engine

30.1%  think that Bing is another meta search engine (sigh!)

18.3% believe that if Bing brings more relevancy, the Microsoft search engine can become more powerful

15.9% hope that Bing could have its chance to steal market share from Google

Should you use Google Analytics?

There is some very interesting comments on the last "Friday Idea" and I thought it would be worthwhile to publish the comments on a separate post and have your views and experience of using the Google Analytics tool.

Mike Lanigan from Alberghi Marketing says

Too many small independent luxury hotels rely on well-known-brand portal websites to generate business but it's often perceived business. Using Google analytics, they can track how much traffic is being generated by these sites (referrals) and, alarmingly, it's often somewhere between low and zero per month. It's also virtually impossible to measure how many bookings are generated via these sites unless customers book via the portal booking engine and these can be very few. Given that the cost can be as much as £2000pa, is it worth it, when their own websites can be working so much better for them?
A hotel's website provides a good testbed for all sorts of intiatives and Google analytics enables them to get some idea how popular these initiatives are. They can see which are the most popular pages of their site.
I can say one thing categorically; those hotel sites that have a Late Availability page that they manage themselves on a daily/weekly basis will find that it's one of the top three most popular pages, especially as more people are booking last minute these days.
In fact, if a hotel is managing its site properly, it can't do without analytics. This, of course, assumes that the site's Google profile is generating loads of traffic!
Of course, a small luxury hotel can have the slickest website in the world and spend an inordinate amount of money on marketing but if the reception team are incapable of converting the enquiries, it can be to the benefit of competitor hotels. But that's another issue!

Anthony Cost replies:

There is no doubt that it is very important to be well ranked in google and other search engines but I would like to tell you guys that Google Analytics was not a good thing for my business.

I run a 30 room hotel in Brittany, I have designed the hotel website in HTML a few years ago, our website is simple but efficient and it has been for years referenced with Google in the top of page n°1, which was great because we have never paid for search engine placement, it worked fine and simply with good key words etc.

Two years ago I read a good article about Google Analytics so I decided to do it. Since I have started with Google Analytics problems have appeared quickly. It is true we had great and precise information about our web visitors but our website was terribly bad ranked, we were appearing on page 3, a true disaster, it was sad to appear so far from page 1.

I have understood one thing:

Using Google Analytics is like giving a call to Google and telling them that you are very interested in your ranking. Once they know you are interested in your web ranking, they put you far away at the back and that pushes you to pay for a better search engine optimization.

I was not willing to pay so I decided quickly to take off Google Analytics of my website and our excellent ranking came back a few days later. If your hotel has already a good or very good search engine placement, it is maybe better not to use Google Analytics.

Whilst Danilo Gasparrini from Babotel thinks:

Google Analytics or any other web analytics tools are fundamental to improve your online performance.
Google analytics has got nothing to do with ranking and in my experience it doesn't affect ranking in any way. It is a reporting tool that allow the hotel to understand how people visit their website and most importantly where the bookings come from.
Very few web agency in the hotel sector, set up google analytics correctly. You should set up the "ecommerce Section" and add the unique tracking code in the confirmation page.
In this way, you will be able to see not only traffic but also revenue and number of bookings from each specific campaign that you decide to undertake.

Danilo has asked the question on LinkedIN

TDS Europe 09 - Search Engines "Innovating in a downturn"

 

First panel up on Tuesday morning with representatives from Google, Fly.com, CheapFlights and ex Kayak.

James from Google gives some insight about different types of searches we make today:

    •    General  search (Google, Yahoo, Ask)
    •    Vertical search (like travel search engines for instance)
    •    Audio & Video search (Last.fm, Deezer, YouTube, Dailymotion)
    •    Social search (through LinkedIN, Facebook, MySpace)
    •    Semantic search (any idea?)

Fly.com Brian Clark gave more a sales pitch about his new venture, part of Travelzoo. As if the travel search engines market was not crowded enough, Fly.com has been launched in Feb09 in the US and will be ready soon in Europe for the summer. Not sure how this engine differs from Kayak, TravelSupermarket and co…Brian mentions that they don’t need to raise more money since it is part of Travelzoo, the leading online travel deal publisher site with 15M email subscribers, 200 employees worldwide with 65 in Europe. In one of the stats mentioned in this presentation, 1/3 of consumers online are happy with OTAs.

Faisal Galaria, ex MD Europe for Kayak believes that search is a media business after all and the commodization of travel searches is obvious. Since he’s out of the travel business, he advised companies to keep working on improving customer experience.

 

 

Sponsored Post

With a name like HotelCalculator, you can pretty much guess what this site is about. Eg:Compare hotel rates across different consolidators like Venere, Booking or Agoda.

HotelCalculator features among other players who aim to facilite the search for cheap hotels and best rates in one single specific engine, usually called meta search engine. Once the consummer has found what he or she wants, the site re-direct to the merchant website and HotelCalculator gets its referal fee.

HotelCalculator homepage is dead simple. Fill your destination of choice, your check-in and check-out dates and how many guests will stay in the hotel. In seconds you will find all the hotel available. Paris for instance featured around 2000 unique hotels searched in 13 different websites.

HotelCalculator is headed by Michal Wlodarski and the company is based in Warsaw, Poland. Hotel Calculator is part of the travel agency StayPoland.

How to find cheap hotels in Europe

Cheap Cheap Cheap! This is the buzz word of the moment (if not the year) because everyone is having shrinking wallet and hope to save money to their next hotel stay compared to past years.

EuroCheapo based in New York is a budget travel website founded by Pete Meyers along with his business partner (and brother), Tom. 

EuroCheapo has a team of travel writers based in  Rome, Paris, Berlin and more who help the website's mission of enabling travelers to find “diamond in the rough” budget hotels throughout Europe

Their approach is significantly different given their unique focus on combining in-house editorial and only including individually selected properties that adhere to their listing requirements. Editors have personally visited and reviewed thousands of hotels in Europe and feel EuroCheapo is one of the most effective and focused sources for travelers to find high value, low cost accommodations.

Their booking engine search hotels and rates from affiliates partners like Venere.com, Booking.com or HostelWorld.com.

The business model is on revenue sharing with OTAs like the ones mentioned below and also advertising from Google.

 

Search results that I am not proud of (more to come I am sure)

The cruelty of Google Search is that sometimes you don't want to feature in certain search results!

The Hotel World according to Meta Search Engines - (Part 4) - Hotelscombined.com

Score: 8.5 /10

Click on the fullscreen button (the icon is the desktop screen) on the video player to enjoy better quality.

HotelsCombined.com is a hotel meta search engine with 20 employees with a based office in Sidney, Australia.

It all started late 2005 in Sydney, Australia when a few former HotelClub.com executives were brain storming how to create the ultimate hotel reservation website. The goal was to eliminate the frustrations felt by customers when scouring the internet trying to book a hotel room. When hearing of a local renowned software engineer working on a similar concept they decided to join forces and start creating an initial prototype. The combination of business experience, internet marketing, strong technical skill and 9 months of hard work produced what we now know as HotelsCombined.com

They have three main objectives for 2009:

 

(1) Increase their visitor numbers to 3 million visitors a month (they are currently receiving 1.5-2 million visitors a month)

 

(2) Continue to improve their product to retain the position as the world’s leading hotel meta search engine

 

(3) Strengthening their commercial and social responsibility. Currently they support CarbonFund.org, SustainableTravelInternational.org, World Vision, Make A Wish Foundation and WWF.  

 

Disclaimer: HotelsCombined is one of Hotel Blogs sponsors.