The Arizona Grand Resort in Phoenix now offers a Facebook booking engine thanks to a new social media suite introduced by Sabre Hospitality Solutions.
The resort, which is among the first adopters of the SocialConversion suite, now offers Facebook specials and a Facebook booking engine and has clocked a 12:1 return on investment since the rollout, Sabre Hospitality says.
Here’s an image of the resort’s Facebook booking engine.
With the Facebook booking engine, the complete booking process takes place within Facebook so there’s no hand-off to the hotel website.
However, Sabre Hospitality says the Facebook booking engines should have the look and of the hotel website.
So here’s an image of the Arizona Grand Resort’s homepage for comparison purposes.
There are a number of tools within the SocialConversion suite in addition to the Facebook booking engine.
Among them are the ability to publish social-media only offers within Facebook; social media plug-ins for the hotels’ websites; tabs and widgets to enable cross-promotion between social media outlets and the hotels’ websites; campaign management solutions; and social media sharing capabilities for guests to share information about their stay across an assortment of social media channels simultaneously.
“SocialConversion was designed as a toolkit to complement Sabre Hospitality Solutions’ existing social media and reputation management services,” Sabre Hospitality says. “These services are offered by an expert team who provide campaign management, network building, online strategy and other support to boost hotels’ presence in social media and ultimately drive revenue.”
Like many others, I suspect many travel suppliers to follow this trend and begin offering “Fcommerce” (ok, not yet paying with Facebook credit – but I imagine FB will get in on the game soon where ever they can).
I suspect booking volumes will initially be very light and I’m interested in companies that will share volumes as we see this trend develop.
Certainly there are development costs to making Fcommerce available and I am very curious as to how it will plot against others chose to spend on the path of driving booking traffic back to their websites. I will definitely keep this topic on the radar.
I also think its great that Sabre Hospitality took Loyalty into consideration in the FB channel. To have ignored it in the first step would have been a grave mistake, IMHO.
Greg,
We have a simple application allowing for reservations in our hostels for over a year now.
The percentage of reservations coming from Facebook is lower than 1% of our total reservations, even though we have a pretty active FB page – http://www.facebook.com/loki.hostels
Ant the number has gone down by a bit since the page tabs were moved to the side. We tried to change that with our profile image, but still very little success.
One thing we see quite a lot is people posting on our page and asking for bookings or where can they book, even though it is just there on the page.
Isn’t this just “me too” booking engine or rather FBML layer… isn’t everyone else doing this already. Yep… Nothing disruptive here.
FB Channel &/ Fcommerce is alive and well… but this $100b valuation for FB is out of touch. FB touts 600Mil+ users but how many of those users are dogs/children profile made by another user, and how many people with multiple accounts. If you take 600M and cut that in half your looking at valuations a lot more realistic. Couple that with a ‘friend Overload’ driving people away from FB. MySpace was once a giant too. FB isn’t going away like MySpace but it definitely plateaued!! I’m watching LinkedIN!
Integrating the booking engine onto the hotel’s Facebook page was very cool…last year. Also, where did they get the 12:1 ROI stats…Facebook is free and booking engine integration should be a minimal charge. For most hotels, booking engine integration into Facebook does not represent a dramatic boost in online bookings. Facebook’s audience is there to engage with their friends and read interesting content…not purchase/arrange travel plans. Google and Expedia are still the top websites for travel research/shopping…Here’s a good article that dissects the audience engagement on Facebook vs. Google as it relates to travel/hotel marketing: http://bit.ly/gU6aPt
Pretty cool to see a GDS integrating into FB. However the MAU (monthly active user) numbers for this app are VERY low about 128. Which can be directly accessed here, http://www.facebook.com/apps/application.php?id=168465186546174
The cost to implement must be really low to get a 12:1 ROI. If that is the case then perhaps we’ll be seeing many hotels have fanpage bookings enabled.