With the ever-increasing proliferation of smartphones and tablets, mobile internet access and apps, consumers are becoming much more comfortable with browsing and shopping through the mobile.

As a result, many business sectors are having to really push forward their multi-channel strategy and approach to mobile, and travel is one of these.

There is one area of importance potentially above all others when it comes to successful mobile engagement – the experience.

Consumers have very personal relationships with their mobile devices, so it becomes even more crucial than on other digital channels, that the user experience is right and that the recipient is engaged with on their terms.

At Webcredible, we have been doing a lot of consultancy around the mobile user experience and have recently been working a lot within the travel sector.

A recent customer was Hotels.com, which wanted to optimise its mobile offering in line with customer requirements with the further aim of producing results that would improve brand experience, customer satisfaction and loyalty through the mobile channel.

This is a common problem, for many travel brands when looking to make moves in mobile.

The approach to mobile will differ according to the brand itself, but there are some best practice tips that travel brands can follow when looking to optimise the mobile experience for their customers.

1. Reduce the amount of content

Not everything shown on a PC site can fit reasonably onto a mobile web page, where space is short and every pixel counts.

It’s important to reduce the amount of content shown on the mobile-optimised version. Only include the most important content or features.

2. Use single column layouts

Website pages are difficult to view on small mobile phone screens. Even on smartphones like the iPhone with their relatively large screens, standard web pages load up zoomed out so that they can fit on the screen.

Instead, create single column pages that use up the whole width of the screen.

To add additional content the page should expand downwards rather than across, as scrolling down is easier than scrolling across and users generally prefer it.

3. Present the navigation differently

It’s difficult to fit the navigation across the top of the screen on a mobile web page, therefore you must look for alternative options to display the navigation.

A few options include:

• Place the navigation and site search at the top of the page and leave the content for later pages. This is suitable for users who want to navigate or search upon immediately finding the site – a common action with travel websites
• Place the navigation at the bottom – still accessible but doesn’t get in the way of the content
• Place the navigation in a dropdown link at the top of the page

4. Minimise text entry

Text entry on a mobile phone is much more difficult than when using a desktop or laptop keyboard, so mobile websites must take this into account.

Allowing users to store details in their “My Account” section is helpful, and if they already have an online account, then linking this to them as a mobile user will also avoid any unnecessary text entry.

5. Decide whether you need more than one mobile site

If your mobile website is only going to be seen by smartphone users with fast download speeds then one mobile version will be ok.

However, if you want a broader reach then you should consider creating a paired down version. Facebook goes as far as having three main mobile versions.

6. Take advantage of inbuilt functionality

Many mobile phones have an advantage over PCs – they come with lots of inbuilt functionality that most PCs don’t have.

You can make it easier for users to perform certain tasks by utilising a mobile’s inbuilt functionality and thereby remove the need for manual steps, for example; making calls, seeing an address on a map and finding the nearest.

However, although these kind of best practice guidelines can help with some ‘quick wins’ for your mobile proposition, travel brands must ensure that their mobile strategies are based on real insights into the behaviours and needs of their audiences and target markets through the customer lifecycle.

Live example

In the case of Hotels.com, Webcredible worked to gain more of an understanding of smartphone users’ use of mobile sites and applications (and any other activity) to guide the development of its mobile website and iPhone and Android apps.

The main objectives of the research was to learn:

How people use smartphones in relation to researching, planning and booking travel
How smartphones are used by travellers while they travel to their destination and how they’re used during holidays and business trips
What are the current barriers that prevent some users from travel-related smartphone use

We used diary study methods, interviews and expert analysis projects, along with its mobile industry knowledge and integrated research, to produce a set of guidelines and recommendations for Hotels.com to build its mobile strategy, which were detailed in a report which:

• Mapped smartphone use against the travel lifecycle
• Updated existing personas to include smartphone use
• Highlighted current attitudes and behaviours towards arranging hotels, flights, meals entertainment and other activities across digital channels
• Reported on how smartphones are being used to store travel-related information
• Discussed current barriers to using smartphones for bookings
• Offered ideas and suggestions for future smartphone opportunities

The importance of a mobile optimised website cannot be underestimated in the travel industry.

When online, if a user struggles to complete a task on your website, they are very likely to simply “drop-off” and go to a competitor’s site.

With the increase in speed of mobile devices and connections, this type of behaviour will become increasingly prevalent on mobile devices as well and travel brands need to ensure they’re providing a mobile user experience that seamlessly matches the online experience, making it easy for consumers to complete the tasks they want, when they want, through whichever platform they want.

NB: This is a guest article by Trenton Moss, director at UK-based Webcredible.

There is one thing those “Ten secrets for a successful startup” articles never mention – the critical business need for a fuzzy shark suit.

Who could have predicted that a costume purchase would spark a burgeoning embrace of social video for marketing and PR at TravelShark?

Even if you don’t have a college-football-quality mascot, and whether you’re a scrappy travel startup or an iconic hotel, here are nine signs it’s time for your company to dive in:

1. You own a fuzzy shark suit, or its metaphorical equivalent

Last June we changed our name from Swiftrank to TravelShark. The inspiration to create a company mascot named Mako Mark and make him our video leading man seemed nearly inevitable.

We binned our plan for a standard press release and instead shot a playful Shark-on-the-Street newsreel outside our office, capturing opinions from the hot dog guy and our mailman. Total spend for the video press release and a few shorts: under $10,000.

The videos made a huge splash in social media, exceeding every expectation, with traffic spikes, thousands of views, Twitter traction, and incoming sales leads. Did we celebrate when we got the news that we won a Gold Adrian Award for this grassroots campaign? You bet we did.

2. You are marketing something with a visual “story”

Video conveys visual and emotional touch points, which are present in almost every travel offering.

Our case and point. Last week we launched TravelSharkPix, a social travel-photo sharing service. We added a charitable component and asked users to help us pick three charity partners.

Cause marketing plus photography made video PR a natural choice. Our tongue-in-cheek launch video shows Mako Mark’s foiled attempts to find a partner.

Over the next week, we are releasing short follow-on charity stories like this one shown first at Tnooz today:

3. You can defuse the “Honey Badger” cynics in your office

I see fear about using video. You pitch an idea, and you get the “this is no Honey Badger” backlash. Instead of comparing your concept to one of the most popular viral videos ever, compare it to your other alternatives.

If your other option is a staid media release with a few photos, you don’t need blockbuster badger stats to score a win.

4. You want to reach consumers

C’mon. You know this one. YouTube is the second largest search engine. Facebook is clocking billions of video views each month.

If you are marketing a travel business to consumers, it likely has a visual story. Video is a must.

5. You want to reach forward-thinking travel executives

You know who they are. Tieless conference-goers mobbed with groupies. You take notes when they talk. They are the new media thought leaders in travel, and if they can influence your customers (or they are your customers), reach them with every arrow in your social media quiver, including social video.

6. You still care about SEO

If in the post-Panda era, you still work at reaching incremental customers through organic search, the YouTube-Google nexus means video matters.

Don’t miss out.

7. You’re allowed to wade in the perfect-is-the-enemy-of-the-good waters

Viral video marketing and PR success rests a great deal on something you can’t control: luck. It’s tough to predict virality, and so don’t break the bank (money or time) on any one video because our best-laid ideas may fall flat.

If your company allows experimentation and testing of “good” ideas, this is your game. If brand standards make “good” not good enough, you’ll spend too much money and time for the likely ROI.

8. You want to get the viral ball rolling with your staff

All those folks in your office may work for you, but if you want them to pull a social media oar, you need to inspire them.
Here’s the math:

Number of employees x (250 Facebook friends + 150 LinkedIn/Twitter) = WOW!

Impressive numbers, but your team members will only advocate for company initiatives on their social graphs if you give them material their friends will love.

A dull industry release is a cul-de-sac. Highly visual video that tells a compelling story – “Check out our new hotel in Da Nang! Let’s go!” – is great fodder for all-company engagement to get that social ball rolling.

9. Your employees aren’t having any fun

Sign out of your email for a minute. Walk around the office and check out the creative energy. Is anyone laughing? Our companies all have stories.

Stories build emotional glue. Videos are a great way to tell those stories, and your people will love being involved in planning, shooting, and giving feedback.

Ask yourself: “What’s my company’s shark suit?”

Armed with that answer, make your iconic story a video star!

NB: This is a guest article by Sue Heilbronner, CEO of TravelShark.

It’s not unusual to hear people say that over the past few years, travel companies worldwide have witnessed tremendous change in the industry.

But as more and more wholesale resources become available via XML connections and online B2B systems, travel agents are forced to access a growing number of platforms to perform queries.

At the same time the industry has witnessed (and continues to witness) strong growth in new distribution channels (mainly mobile and internet). It is not always clear how a single agency can manage them all, allowing large OTAs to fill the void.

The main challenge and the key for future success lies in one’s ability to establish an efficient distribution network of competitive products, accompanied by effective business controls with automated administration tools.

Here are five areas which are pivotal to the success of any travel business in 2012.

1. Access great resources and improve your offering to customers

A vast majority of travel product suppliers, wholesalers, and brokers provide online access to their inventories.

Online B2B systems allow travel agents to instantly access a multitude of inventories when searching for the best rates and availability for their clients, across all product categories.

Not long ago, strict financial terms hampered one’s ability to contract with many providers simultaneously. Many of these providers now offer flexible financial arrangements, making it feasible for travel operations to access and distribute their products to their travelers.

Creative travel companies are constantly on the lookout for new providers: With the right resources you can provide your clients not only with the best rates, but also with highly specialized products that are difficult to find elsewhere – providing your company with an essential competitive edge.

2. Access all of your resources from a single point of access

The hunt for the best rates and availability has led travel companies to simultaneously manage a multitude of B2B systems.

Many attempts were made to aggregate resources using XML technology – somewhat simplifying the search process. However, while XML integration is simple and inexpensive, several crucial problems remain:

• Wholesalers providing XML connectivity to their inventory transmit imperfect data – as they compete against others for your attention they strive to differentiate themselves with unique product IDs, and product categories. XML aggregation is of little help, if for example, you cannot instantly compare all of the offers for the same hotel, or immediately identify the best offer for a specific car.
• Moreover, an imperfect merge of several XMLs, without the proper business logic and sophisticated system infrastructure, cannot be used to develop a network of sub agents and affiliates – which can serve as a catalyst for significant growth of your distribution network.
• Systems allowing multi-product search of ‘Mapped’ content from numerous suppliers – enable travel companies to quickly put together the most competitive travel package – online, over the phone, or in person.

3. Grow your B2B/B2C presence and expand your distribution network

No doubt, the more points of sale you set up – the greater your chances are for success. It’s no wonder that all of the large OTAs offer affiliate programs – iFrame distribution is cost effective, and gets them featured on numerous websites, ultimately leading to exponential sales growth.

HotelsCombined has had tremendous success in this respect, while Expedia’s Affiliate Network has become a major source of growth for the company. How can you compete with that?

• By providing sub agents with a unified access point (B2B) to all of your resources, complete with a B2C booking engine to place on their website.
• The ease of becoming an affiliate of a large OTA attracts novice travel entrepreneurs, but has little value for professional travel agents. If you can provide instant access to a unified and intuitive B2B system suitable for local travel professionals, and compliment it with an online booking engine to place on their website (all under your agreements). All this complete with professional support stemming from your market expertise – and you are bound to become an attractive partner by local and international travel professionals alike.
• If you can get 100 travel agents to make five bookings a month on your system – you’ve already won. Now all you need to focus on is negotiating better rates, and finding new and exciting resources.

4. Business controls: Margins, user access, credit, risk, currency conversion

Managing multi-user operations requires having sufficient controls in place.

Your system must be able to define role-based user-access to information, grant your authorized agents the ability to instantly control margins across products, suppliers, users, destinations – down to single properties and bookings, etc.

i. Access Control

• Managing numerous users calls for role-based user setup. Who is authorized to make reservations? Create new users? Control mark ups? Cancel orders? Modify credit limits? See the original supplier price, or the supplier’s identity?

ii. Margin Control

• Growing your distribution network implies working with a variety of financial arrangements each with different profit margins. The ability to establish a hierarchical fee-structure will simplify your revenue-stream control on one hand, while providing the essential freedom to your sub-agents to manage their own sales.

iii) Credit Control

• Providing travel agents with access to your supplier agreements requires you to control when and how financial concerns are addressed. What happens if a booking cancelation date is coming up and no payment from your agent is in sight? How much can a single user book before having to clear his balance with you?
• It is essential that your system provides you with automatic notifications of approaching deadlines, and even auto-cancel the order before your account is charged. It should allow you to set up booking caps, and release credit as payments are received. Ultimately, it should allow you to do so across numerous levels, and according to varying user specifications. A well designed distribution system should provide you with tools and automated controls that are essential for safe and efficient operations.

iv) Currency Conversions

• Make sure you don’t lose money due to outdated currency conversion rates with manual and automatic-updating of representative rates, and even add a percentage or fee for currency conversions.

5. Streamline processes (multi-segment reporting, CRM, data entry)

Working with several suppliers on their B2Bs poses a huge data-entry challenge. Booking a flight from one source, a car from another, and a hotel from a third, requires someone to access three different systems, pull out three different reports, and consolidate them into a single accounting management system.

Multiply this process by all sales handled by your in-house and sub agents, and your online booking engines. Your data entry task must be error prone, arduous and time consuming, and ultimately a very expensive task.

The advantage of managing all of your suppliers from a single platform is that your order management process is considerably simplified to: working with a single XML or CSV file which includes all of your orders, across all product categories.

The result: substantial time savings and significant data entry error reduction.

The need for travel operations to adapt to the changing nature of the global travel industry, and at the core of this process is the deployment of the right technology portfolio.

This technology mix should not only enable uniform connectivity to existing resources, but to also to take into account future content needs. It is of an essence to be able to push the resulting output across as many channels as possible – sub agents, affiliates, and direct consumer facing websites.

The right technology should allow an effective control of the entire cycle – both to protect the operation from unwanted credit exposure, as well as to provide independent users with the best set of tools to grow their sales.

At the end of the day, it’s all about being able to offer the best and most comprehensive travel product – to as many consumers as possible without losing your pants in the process of doing so.

NB: This is a guest article by Andrey Spektor, CEO of Gimmonix (owner of Carsolize).

NB2: TLabs Showcase – Carsolize.

NB3: TLabs Reprise – Carsolize 12 months on.

NB4: Image via Shutterstock.

It’s hard to find any business better suited for the internet than travel and hospitality. What industry can show “pretty pictures”, display the cost, collect money, send a confirmation email and wait for you to show up?

Not to minimize the complexity of travel technology but, let’s be honest, the consumer could care less.

So what exactly is the consumer looking for?

Specifically, according to internet psychologist Graham Jones, the leisure traveler is looking for one of two things – an escape or new experiences. The challenge for travel marketers is to effectively inspire, educate and motivate consumers with various online tools to show value for money spent.

Brain research demonstrates that human eyes are capable of registering 36,000 visual messages per hour, and 80% of information absorbed by the brain is visual in nature.

Therefore, it is critical that travel marketers consider the significant role visual factors play in both online and offline sales. Considering the sheer number of marketing messages that we are bombarded with on a daily basis, the goal is product differentiation.

According to Wikipedia, product differentiation is defined as: “… the process of distinguishing a product or offering from others, to make it more attractive to a particular target market”.

Your differentiators or USPs (unique selling propositions) should be something that is of value to your target consumer.

Three steps to help you differentiate:

• Identify your target customer. It’s impossible to be everything to everyone. As the expression goes, “one size does not fit all, one size fits one.” Imagine creating a marketing strategy that appeals to honeymooners as well as families – good luck.
• Identify what your target customer finds valuable. Once you’ve identified your target customer, find out their likes and dislikes. If you can satisfy the customer’s likes (eg. a secluded, quite escape), that becomes part of your overall value proposition, a differentiator, or unique selling proposition.
• Create attractive visuals that resonate emotionally with your target customer. Now that you have identified your target consumer and what they value, show them what they want to see. Let the visuals “talk” to the target consumer in terms that clearly shows your value.

Putting price aside for the moment, visuals are the most important element to market and sell travel.

That was true before the internet, and is even more so for any internet marketing strategy. The web still offers a cost effective storefront (website) that can be accessed by almost two billion people (28.7% global penetration and growing) that are online 24/7/365 and your goal is to get your best visuals in front of as many of your target eyeballs as possible.

This means your website, your brand website, the OTA websites, social networks, everywhere!

According to a recent study by Cornell University on the so-called billboard effect, almost 75% of the traffic that booked on a hotel brand website visited an OTA prior to making the purchase, and three to nine of those bookings, were directly influenced by the OTA listing. The take away: a listing on the OTAs, will generate more bookings (on your site and the OTA).

Furthermore, if you have high quality, large photos, videos and/or 360-degree tours on your website and on the third party sites you will generate more booking, period.

Take a moment to audit your current visual assets (photos, 360-degree panoramic images, videos, slide shows). Do your visuals provide a good representation of the property, the rooms, and the differentiators?

If not, make it a priority – at the very least, update the photos. Consumers want to see the actual hotel and the rooms they can book – they should be able to clearly imagine themselves there. Primary benefits of rich visuals are to increase traffic to your website and improve look-to-book conversion.

It’s tempting to break out your digital camera and snap some images of the property, but customers can tell the difference between photographs taken by professionals and those that weren’t, and perception becomes their reality.

Quality visuals will create a positive and lasting impression of the property that helps customers decide where to book. Even a slight increase in the percentage of bookings from rich visuals shows a significant increase on your bottom line.

Let’s connect the dots. Consumers seeking a vacation are looking for rich visual content to help them understand the value. The visuals keep them more engaged with your property, no matter what site it is on. If the visuals are enticing enough, they will do some research on your property – read reviews, go to your website to find more information and rates.

If the same rich visuals are shown everywhere, the consumer gets more comfortable and will book the room.

Bottom line, creating high quality videos and/or 360 tours to show on your website as well as the travel sites selling your property delvers tremendous benefits. Studies have shown:

• Total unique visitors to the hotel website will increase an average of 13%.
• Rich content click-through (to booking engine) rates 4 to 5 times more than static images.
• Rich content generates post-impression activity (return visits) rates twice those for non-rich content and 46% more sales for those activities compared to non-rich content.
• The bounce rate (number of visitors abandoning site after viewing only one page – home page or landing page) improves by more than 5 percentage points.

Rich content is no longer a “nice to have” – it has become a “need to have” element in travel marketing strategy. Technology has made it easy for travel suppliers to create spectacular, rich content at a cost that will not break the budget.

It’s your image, how do you want prospects to “see you”!?

NB: This is a guest article by Henry Woodman, president of ICE Portal.

NB2: Image via Shutterstock.

The hotel industry seems to put a lot of focus on its online conversions, but how many queries to call centers are we actually then converting into bookings.

Phone sales are a very important direct sales channel for hotels, with consumers making the effort to contact you directly, so should be easy to convert. Why is it though that many hotels have such a poor sales process?

Is hotel management not on the ball?

It seems perhaps that we have lost focus, concentrating instead on developments with the web.

In fact, reservations departments have for many years already been regarded as an operational department rather than a commercial one.

Backing up my rant of this apparent disinterest to generate direct sales, we carried out some test calls to various hotels in different cities.

[NB: I did not want to publicly embarass anyone, so decided to remove the hotel and agent name.

Test call #1 [opens in new window]

These guys only quote prices when I called. They did not even react to my buying signals and motivation for the trip.

Test call #2 [opens in new window]

This one was trying, but the operator was mumbling. I could simply not make out what she was saying. Unfortunately they did not get me to book.

Test call #3 [opens in new window]

And here a really shameful situation: an agent referring me back to the website…

In this particular case the hotel’s management was under the impression the hotel was performing on target as the correct average rate per person was achieved.

Unfortunately the average occupancy per person per room was actually 20% lower than normal, which made it impossible to reach total revenue target, because the average room rate was totally off.

Hotels have to train their reservation staff to go beyond the price quoting approach. They have to implement a sales process which can then be customized to the individual caller to make it feel more personal.

We need to sell the destination as well as the location and the hotel’s surroundings.

Even the simple things matter:

• Address the caller by his or her name.
• Ask questions to find out why they are traveling so the hotel can better assist their needs.

Call center agents also have to be aware of what is going on in town and be able to give some recommendations on restaurants, public transport and activities.

Below is an overview of a possible sales script you can use to increase the conversion of your reservations call center:

	Task	Comments
1	Answer within three rings
2	My Hotel reservations greeting	"Good [Morning, Afternoon, or Evening], My Hotel reservations. [Insert Name] speaking!" Note caller ID to determine language
3	Listen to the Caller’s request!	A. Redirect call, if applicable B. Process change request, if applicable C. Begin reservation process
4	Search for availability on the requested nights	Ensure to obtain the following information: Arrival date Length of stay/departure date Number of people/rooms If the hotel has availability, restate the arrival and departure dates (confirming the day of the week) and proceed to 5. If the hotel is not available, suggest days surrounding the anticipated arrival date when the Hotel does have availability. If you cannot accommodate the caller, place the them on the hotel’s wait-list or refer the caller to another property. Only when the Caller asks you to recommend an alternative hotel, should you do so. NB: Never refer the guest to another distribution channel (wholesalers, travel agency, etc.)
5	Have you stayed with us before?	If "No", go to #6. If "Yes", go to #9.
6	Are you traveling on business or pleasure?	If "Business", ask the caller which company he/she works for. Proceed to #7; however, while you are describing the hotel, look up the caller’s employer to link the reservation to the company profile. If "Pleasure", go to #8. NB: This question is asked so that we can customize our sales methodology to the caller’s needs.
7	Hotel overview (business)	Explain the hotel's concept (real business USPs) Location (proximity to transportation, offices, restaurant areas, business district) Facilities (food and beverage, congress, fitness, parking, restaurant space, more) Room overview (emphasize special amenities for business travelers) Go to #11.
8	Hotel overview (leisure)	Explain the hotel's concept (mention real leisure USP’s) Location (proximity to transportation and attractions) Facilities (food and beverage, restaurant, fitness, parking) Room overview (emphasize leisure related amenities) Go to #11
9	Obtain the guest’s name	"Great! Welcome back! May I have your last name so that I can find your details immediately?"
10	Search guest history	Use the guest’s name throughout the remainder of the sales process (at least three times)
11	Guest rooms (it's showtime!) - sell, sell, sell…	Repeat guest Scan guest history and confirm address and personal details. "I have a [room type] available at a rate of [insert price]..." NB: In response to rate resistance, highlight the hotel’s limited availability and re-state the fact that the rate that you quoted was the best available. If applicable, note that availability is limited due to city-wide demand (cite the event/reason). Never use the terms "cheaper", "inexpensive", etc. And never apologize for a price - the price is right. Mention that the rate is the best available rate at this moment. You can’t guarantee the same rate to be available in the future. If more bookings are made the rate might move up. Upon further resistance, suggest alternative dates where other price offers are available. Converting a booking and selling is easier when you give the guest psychological reasons not to wait with booking a room.
12	Convert the call	Option 1: "Would you like to confirm the reservation?" Option 2: "May I book the reservation for you?"
13	Process the reservation	Enter data in all required fields, including the company name (even if the company does not have an account with the hotel). Reconfirm details (including the spelling of the guest’s last name), advise the guest of the Hotel’s cancellation and change policy, arrival and departure times, as well as early departure fees, and issue a confirmation number.
14	Close	Ask the caller if there’s anything else you can assist them with. Send confirmation letter (useful links for what to do in the city, public transportation, taxi services etc.) Thank the caller and let them know that we look forward to their return/arrival.

Here is a schematic overview of the sales process for hotel reservations:

This is not something that it is implemented overnight. It requires many hours of training, creative brain storming and constant motivation to keep it up.

We highly recommend implementing a mystery calling program, with test calls, scoring cards, following up coaching, and all tied into an incentive program.

Importantly, we should not to forget to measure the financial results. Hotels need to track the success of each agent and the department as a whole.

NB: For more ideas, visit our hotel blog.

NB2: Image via Shutterstock.

In this final article we’re going to look at the big picture and go through some high-level marketing trends we saw over the past year.

International marketing became very important

With different countries and economies recovering at different speeds, a global communications strategy helped maximize revenues and reach new markets. This is obvious for large, multinational hotel brands, but we saw that even small independent hotels can do something similar.

For example, Isabelle Lozano at the Apostrophe Hotel in Paris creates unique versions of their site in French and English to reach different audiences:

“We noticed that there’s a slight difference between the English part of the website and the French part. The French part has more articles and talks more about things that are less-known than in the English part. We’ve realized that the French customers were really reading alot of our posts.

“After arriving at the hotel, after their booking, they would say: ‘I’m going to go see this exhibition that I saw on the website.’ The English part follows the same idea, but talks more about the hotel itself, because that’s what English clients want to learn about, we’ve realized.

“At first we were just translating, but we asked customers what they thought, and we found out that our English and French customers wanted different things. English and Americans were saying: ‘That’s too much information; we just want to learn more about the hotel.’

“I’m not working only for my own pleasure; my main aim is to please customers, so I keep asking them what they think.

For executives at travel companies that oversee multiple properties in multiple locations around the world, understanding specific cultural travel trends – like this piece from New World Hotels – can be very useful.

I talked about the trend towards image-based social networks in part one of this series, but it’s interesting to note here that a focus on images in your marketing not only taps into a hot trend – what Robert Scoble calls “the currency of Facebook” – but it transcends language barriers to tell your story to potential visitors from around the world.

We saw this with the unveiling of the Four Seasons’ new $18 million website – the pictures do the selling:

Increasing blur of “online” and “offline” worlds

This is increasingly happening with mobile technologies such as augmented reality. Yelp and other review sites launched mobile applications that display a live overview of reviews:

Google Googles identifies things you see on the go, and Amazon introduced its Flow app to help you discover products around you – and buy them – using image recognition.

But beyond these technologies, the basic truth is that real life happens offline. It seems the best marketing campaigns understood this – such as the Swiss village that became a worldwide hit after printing out profile photos of all their Facebook fans.

That’s why I expect to see more companies trying to bridge the gap when it comes to online-offline activity:

[NB: Trendwatching has an interesting report on the OFF-ON trend that you may want to explore in more detail]

Real-world events and “Advertainment” becomes critical for branding

Online and offline are more than just blending – offline experiences and promotions are increasingly critical for generating online buzz. Attention is the most valuable commodity today, and companies are increasingly trying to combine entertainment, media, and advertising to raise awareness.

Fast Company recently profiled this trend in its feature, Co.Create Nation: The worlds of Silicon Valley, Hollywood, and Madison Avenue have blurred, and a new realm of business has emerged.

“Once upon a time, entertainment and advertising were two separate lands. Each land was dynamic and cool, in its own way, but their denizens rarely commingled.… And then the winds of innovation blew through. Everything has changed.… The barriers between these businesses [are falling] away…”

Hewlett-Packard launched its Music Influencer program last year as a way to spread the word about HP products through traditional blogs and giveaways. Building on the success they acheived there, the company expanded to real-life parties to engage some of the web’s most influential people.

“We measured success by who we were able to get into the room, the amount of content generated (about 330 pieces) and the reach of that content.”

In hospitality and travel, this becomes even more natural. People like James Kinney have been doing this for a while in New York and beyond through music and events:

“Hotels have an extraordinary opportunity to become mavens of culture, which increases their brand impressions and their bottom line. In the case of the Forty Four Music Series that we have at the Royalton… we’ve had Grammy Award nominees, Grammy Award winners – literally the best in New York City – play right in the lobby of the Royalton and people absolutely have that WOW factor, like: ‘Wow, I never expected this to be here.’

“We’ve seen an increase in sales and in their social media and digital assets as well, because the artists are tweeting about the property.”

“Content is key, and there’s this big thing around social media where people say: ‘Oh, if I tweet that you get 25 percent off of your next drink,’ then I’m going to have a herd of people coming over to my hotel.

“As you and I know, that’s not the case. Whether you’re doing music or a movie screening or live dancers or whatever you’re doing, the content itself is how you communicate the property’s brand.

“We have so many artists that are on the verge and that are famous coming to the property; when they’re tweeting and they’re taking pictures — ‘Oh, we’re at Royalton NYC at Morgan’s Hotel’, we’ve automatically increased their content strategy and their social currency and, specifically, their digital assets; all these things are very real in the digital world that we live in. But saying that you have a special on pancakes just doesn’t work anymore.”

Location-based services grew up

…and they became an important part of how hospitality and travel companies encouraged loyalty, discovery, and service. Again, this is right in the center of all that’s hot in marketing today – social/mobile/local – and it helps hotels and travel companies bridge the online-offline gap.

With the sale of Gowalla to Facebook, Foursquare has become the king in the space and matured beyond checkins to present expanded opportunities for advertisers and a very solid business case. Radar makes it easy to find what’s cool around you. Companies can create curated experiences with lists.

For example, The Ritz-Carlton introduced World Concierge on Foursquare as a way to extend their brand to a mobile audience. The project was a simple concept: taking internal knowledge and making available it outside four walls of hotels.

The team collected the knowledge and the tips from concierges at each property, and collected it all into central account.

The company got the whole team to contribute through close collaboration between the agency, brand, and staff at each property. There are 76 Ritz-Carlton locations around the world – representing a huge infrastructure of knowledge – so it was just a matter of collecting this and putting it online.

Travelers have two ways to access this information. The first is to follow The Ritz-Carlton on Foursquare, where you can see every new tip that is published. The other way is through traditional check ins.

The program was designed to not be exclusively about The Ritz-Carlton, and you don’t have to be a guest to engage with the brand. For example, if you are at the Red Square in Moscow, you might see tip or something special about the neighborhood. Promotional messages are not the priority.

Using location-based services and other similar technologies are a powerful way to create a curated brand experience. Which is crucial, because…

Branding became paramount

As time-starved consumers, we crave direction – and brands often provide this by making buying choices easier. Today, we’re seeing social media increasingly used to define and shape the way successful brands are built.

Product design – and in the case of hospitality, experience design – is an integral ingredient in branding. We’re seeing hotel and travel companies increasingly use customer feedback to share this design process – and then increase the amount of buzz around these great designs.

CitizenM is a powerful example of this in the hotel industry. They aim to provide a new type of hotel experience for a new type of traveler: guests that may not want to stay in their rooms for the entire duration of their stay.

“Our guests just want a good bed, a good shower, and then they spend most of their time out in the city or in our hotels’ social spaces,” says chief operating officer Michael Levie. An innovative building system (hotels are constructed from pre-fabricated modules) in offsite unit factories allows the company to consistently maintain high quality standards while accelerating the building process.

The story of how their hotels are built is remarkable, and the impact of design on their brand, reputation, and overall success is undeniable. Among other awards, citizenM was voted The Trendiest Hotel in the World by TripAdvisor two years in a row – in 2010 and 2011.

Systems for constant improvement

The link between design, branding, and the social web takes place when online feedback is used to guide the design process.

Many of the strongest brands were created through more than just big-picture brainstorming – it is also the result of daily, consistent operational improvement. Constantly refining and tweaking the way service is delivered leads to remarkable experiences – which, as I mentioned – is how the best brands are built today.

Until recently, hotel managers have relied upon some combination of internal guest satisfaction surveys, mystery shopping and intuition to understand sentiment and improve service.

It took a herculean effort to collect these, and since each of these feedback channels is somewhat self-selecting, there are significant structural flaws that can prevent gathering an accurate understanding of satisfaction.

The social web changed that. Today, online travel agencies, review sites and social media platforms have provided the potential holy grail of customer insight.

Since customers now share unsolicited feedback everywhere and anywhere they are, the challenge is now how to collect all of the relevant conversations, separate the signal from the noise, and create insight for action to improve guest satisfaction levels.

Insight for action is key. Your brand is defined with every single interaction each of your employees have. This makes intentional experience design and excellence in service delivery critical parts of this brand building process.

Create that set of tools and operational processes so you can continually incorporate customer suggestions into your product improvement process, and along the way, build a brand that sets you apart from the competition.

The importance of branding is clear once we see how it affects everything social media: the type and format of content you publish, the tone of that content, and the platforms you will distribute it on. In fact, branding activities touch multiple departments:

• Strategy: How will you define the message in a way that instantly communicates what your brand stands for?
• Marketing: How will you distribute this message?
• Operations: How will you deliver on that promise?
• Service and Reputation Management: How will you defend and stay true to that message?

Because the social web plays a key role in each of these activities, it has become the biggest brand-building opportunity the travel industry has had in decades.

Summing up

In this series of articles, we’ve examined some of the most interesting and engaging opportunities that exist on the social web.

What are you doing to take advantage of this opportunity?

John M Richardson Jr:

“When it comes to the future, there are three kinds of people: those who let it happen, those who make it happen, and those who wonder what happened.”

You don’t have to foresee the future. You have to create it. Go make something happen.

NB: Email me if I can help you or tweet @HmarketingHelp.

NB2: Image via Shutterstock.

In this article, we’ll be looking specifically at what happened with reviews and customer-created content.

The rise of the review economy

Over the past year, we saw insights from customer reviews increasingly used for more than just reputation management and PR. It was used in all departments of hospitality and travel companies: sales, marketing, operations, quality, revenue, and distribution.

This has led to the emergence of what I call “The Review Economy”, an environment where customer feedback plays a central role in all areas of a business.

This effect is partly due to the rapid diversification of customer-created review formats, and also the creation of better analytics that can separate the signal from the noise and reveal insight for action.

In terms of review validity, we’re seeing a shift away from anonymous review sites and toward company-gathered feedback: reviews verified with bookings.

This December, Expedia announced its new Verified Reviews program, which only includes feedback from guests that stayed at a property (review requests are sent in the booking followup email).

“We like to call it the new source of truth, internally,” said John Kim, Expedia’s senior vice president of global products, in a USAToday interview. “People love the idea that our reviews are verified so you can’t randomly leave a review.”

Hotel companies are joining this trend as well. In October, Starwood introduced its own rating and reviews program.

Members of the Starwood Preferred Guest program can review the hotels they have stayed at over the past 18 months – if they provide their loyalty program credentials or the reservation confirmation number for their stay.

Un-edited reviews will be posted to the hotel’s website after at least five reviews have been collected. Starwood executives are doing this to encourage guests to engage with the company more and book more repeat stays.

Many of the hotel marketing professionals I’ve spoken with say it’s highly likely other hospitality companies will follow suit and begin collect their own guest reviews. This, and the fact that more reviews are validated by bookings, provides increased assurance to executives that this feedback can be trusted for making management decisions.

But quality data without the right tools to extract meaning from it is useless. Review collection and analysis technology has become much more sophisticated over the past year, and now we’re seeing examples of hotels doing very interesting things with this.

For example, Cristina Mulet and her team at Sol Melia Hotels do a great job of taking insights from their customers on the social web and using them for product improvement, quality management, and revenue optimization.

Diego Sartori and his team at CitizenM Hotels do something similar, taking online review feedback into consideration for each new property they open. And on the individual property level, Ricardo Samaan at Olivia Plaza used this approach to improve the quality of their breakfast.

In order to use customer feedback to consistently improve product quality and business performance, semantic analysis of online reviews is very helpful to identify major issues that need to be resolved.

Specific, department-level reporting for each manager is critical, as is a workflow system to manage the whole product improvement process. It requires a culture of using guest feedback to guide improvement. Co-creating with customers helps hotel and travel brands build loyalty and create a product that better fits market needs.

Semantic technologies made sentiment analysis a lot smarter

Valyn Perini wrote about the opportunities semantic technology will provide consumers in her Tnooz article this week, but there is also a powerful opportunity for using semantic analysis to understand sentiment from online customer feedback (as Martin Soler and I wrote about back in September 2011).

It’s providing travel executives with valuable insight in how to improve both their business operations and marketing communications, by instantly revealing exactly what guests like and don’t like about the business.

Here’s an example semantic analysis report from a popular New York City hotel:

As you can see, quality, location, views, and the bar are all parts of this hotels’ experience that guests talk about positively. These elements should be present in all marketing communications and mentioned over and over again in the advertising copy.

Meanwhile, we can see that price is something that comes up as negative. This typically happens when the hotel is giving the impression of having great value, but guests do not perceive it that way.

This hotel could increase the effectiveness of their communications by focusing on promoting these elements guests appreciate most, and guide the customer perception of the hotel before the booking.

Promoting these attributes of the hotel through advertising will likely lead to an even better online reputation, since it will help attract guests that appreciate what the business does best.

Short-form and mobile-based reviews dramatically increased in popularity

While written reviews began as the standard in travel planning websites, the rapid rise of social networking and mobile communications has lead to short-format and mobile reviews becoming increasingly important.

I’m increasingly finding myself hesitant to write a long text review of a hotel or restaurant – I simply don’t have time.

But it is very easy to send out a tweet or check-in on Foursquare to leave a tip for my network there while I’m waiting for something. I suspect I’m not alone.

The quickly growing popularity of mobile-based social networking combined with time-starved travelers makes it likely to be even more important in the year ahead.

For companies using the social web for service or reputation management, it’s critical to focus on these types of feedback. And given the real-time nature of the web, response time is critical.

But when looking at all of the tweets and social networking content in aggregate, hotel executives are also extracting valuable operational and marketing insight.

While it’s clear these individual pieces of feedback play an important role in customer service and reputation management, all this data together provides a rich source of business, market, and customer intelligence.

Reviews and social played a bigger role in search visibility

Generating business from the web is often very dependent on how easy your business is to find. Do you appear on the radar of travelers planning a trip to your destination?

For many consumers, search engines are the first stop on this travel planning process. Google research found that on average, every travel purchase is preceded by 2.5 hours of research time and dozens of unique queries.

This has been true for a while. What’s new is that now social activities affect search rankings and search content.

Building visibility and authority in social networks provides a benefit beyond that site…and into search results pages.

While many in the search marketing industry have guessed this for some time, last year we clearly saw social media affecting search engine results pages.

Bing integrated Facebook data as a way to personalize search results based on someone’s social network – such as links or content that friends have Liked. When a person’s friends have not shared any content related to a search, Bing will prioritize content that is popular with the Facebook community at large.

And while Google has been experimenting with social search for quite some time, this week it introduced a whole new approach to including social content – initially from Google Plus – in results pages.

Danny Sullivan of SearchEngineLand called this the “most radical transformation ever” of the Google algorithm in his detailed overview of the changes. On TechCrunch, Jason Kincaid explained why he thinks there are bigger changes afoot:

“This may not sound like a huge deal, but it’s foreshadowing a bigger change to come: Google is going to increasingly become a search engine for all of your stuff….

“The key, [product director Jack Menzel] says, is that Google is getting a lot better at figuring out when to incorporate this socially relevant data. They’re focusing on showing content not simply because your friend shared it — but because it might actually be helpful.”

So both search positioning formulas and the very content showing up in those search results pages is changing based on activity in the social web.

Why exactly is search engine visibility important?

As mentioned above, web search plays a central role in the travel planning and purchase process. Each of these searches is an opportunity to introduce your brand….if people see your website. A few statistics from Hubspot to remember about the importance of ranking well in search results pages:

• The top 3 results get 79% of the total clicks
• Only 3% of searchers go beyond the first page of results pages

Clearly, your placement in search results plays a disproportionate role in website traffic they will receive. If your websites are not near the top of page one of a search results page, the website is practically invisible to potential guests.

The key takeaway here is to invest in building your social media presence and cultivating as many online customer reviews as you can to increase your ranking and drive more website traffic.

Encourage customers to review you on Google Places and any other review websites they participate in. Also, make it easy for people to share content about your hotels on the social web.

From Google Plus to Pinterest, people are looking for material to post – so make this easy for them.

In the next and final part of this series, we’ll look at international marketing, location-based services, branding, and other big-picture ideas.

NB: Image via Shutterstock.

So Tnooz has already done a fantastic job of covering important technology trends in its Predictions 2012 article and this episode of TnoozLIVE.

In this series of articles, I wanted to take a slightly different approach, and instead look back at the technologies I saw making the biggest impact in the hotel industry over the past year – and use this as inspiration for you as we look forward to another year of innovation.

Understanding if a technology is relevant for your audience and effective in your situation is often more valuable than trying to determine whether it’s the next big global trend or not.

Let’s take a look at some of interesting things I saw in travel technology last year, and think if you can put them to work in your situation.

Social networking became more private, with selective content sharing (and consumption) options

It should have always been like this. That holiday photo you want to share with people who attended the party may not be for the world to see.

With different preferences for sharing different aspects of your life with family, friends, coworkers, and clients – social networking needs different levels of privacy.

As Dave Taylor wrote in the Huffington Post:

“As people, we differentiate between our friends, whether we’re youngsters lauding our BFF or whether we’re married, have kids, social, cultural and political groups.

“You know what I’m talking about, it’s the ‘strength’ or ‘depth’ of an interpersonal relationship. It’s complicated, particularly when you realize that it’s not symmetric, either, in that you can view someone as your bestest friend, even while they think of you as a close friend, but not their best pal.”

Tools for sharing pieces of your life with select groups in your social network became increasingly advanced and important last year. In 2011, it looked like social networks finally began realizing your privacy preferences go far beyond private and public.

First, it was Google Plus introducing Circles as a way to share content selectively. Facebook quickly responded with advanced sharing options, and perhaps more importantly for travel companies, the ability to ignore people and brands that are not relevant for you.

This evolution in social networking means people now have more control over the content they see and the messages they receive, making it increasingly important for travel brands to stay interesting and relevant. (Even better, get influential, interesting people to be talking about you online.)

Boring content will become increasingly hidden. If you’re not remarkable, you might as well not even participate.

How do you stay interesting?

Learn from the people behind some of the most interesting, engaging content online today. Marc Schiller, CEO of Bond Strategy and someone who has designed campaigns for everyone from Christina Aguilera to The Economist, said this in an interview with Business Insider:

“As a marketer I focus in on behaviors, not technologies. We really need to look at and adapt to the behaviors of what people do online—how they express themselves, how they create, how they curate. Then, you have to provide value to that. That is the key to success.”

The same is true in the hospitality and travel industries. The curators publishing the most engaging content have their finger on the pulse of what’s new and cool.

Sabine de Witte is a great example of this, connecting with a new generation of travelers that cutting-edge hotel brand CitizenM is reaching out to.

Today’s traveling digerati want more than just information about your company. They want to know about what’s new and cool – and specifically, the people creating this.

“Our readers loved our ‘day in the life’ profile story of a very famous 23-year-old fashion blogger in the Netherlands. People want to hear about more than the superficial: they want to know about other people’s lives.”

According to de Witte, marketers today must live the lifestyle of the people they want to communicate with:

“If you’re living the lifestyle, you’ll know what type of content will connect with your audience, because it connects with you.”

The Roger Smith Hotel is doing something similar in New York with its e-magazine, The Jolly Roger. Suggestions of what to do in New York are provided by not just their marketing team, but by the director of sales, interns, and the general manager.

The result is a glimpse into the real New York by real New Yorkers – and provides a great example of something you could do in your organization.

That leads into the next big thing I’ve seen…

Entire companies became involved in social marketing

This happens when staff expertise is featured to create more interesting social media content.

As mentioned above, the Roger Smith team does a great job at this because they intentionally recruit the right people and them include them in the publishing process.

There are a wide variety of ways to involve your staff in social marketing. It could be as simple as introducing team members – like how the Mandarin Oriental Hotel Group highlighted individual staff on its Hong Kong property’s Facebook page:

Or it could be more active, where different staff members participate in producing content. Your concierge team, for example, has a wealth of local knowledge and insider tips that can make compelling digital material – whether this is shared in a blog, on YouTube, through Twitter or on Foursquare.

Mobile photo sharing went mainstream

Design-led companies are beginning to embrace the rapid adoption of mobile-based photo sharing websites such as Instagram – which tap into the hot trifecta of marketing magic today: social/mobile/local.

Hotel groups such as CitizenM and Morgans are sharing not only what’s new and cool in their properties – but artistic shots from around their neighborhoods.

For consumers, these photos often act as a new form of review. People are using these sites to inspire and express their own creativity, so the content is nearly universally positive.

Niche social networks became valuable branding tools

Continuing from the trend above, niche social networks such as Pinterest are proving to be a valuable way to build brands and connect with niche audiences.

By curating cool content, it’s possible to communicate the lifestyle messages that are so important for many brands in the hospitality business. Plus, it’s a powerful way to feel the pulse of what’s trending – and influence some of those trends.

“Think of [our site] as a virtual pinboard,” says the Pinterest team.

Heather Allard explains the opportunity well:

“If you had the opportunity to make your business part of someone’s vision board, would you do it? Pinterest is that vision board. Consider it a visual buffet—a look book—of all the things we crave in life.”

Early adopters such as Gansevoort Hotels have already begun experimenting with image sharing on Pinterest:

Guestsourcing became even more important

The rise of niche social media networks and the dramatic increase in content production and sharing – much of it based on images and videos – leads to another opportunity.

I coined the word guestsourcing in 2009 to describe the trend of hotels using guest-created content in their marketing.

But 2011 was the first year I really saw hotels begin doing this well – often re-purposing content from photo sharing sites for use on other social networks.

InterContinental shared tweeted photos of their hotels on the brand’s Facebook page:

Hotel Indigo does a great job of guestsourcing – using photos that guests have tweeted or uploaded as a Pinterest board:

This concept is very simple, but more people need to be doing it. Just monitor the social web, grab interesting content, and re-post to Facebook, Tumblr, Pinterest – or any other site – with credit to the original author.

Individual profiles became more visible (and important) on social networks

In the world where anyone can be a publisher, services that provide some insight into the credibility of that publisher became important.

Leading the way is Klout, which is seeking to become the standard for measuring online influence.

The use of metrics like this became clear to everyone from hotel groups providing service, to public relations agencies identifying people most qualified to spread the word, to marketers looking to build relationships.

Closely related to this trend is the fact that people want more background details on content publishers that will allow them to gather relevant information.

Over the past few years we’ve seen a big shift from the “wisdom of the crowds” to “wisdom of my friends” to “wisdom of my friends with taste”.

This is especially important on consumer-written anonymous review sites: both in understanding our own similarity to the person writing the review to understanding the reviewer’s credibility and history over time. People want experts.

The importance of trust and authenticity is rising quickly. As review sites look for ways to add credibility to their community and content, expect the importance of individual reviewers’ profiles to increase.

In the next article, we’ll examine some more trends in reviews and consumer-created online content – and explore how that affects business.

Larry Smith of Thematix has previously written several excellent posts in Tnooz about semantic technologies in the travel industry.

In particular, their potential to create truly personalized offers by adding distinct value to travel offers based on customer data.

At OpenTravel, we’re turning the abstract into the concrete by building a semantic ontology for the car rental industry, including thinking through what it takes to actually plan for a semantically enhanced booking experience, what we call semantic offers.

So I thought we’d share some of the lessons we’ve learned by using a basic online transaction as an example.

I should note that this example is based on the supplier company not knowing who the customer is, so it is not able to present a “personalized” offer, that is, an offer to a known individual.

This example is based on non-personal but still actionable data passed from one trading or traffic-referral partner to another. For all the talk out there, personalized offers in the travel industry are a future phenomenon.

It’s much more common currently for partners to exchange information about a transaction, not about a person.

Semantic offer technology: a not-too-distant scenario

Although there are lots of ways to implement this technology, let’s look at a semantically enhanced web booking experience that shows how semantic offers might be integrated into availability processing on a travel supplier’s branded website.

In this example, an airline supplier has partnered with three car rental suppliers, but only one of them, ABC Car Rental, has implemented semantically enhanced services in their booking path.

Ted Smith needs to take a one-day business trip to California but has decided to extend the trip by a week and bring along his wife and children for a family vacation.

Ted starts his trip planning by going to the XYZ Airlines website and entering his dates and airports. Ted reviews flight availability options, makes a booking and selects four seats in proximity of each other.

Included with his online booking confirmation is the option to “add a rental car” to his trip.

Ted needs a rental car so after selecting the option, XYZ Airlines sends an availability request to three of their car rental supplier trading partners to request offers, which the airline will present in a single car rental offer page.

In addition to core information about Ted’s flight, the availability request contains other information that a semantically enhanced system can use during car rental offer processing.

The two car suppliers without semantic systems use the core information to determine availability of their inventory, and their availability results include three classes of vehicle with varying prices.

When ABC Car Rental receives the availability request, their semantic search engine takes charge and looks at all the data in Ted’s reservation request, including the number of tickets booked, the class of the tickets, loyalty program participation and the fact that there are two adults and two children.

An assumption is made that this is a family trip and accordingly their three car offers include an “Ultimate Family Vacation Vehicle”.

Ted looks at the nine rental car offers returned by the three rental car companies and immediately selects and books the “Ultimate Family Vacation Vehicle”, which is a minivan with a family entertainment package – even though this offer has the highest rate.

So how did ABC Car Rental, which basically has the same fleet inventory as the other two car suppliers, create the offer that most appealed to Ted?

Planning for semantic search technology: adapting your inventory to appeal to your customers

A diverse and complex collection of factors influence consumer trip planning and purchasing behavior, and while semantic technology can’t provide a crystal ball for each one of your customers, it can help you sell more product by categorizing and describing your inventory and services in a way that is aligned with your customer travel segments and scenarios.

The process of adapting your inventory to appeal to your customers does not mean that you’ll be making any physical changes to it; instead you’ll have to re-think the features and services associated with the inventory and how they pertain to what you know about your customer and their trip.

Keep in mind that a successful semantic technology implementation needs data – the more the better. For travel suppliers, this can be challenging for two reasons:

1. Your data is not neatly packaged in one central repository; bits and pieces of your data are spread throughout disparate data sources and systems
2. The majority of information you are storing and maintaining is in an unstructured (or unknown) form to a semantic engine.

To address the first challenge, travel suppliers may want to consider third-party companies that create centralized data warehouses.

The second challenge can be resolved by implementing an ontology, which is a structured way of specifying a variety of data elements (such as rental cars or hotel rooms), and identifying the abstract associations and relationships between them.

Step 1: Understand what you sell and how you sell it

This first step is a great example of why marketing and IT teams should collaborate from the onset of the project. You will need to know both the details about your inventory and the complexities of how the inventory is sold through different sales channels.

Considerations include:

• Corporate Purchasing Restrictions: You may be contractually obligated to offer specific types of inventory and services to your corporate clients due to negotiated rate agreements.
• Locality-Based Purchasing Restrictions: You may have limitations on what inventory and services can be sold locally versus internationally.
• Loyalty Program Promotions: You may have a loyalty program that your customers participate in that guarantees upgrades and/or preferred pricing based on program levels.
• Marketing Initiatives: You may have ongoing (time-sensitive) marketing initiatives that offer a specific type of inventory and services at a promotional rate.
• Trading Partner Agreements: Similar to corporate purchasing restrictions, you may be contractually bound to offer specific types of inventory and services to various trading partners.

So why is this exercise necessary? Your semantic engine will need to know about these types of restrictions so the appropriate rules can be applied before, during or after semantic offer processing.

ABC Car Rental IT and marketing teams collaborated to make an “inventory to sales channel model” that described specific data fields that could constrain offer processing by either including or excluding inventory, and in some cases, such as time-sensitive marketing initiatives (perhaps identified by a promotion code), bypassing semantic search processing entirely.

As part of this exercise, they determined a rules engine component capable of invoking semantic processing constraints was required and its basic functional elements should include:

• A GUI-interface to allow the marketing team to enter time-sensitive promotional information
• An automated feed from the sales and marketing system to manage rules associated with corporate accounts and trading partner agreements
• A real-time interface to their loyalty program system to determine benefits associated with various program levels

How did this step affect Ted?

He did not enter any information that would have triggered the rules engine component, such as a promotion ID, corporate ID or car rental loyalty program number, so he was eligible for a semantic offer.

Step 2: Determine what you know about your customers

This step is a two-part process that includes:

• Understanding what data you already have about your existing customers and where that data resides
• Understanding what data you can derive about unidentified customers and how you obtain that data.

Let’s assume your company already has some type of data about your existing customers – stored booking and itinerary data, customer profile data and/or loyalty program data, etc.

From a semantic technology perspective, this is known as explicit data because it is based on information that a customer has either given you or on their past purchase behavior.

Your semantic engine will want to know about explicit data for two reasons. The first is that past behavior and purchases can be a great indicator of future behavior and purchases.

The second is customer profiles that include travel preferences are a goldmine of information that can be used when processing a semantic offer.

For example, a customer’s past purchases may indicate they typically fly economy class, but their preferences may show they prefer business class and have opted-in to marketing offers from an airline supplier.

• From a semantic offer perspective, a quick check can reveal that when the customer has flown economy class there has been an associated corporate ID in the reservation, indicating their company has a negotiated rate and restrictive travel policy.
• From a semantic processing perspective in this example, if the customer has not included a corporate ID in an availability request, no constraints need to be applied to the processing and they would be eligible for a semantic offer.

For the second part of this process, the task at hand involves identifying all the methods your company uses to receive inventory availability requests and what data is contained in the request so you can determine what data may be significant for semantic engine processing.

If you’re using XML or another structured data format, you have a head start as each of your sales channels will be sending data in the same format. From a semantic technology perspective, this is known as implicit data because it is based on dynamic information (versus stored or factual) that an unidentified customer has provided.

Why is this exercise necessary? Your semantic engine will need to know how to weight or influence the information that it receives to create a semantic offer.

Explicit data typically has a higher weight on the semantic offer processing, but in cases where explicit data is not available, the semantic engine needs to rely solely on implicit data, and it is important to the engine to know if some portion of the implicit data is more significant than others.

For this step, the ABC Car Rental IT team:

Identified all sources of stored (explicit) customer data, including:

• Determining whether or not they had a pre-existing interface to the data or would need to create one
• Creating a consolidated map of all of the available data fields with assigned data field weights between 1 and 3, with 1 being the most significant because these contained the most relevant information that would influence semantic offer processing

They then identified all of their internal and external web services that dynamically request car rental availability, including:

• Creating a data map of each service’s XML data fields and assigning data field weights between 1 and 3.

As a part of this exercise, the ABC Car Rental IT team needed to create an ontology to help them formally represent each of the explicit and implicit data fields, weights and relationships between them if appropriate.

How did this step affect Ted?

He did not enter any information that would have triggered the semantic engine to look for and process explicit data, such as a car rental loyalty program number, so the offers were processed within the ontology using data fields in the availability request passed on from the partner airline.

Step 3: Rethink (and classify) your inventory and services

Now that you know what you sell, how you sell it, and what kinds of customer information you have access to, it’s time for some serious thinking about your inventory and services. This step involves creating “synthetic classes” for your inventory and services.

Although it sounds complicated, it’s basically an exercise to identify what may motivate your customers (or prospective customers) to buy a product, and then map and/or assign new categories (or classes) to your inventory.

Why is this exercise necessary? Your semantic engine wants to think out of the box and present offers based on an abstract collection of information.

For this step, the ABC Car Rental IT team:

• Created new synthetic classes for their inventory that would appeal to their customers personalities and trip goals, including “Power Car”, “Green (or eco-conscious) Car” and “Family Vehicle”
• Identified known inventory and service characteristics (data fields) that would pertain to their new synthetic car classes (such as transmission type, fuel type, mileage per gallon, horsepower, seatbelt quantity, luggage capacity and entertainment packages)
• Mapped these data fields to their existing inventory through their ontology

Step 4: Make the necessary changes to the descriptive information presented to your customers

The last major step is to review how you would describe your inventory and make adjustments to descriptive information to be consistent with your new synthetic classes.

For example, if you have created a synthetic class called “Family Vehicle”, you may want to adjust how you describe this vehicle by including an offer title such as “The Ultimate Family Vacation Vehicle” and include some description of the features that put it into a family vehicle class, such as seating capacity, car seats and other similar amenities, entertainment packages, etc.

Why is this exercise necessary? You created a great semantic engine, but your customer’s perception of and response to your semantic offers will ultimately determine the success of this initiative.

For this step, the ABC Car Rental marketing team created new offer titles and descriptions based on their new synthetic vehicle classes so the customer would see this alternate descriptive information if the semantic engine determined that one of these offers was appropriate to an availability request.

As a part of this exercise, the ABC Car Rental IT team needed to:

• Create a GUI-interface that allowed the marketing team to enter the alternate synthetic class descriptions for their inventory and services
• Update their application presentation (and availability results) logic to include the targeted semantic offers and ensure that they appeared in priority order in availability results

How did this step affect Ted?

He was offered three vehicles from ABC Car Rental, with the first vehicle titled “The Ultimate Family Vacation Vehicle”. The other synthetic classes defined by ABC Car Rental did not meet Ted’s criteria, so two standard vehicles were also included in the results.

Summing up

We’ve used a fairly basic scenario to illustrate these steps but the structure can be applied to almost any type of description and inventory in the travel industry.

• The benefits to the consumer are clear – his shopping experience is much better.
• The benefits to the travel company are clear – generating higher conversion AND incremental revenue – and customer loyalty.

NB: Additional analysis by Bonnie Lowell, specification manager at the OpenTravel Alliance.

NB2: Image via Shutterstock.

Though loyalty programs in various forms have been in existence for a long time, credit for popularizing and institutionalizing them goes to the airline industry.

American Airlines initiated the advent of well-designed and structured frequent flyer programs (FFP) in the early eighties.

The success of AAdvantage spawned many other programs that number close to 150 today. Originally meant to increase stickiness to the airline, the accrued miles earned were meant to be redeemed for free flights.

In a hyper-evolutionary mode, the FFP rapidly transformed into coalition loyalty models that enabled the participation of other allied businesses.

The partner-rich program model created a large accrual and redemption ecosystem for the loyalty member, presented enhanced revenue opportunities for the airlines and increased business for partners.

This has resulted in the creation and sustenance of one of the most viable loyalty models. Some of the prominent FFP partners include credit card companies, rent-a-car companies, hotels and a host of retailers.

Today, this potent combination has ensured that all accruals happen only from flight-related activities.

An authoritative study (Web Flyer Group) has indicated main sources of accrual transactions-43% flight, 25% from credit card transactions and hotel stays.

Assuming these figures to be close to reality, then the rest of the 32% should come from retail, restaurants and numerous other partners. Substantial amounts of points are accrued through non-flight activities.

High accrual velocity of miles vouches for the popularity of frequent flyer programs. It has been estimated that in the last 25 years, more than 19 trillion miles have been awarded to FFP members.

However, despite its popularity, these programs have also been characterised by low redemptions and high breakage ratios. While breakage is booked as revenue and helps in reducing liability, in excess it becomes self-defeating.

Some of the airlines we worked with have indicated that they are striving towards 75-80% redemption (which is not an easy task) and would like to limit breakage to 20-25% which was considered as legitimate revenue.

It has been an accepted fact that earning ‘margins’ on redemptions is a sustainable model than seeking breakage.

The primary factors contributing to increased breakage are low exchange value of miles accrued, fewer number of redemption seats and lack of alternative and attractive redemption choices.

It is estimated that there are trillions of unredeemed miles in the member accounts (it is estimated to be between 14-15 trillion). Redemption velocity may be a critical parameter to assess the efficacy of a frequent flyer program.

The airport opportunity

For FFPs, airports are logical loyalty partners that help in accelerating redemptions.

This is primarily because, despite having distinct business models, airlines and airports are intrinsically linked together and are also reliant on each other for operational efficiencies.

Responding to changing times, airports are also being unshackled from governmental control and its management is becoming more privatized. Increasing competition among airports has also triggered the need to treat airline passengers as customers especially frequent flyers who spend considerable time at airports.

The airports today focus on offering a positive, integrated passenger experience. Extensive revamping and expansion of airports with focus on not just function but form is a sign of changing times.

The increasing popularity of low cost carriers (LCC) and increasing number of small airports catering to short-haul flights have offered tough competition to larger airports. Contemporary passengers have the choice of not only choosing airlines but airports too.

Revenue pressures have also pushed airports to seek ‘non-aeronautical’ revenues. They have metamorphosized into an open format to survive in a marketized rather than subsidised environment. Contemporary airports are no longer utilitarian hubs geared only towards handling passengers and baggage.

By launching or sponsoring airport-specific loyalty programmes like Thanks Again (JFK, EWR & LGA airports), Privium (Schipol airport), Via-Milano (Milan airport), World Miles Program (British Airports Authority) etc, airports have indicated that they are becoming more customer-centric.

These loyalty programs are predominantly driven by technology and help airports to identify passengers, understand their needs and customize travel experiences. They also provide the scope of earning substantial non-aeronautical revenues by presenting enhanced retail opportunities to travellers.

Like new airports that have incorporated substantial retail space in their architecture, existing airports not initially designed with retail business in mind are also adding more non-aviation areas.

Breaking new ground

Examples are Frankfurt airport with 30,000 sq m (570 squre meters per million passengers), Heathrow Airport with 68,750 sq/m (1,050 sq/m per million passengers) and Vienna International Airport with 11,500 sq/m (580 sq m per million passengers).

The inherent need for airports to increase non-aeronautical revenues mainly through retail sales combined with the compelling need of airlines to provide credible redemption choices makes a loyalty partnership between the two entities a ‘natural’ one.

The psychological convergence of airports and airlines makes passengers more amenable to making loyalty transactions within its precincts. Redemptions can be facilitated via vouchers or by enabling instant earn and burn through multiple channels including mobile phones.

Passengers would only be happy to redeem their miles for preferential parking, spa services, or indulging in a bit of retail therapy as they can subsidize spend through miles which they might otherwise not have used.

Brand value of airlines would also go up as the redemption choices need not be dominated by the already scarce redemption seats. It’s a win-win situation for passengers, airlines and of course, airports.

NB: This is a guest article by Sanjai Velayudhan, senior consultant for loyalty programmes at ITC Infotech.

NB2: Image via Shutterstock.

It surprises me that many hoteliers do nothing with review sites. Even if all the reviews are positive, there should still be some level of management response.

There are many other issues around how hoteliers engage with review platforms and with guests who may leave a review of a hotel, whether it is positive or negative.

So here are 17 mistakes I have found hotels often make with regards to review sites:

1. Not showing that you care

If a review has potential to be damaging to your reputation, somebody on your management team should respond to it.

A response should be written thoughtfully, carefully and intelligently… so that everyone who goes on to read it will get the impression you run a thoughtful, careful, intelligent business.

People want to see that you care. They want to know that if they have a problem, somebody at the hotel will seriously attend to the matter.

Another important thing, research from TripAdvisor shows that 71% of travelers believe management responses matter.

2. Hiding

People don’t like this. If you are going to write a response, put your name to it, and your title. When you don’t put a name on your management response, what you have written isn’t as authentic and human as it could be.

Your management response simply won’t mean as much. It shows that you are not 100% committed to your customers, whether that is the reality of the situation or not.

In summary, you weaken their trust and increase their skepticism when you hide behind a company facade.

3. Inadequate proofreading

It only takes one careless error to convey in some readers’ minds that the management at your hotel is not well-educated. Something as simple as using “their” instead of “there” can set that impression.

4. Using overly complicated words

Don’t take it too far with trying to impress the readers with your vocabulary. It isn’t helpful. Use conversational English.

5. Attacking the review writer

This is risky. Taking on a defensive tone, belittling the writer, accusing them of being dishonest, blaming them for the problem…

Though it may be tough to do, it’s better to take the high road with not even a hint of these elements being in your writing.

If somebody says there was a bug in their room, and you say it’s their fault for leaving the door open, it’s not going to go over well with a lot of travelers who go on to read that response.

Keep the tone of your response cordial. If the tone is too aggressive or comes across as immature, you could scare away potential guests.

6. Failure to deal with a seriously negative accusation in a review

If somebody says you have bed bugs, and you don’t respond, this probably will be severely damaging.

If you are certain it is a malicious, fraudulent post, then use your capability with the review site’s management tools to report it and to request its removal.

If the review has any chance of being accurate, then be completely transparent about how you are addressing the situation.

7. Failure to respond to positive reviews

You shouldn’t respond to every positive review. But do respond from time to time to show readers that you care about what people think, that you appreciate their comments, and take a moment to plug a few benefits connected with staying at your hotel.

8. Responding with a boiler plate response

If you write the same basic response over and over again, you will come across as kind of stupid, shallow and insincere.

You need to mix it up. Make each response unique. Show that you understood what they said.

9. Permitting a low number of reviews

In the minds of travelers, a small number of reviews compared to other nearby hotels could mean “beware” in their minds, unless your property is brand new. And if you have old reviews on the first page, those are stale.

Their value is questionable, because they don’t represent the current conditions at your hotel.

10. Asking guests to write reviews through the hotel’s wireless network

If you are asking people to join TripAdvisor for the first time, and they go on to write a very positive review from your IP address, this could cause you problems.

TripAdvisor might begin to think your reviews are being concocted by staff members, and this could lead to punishment by TripAdvisor, such as “red flagging” and a downgrade of your ranking.

Other review sites could react similarly.

11. Not taking full advantage of the visual content you can upload to a review site

Upload all of the photos and video you can. VERY FEW hotels are uploading any video content. A good video presentation could be very helpful.

Try to take advantage of Google’s special interior photography for businesses, where the 360 degree “street view” camera comes into your hotel. Check out this example of a bar.

Currently, Google is providing this service for free. If you can get in on this deal, it’s one extra free marketing tool that your local competitors might not have.

12. Failing to ask for positive reviews

Anytime you let an extremely satisfied guest walk out of the hotel without asking for a review on a specific review site, you are letting opportunity slip right through your fingers.

Extremely satisfied guests, especially those who are first-time visitors, are the most likely to follow-through and write a positive review for you.

13. Ignoring the potential of other review sites, besides TripAdvisor

Yes, TripAdvisor is dominant when it comes to hotel reviews, but you should be making efforts to raise your visibility on Yelp and Google Places too.

Devices with advanced voice recognition technology, like the Apple iPhone’s Siri, will become more advanced and widespread — soon.

People will be curious which hotel Siri, or Google’s upcoming system, will recommend, and they will say to their next generation iPad, Apple television or smartphone: “I’m going to be in Boston next week. And I want a hotel room for less than 200 bucks a night. Which one should I stay at?”

These new voice assistants will comb through Yelp and Google Places and make recommendations based largely upon reputation.

It’s going to be revolutionary. If you want your hotel to be highly likely to be recommended by these devices, you need to take steps now to position yourself for it by getting a dominant quantity of positive reviews on Yelp and Google Places.

Even if the voice recognition revolution is slow to come, there are still a lot of Yelpers out there and plenty of people hit Google up for travel info. It would be a good idea to establish a strong reputation on these sites.

Besides Google Places and Yelp, look for other review sites that might benefit you, like HolidayCheck, a popular site with Europeans.

14. Provoking a sudden flow of 5 star reviews on Yelp by people who are brand new to Yelp

Yes, it’s a good idea to encourage a strong reputation on Yelp, but you need to be careful about who you are asking to post a review there.

If suddenly you begin getting 5 star reviews from people who have just signed up for Yelp, you are in danger of having all of those new reviews taken away from you.

It is better to ask for reviews on Yelp from established Yelpers. (Yelp is tricky.)

15. Blocking access to managers and failure to head off negative reviews at the pass

A lot of hotels seem to have drawbridges around their managers, where the pathway to them is blocked.

It’s better to encourage guests to complain to someone in authority so that problems can be addressed.

If you don’t make it easy for dissatisfied guests to complain, they will make you pay for it with passionate, in-depth negative reviews and negative buzz, and they will gladly spread it around in attempts to reap some satisfaction out of the situation.

The average Facebook user has 130 friends. Do you really want the occasional dissatisfied guest telling 130 people, or more, how much you sucked?

Make yourself available to intercept those problems before they become damaging problems.

16. Asking for positive reviews on more than one review site

By adding complexity to your request for a positive review, you lessen the chances of getting any review.

If you are going to ask your customers for reviews on multiple sites, you’re probably asking for too much. Make it simple. Pick one review site and ask for nothing else.

And if you ask for a positive review and a Facebook “like” and a newsletter sign-up, your request has too much clutter and probably will result in getting nothing for your efforts.

17. Posting fraudulent reviews

This is risky. My gut feeling is that only a few hotels, here and there, are attempting this, for example, in the US. If you do get caught, you could receive some embarrassing attention.

Your ranking will probably be shot to bits by the operators of the review site, and if your hotel is in the US, you might even be prosecuted and fined by the FTC (Federal Trade Commission).

Why risk all that trouble? Just ask your most satisfied guests for the favor of a 5 star review.

NB: This is a guest article by Ed Ryder, a word-of-mouth strategist at OutRivalReputationManagement.

NB2: Download Ryder’s Review Trigger Cards to make asking for positive reviews easier.

NB3: Image via Shutterstock.

But just like most up-and-coming technologies, there is much confusion as to what it all really means and how it can help make the customer experience better and lead to more sales.

This article is meant to serve as a technical primer and will show some of the potential future applications across the travel ecosphere.

Big Data 101

The term “Big Data” is often applied in several ways, but it is quite self-explanatory. Big data just means “a lot of data” – that is, datasets that are beyond the capabilities of a typical database in terms of size, workload and overall cost — and the technologies that enable the extraction of meaning from it.

So where might we encounter a lot of data in travel?

A prime example would be the analytics logs of an online travel agency. For years, analytics tools have enabled companies to keep track of conversion funnels, detailed demographic statistics, and other pertinent information such as which pages convert the best, have the highest bounce rates, etc.

These reports are then used to optimize sites to ensure the best possible conversions. But in the era of big data, companies are gathering and paying attention to much more data than seemed possible just a few years ago.

For example, some sites are now gathering the detailed mouse movements of customers in real time as they move around pages.

This generates literally millions of coordinates and data points for every user, allowing companies unparalleled insights into what users are doing when they’re on a page.

Just a few years ago, storing the amount of data required for projects like this would’ve been prohibitively expensive.

These days, the proliferation of cheap storage as well as distributed file systems that allow storage across dozens (or hundreds) of commodity computers enables the cheap and efficient storage of petabytes of data without massive cost.

As storage technology improves, the costs of keeping every last byte of data for later analysis will keep going down.

Big data analysis, MapReduce and the extraction of meaning

Having all this data is nice, but the real value lies in the extraction of meaning from it. Big data tools such as MapReduce, based on technology originally invented at Google, enable easy discovery of common trends in data and the action upon those trends.

This is more easily demonstrated by an example:

Imagine you had an Excel spreadsheet of every hotel in the world and wanted to find the ones most commonly described as “awesome”. [NB: Ed - Are you sure? ]

The raw data you have might look something like the following:

Hotel Name, Review
—————————–
“Hotel A”,”Miserable experience”
“Hotel B”,”Awesome pool!”
“Hotel C”,”Liked it”
“Hotel B”,”Awesome restaurants”
“Hotel A”,”Loved it”
“Hotel C”,”Awesome experience”
“Hotel B”,”Boring”

Even though we’re only showing a few records here for simplicity, this spreadsheet would have hundreds of thousands of rows.

With MapReduce, you could write a function that maps each hotel name and creates a group of reviews for each name that is commonly discovered.

In the above example, “Hotel B” occurs 3 times, so the Map function would create a collection resembling something like this:

“Hotel B”:”Awesome pool!”, “Awesome restaurants”, “Boring”

Already, the map function has helped us find every review for “Hotel B”. But we’re not done yet — we’ll let the Reduce function do its job.

This function lets us perform any type of analysis we want on the collection that Map created for us. In our case, we wanted to find only reviews containing the word “awesome.” Reduce would contain computer code that did this:

“If the review contains the word awesome, increment an internal counter by 1″

This internal counter would essentially act as a score, or number of times the word “awesome” appeared for a given collection. In our example, “Hotel B” would come out on top with 2 “awesome” reviews, “Hotel C” would come out with 1, and “Hotel A” with 0.

So what did we accomplish in the above example? We found commonality in raw, unstructured data and then analyzed it for a business purpose.

While simple, this is the raw power of MapReduce and similar technologies: Extracting meaning when there previously wasn’t any.

The amazing part of this is that MapReduce can analyze billions – or trillions – of data points and find patterns in them. All on clusters of commodity hardware, and at a cost that even a startup can afford.

Can you see the potential yet?

State of Big Data in travel

The ability of big data technology to enable us to find intelligence in vast amounts of data presents a clear, massive opportunity to reshape the way consumers are marketed and sold to in travel.

It’s not a question anymore that those companies with ongoing big data projects are at the forefront of an entirely new way to sell travel to customers.

Emmanuel Marchal, currently at big data storage company Acunu, and a former-director at LikeCube, a company that leveraged big data for consumer travel sites and was later acquired by TimeOut, spoke with me briefly about the current state of Big Data in the travel industry:

• Big data applications are moving from profiling to true personalization. For example, true personalization would enable a site to recommend a specific hotel to a specific traveler based on their specific wants, needs, and previous purchase patterns, rather than a generic set of recommendations based on the type of traveler.
• True personalization is the main driver and “holy grail” of all big data efforts in travel.
• OTAs and other sellers of travel now see their big data efforts as “must haves” rather than “nice to haves”
• 2009 was the year of talking about it. 2010 was the year of starting big data projects. 2011 was the year of the prototypes. Will 2012 be the year these efforts finally see broad implementation?

In addition to personalization, efforts such as Hopper (NB: Disclosure – Hopper CEO Fred Lalonde is chairman of Tnooz) are demonstrating another prime example of how big data can empower consumers.

Large scale analysis of data related to places combined with natural language processing (NLP) enable search queries such as “nearby beach vacations under $500″. While this represents a combination of technologies, they all are enabled by the application of big data processing.

Into the future

While personalization is surely a holy grail, there are literally thousands of potential uses of big data in travel.

Geo-fencing, the process of knowing when a traveler is near a certain attraction or vendor, is starting to emerge.

An example of this is the recently launched Foursquare Radar feature, which alerts you when you are near a place you at one time wanted to be reminded of.

This technology is pure big data: gathering your coordinates in real time via your mobile phone’s GPS and realizing when you are in a certain boundary.

Enabled across millions of consumers, the amount of data gathering and processing required for efforts like this were unthinkable just a few years ago.

Think about it: how many GPS coordinates do you generate in a given day? The potential of geo-fencing to marketers is nothing short of amazing.

Image data processing: Billions of photographs representing petabytes of storage are uploaded to the internet every day.

Photo sharing apps such as Instagram might seem a great way to share moments with friends, but the true value behind these startups lies in the data they’re collecting on the backend. Each photo generates a mountain of data that, with further analysis, reveals a host of information on the user uploading it.

Color, the much maligned startup that debuted with a stratospheric valuation before even launching their product, surely wowed its investors with the potentials behind all the data it was hoping to collect.

In travel, the startup Jetpac is already using these image processing methods to put a different spin on the social travel concept.

Recently acquired by eBay, the startup Hunch represented one of the finest examples of finding commonality in previously disparate forms of data.

Their API and publicly available test tool allows anyone to find out things like “People who prefer Subaru cars also prefer to stay at 5 star resorts 40% of the time” (this is not a real example!).

While these types of correlations might seem questionably useless, imagine the power of putting these concepts to use when you’re trying to market and cross-sell a traveler.

Taste Graphs turn knowing “something” about your customer into knowing a lot of other things about that customer. The use and application of these Taste Graphs is sure to become much wider in the coming year in everything from online retailers to, you guessed it, travel.

To sum it all up, big data isn’t an amazing new magic box you’ll be able to buy from a vendor.

Big data merely sums up the concept that we each generate billions of data points every day and that with the economically viable application of technology, we can be sold to better than ever before.

Are you ready?

NB: Image via Shutterstock.

In late 2010, we interviewed 650 destination marketing organizations to determine what they had in the way of tools for delivering web content to visitors.

By tools, we mean utilities such as interactive maps, itinerary builders, or calendars of events. We also asked about organizational tool selection processes and who operated new tool purchases after they were acquired. Tnooz published our inventory – Rough Guide to Tourism Websites and Technology – in January 2011.

Among our findings were stories that destination marketers told us about why they succeeded or failed. These anecdotes added context to our raw numbers. They also helped us understand the importance of organizational dynamics throughout acquisition processes.

As we teased out our data, we found that resources made less impact than we originally estimated. While funding directly impacted the number and sophistication of the tools that a DMO could afford, it had little to do with overall satisfaction or success in reaching organizational goals.

As it turned out, dissatisfaction surrounded peripheral issues to funding such as vendor and technology lock-in, inadequate staffing and institutional inertia brought about by policies and oversized egos.

Merging our factual inventory with these organizational anecdotes revealed a five-tiered break-down based on the numbers of tools, their types, and the organizational dynamics affecting their selection, implementation, and day-to-day management.

Empowered by what we observed, we spent a year building a comprehensive web framework.

In anticipation of its launch, we revisited our data to see if anything changed while we bent over the grindstone. Our re-visit involved an inventory of 60 websites that we surveyed earlier.

Our methodology consisted of comparing what we saw over a year ago with what we observed today.

Our findings showed us that changes were few when viewed through the lens of predictable change. While the technology paradigm shifted slightly, organizational positioning within the technology market remained fairly rigid.

In effect, organizations remained in their original class. What changed was what constituted a class.

For example, in our original survey, 54% of all respondent websites lacked interactive mapping functions. Now, 50% of those have interactive maps and itinerary building capacities.

Another 35% have Google maps that merely show POI locations, but not the spatial relationships between or among points of interests. None benefited by using their new functions to drill down into user preferences or spatial activity landscapes.

In the absence of harnessing the true essence of technology, the most poorly outfitted classes are still the most poorly outfitted.

The difference being that they now are at the bottom with features that more equipped organizations had a year and a half ago. At the other end of the spectrum, the rich didn’t get much richer.

Of the 16% that had mobile phone apps when we originally surveyed, none has added newer features such as media consumption on many screens, as articulated by Claude Benard in his Tnooz Predictions 2012.

Our observations show us that many organizations added phone apps moving into a higher class based on the number of capacities that they offer.

On a less encouraging note, our observations suggest that the state of technology is flat and the vision for media consumption on many screens is simply that – a vision moving forward for Google and Apple, but not trickling down to designated marketers.

Our observations are particularly true for Capacity Under Performers, Technology Prisoners, and Widows and Orphans.

1. Capacity Under-Performers

According to our findings this group comprised 55% of all organizations that failed to offer contemporary, industry-ready tools.

Today the class still comprises slightly over 50% and despite having added some capacities, it still lags behind because the definition of industry-optimal has shifted like a carrot on a stick to include smart devices, true interactivity, and data mining.

2. Technology Prisoners

Technology prisoners were those that were reluctant or incapable of changing course.

Included in this class were those that offered full capacity sets, but were burdened by onerous, long-term contracts for tools that have long-since passed their technological prime.

Technology prisoners are also well-meaning pioneers that made early and costly commitments to technologies that are now limited in their abilities to expand to accommodate new smart applications and advanced database queries.

Also mired among Technology Prisoners are organizations managed by individuals who justify or protect historical decisions for personal reasons.

Obviously, a simple 60-site web inventory can’t replicate the anecdotal information that we originally gathered, but we can see that little has changed in terms of the outward interfaces of these ego-driven organizations. Since this is the case, we have little reason to believe that managerial inertia isn’t still affecting progress in a negative way.

3. Widows and Orphans

These small organizations need new technology and efficiencies but lack finances and/or staffing. Our survey showed that 36% of our original respondents fell into this class.

Today, the number remains the same despite some improvements in services. Given the fall in price of adding interactive mapping 25% of our original widows and orphans can now afford them.

We can see, however, that most of these additions are not a database driven solution. We can also see that most of our widows and orphans still don’t have content management solutions (CMS) or evidence of customer relationship management technologies (CRM).

What to do next?

As we revisit this break-down, we must acknowledge limitations in the market. To do otherwise, ignores fundamental facts – positioning is relative to structures and resources in the industry, more than it is due to other factors.

If a technology heaven does exist for destination marketers, it is one in which every group has an equal chance of making it to the promise land. In this case, the promise land is where 650 organizations told us we could find it. It is a place where marketers find:

• Expert intelligent systems that learn who the traveler is and how to configure visitor experiences based on individual affinities or preferences.
• E-newsletters to inform prospective visitors of events, specials, or “hot deals”. (We think that QR codes would have fit this bill if they were around at the time of our survey)
• Online shopping and advertising to offset the rising cost of site creation and management.
• Tools that manage and record itineraries, traveler reviews, events, personalized travel itineraries, and maps for the purpose of facilitating destination-specific planning.

Given advancements in smart technology, we might add the following:

1. Using technology to enhance experience at point of contact

In another contribution to Tnooz, I called this “what-else-marketing” that employs newer technologies such as smartphones, social media, and QR codes to increase commerce at the POP (point of purchase or geographic location of the visitor, within the destination marketplace, at any point in time).

“What-else-marketing” harnesses the spontaneity of the journey in that it links physical world objects and opportunities to visitors at the street level in real time.

2. Recognition of personalization

Personalization, to me, means replacing the current destination-marketing model that is a mile wide and an inch deep with tailored communications that are a mile deep and an inch wide.

In this way, destination marketers can serve highly differentiated constituencies or affinities by compiling and utilizing the emergent properties of travel in the same way that an ornithologist might utilize the characteristics of singular birds to understand the behavior or affinities of flocks.

3. Use of multi-channel technology

In our way of thinking, technology isn’t about adding features. It’s about building frameworks that facilitate multiple visualizations in the same way that a user can use a menu to select multiple displays or print options.

To talk about new entry points such as smartphones, tablets, and e-books requires a wholesale re-evaluation of tools as a concept.

Moreover, if destination marketers are to remain relevant in the face of advances in multi-channel technologies made by Internet giants like Facebook, Google, and Apple, they must look beyond the simple addition of tools or capacities and start to invest in systems that are “all-tool”” and “all channels” simultaneously.

Summing up

In order to attain the aforementioned goals, we need to shift gears from tool counts to mission-based accomplishments.

None of these things is going to happen at the level of destination marketing without taking the vertical costs of invention and turning these flat against the democratic and universal needs of destination marketers of all sizes and capacities.

In other words, if marketers leave invention to billionaires like Apple or Google, they are sunk because no matter how flush they are with funds they can never hope to keep pace.

What the industry needs is a system that collapses the lengthy and costly assembly line into a simple and easy-to-use box that feeds highly specific individual and organizational content into one end and spits it out to any screen at the other.

This system needs to be infused with feedback loops—both longitudinal and real-time—that add traveler preferences, profiles, opinions, and experiences as emergent properties of a system that outputs to “screens” of all types.

To look to other solutions, to keeping adding tools as separate workstations on the destination marketing production line is the type of linear thinking that will never accomplish a holistic view or a multi-screened future.

NB: This is a guest article by Mark Mattson, a former university professor who writes agile software solutions for the travel industry through TravelTools, a service for destination marketers.

NB2: Mattson is about to launch a proprietary WordPress plugin that is a multi-channel and multi-screen solution that simultaneously runs DMO websites, interactive maps, smart phones, pads, e-newsletters, itinerary builders, HD kiosks, QR code integrations, and HDTVs from a single administrator panel and database.

NB3: Image via Shutterstock.

We all know that nobody clicks on banner ads, right? A decent banner will net you only one click for every 1,000 impressions. So even if you bought one million impressions that is only 1,000 clicks.

After you blow through your budget you might end up with one or two bookings from those 1,000 clickers. But what about the other 999,000 people who did NOT click your banner?

It turns out many of them end up going directly to your site weeks later to book.

A so-called view-thru booking occurs when a user views a banner but does not click. The user then might visit the airline or hotel website directly to book days later.

Most travel suppliers use a view-thru window of time to give credit for bookings made after the banner was viewed.

Typically that window ranges from seven to 30 days, but can be 120 days for an international tour or cruise. The travel supplier simply places view-thru tracking pixels on its booking engine confirmation page.

Those pixels match up to the banner ad that was served to the traveler so that travel suppliers can give credit to the right advertiser that influenced the booking.

I have seen 25-100 times more airline and hotel bookings from view thrus compared to bookings that happen after a direct banner click.

Case study

For example, let’s take an airline called XYZ, whixh runs a banner ad promoting a $99 fare sale on a travel website called Travel Site #9.

A user would view that airline’s $99 banner ad but not click on it. The user would recall the ad and visit the airline’s website directly 11 days later to book.

Using view-thru tracking, XYZ airline would know that the booking was made by a traveler from Travel Site #9. This is called a view thru booking.

Tracking bookings can be a bit confusing since you must also track the bookers that clicked on your banner ad or textlink and then booked later.

Some of you are familiar with post-click bookings as they have been around for quite a while.

In our example above what if a user from Travel Site #9 actually clicks the $99 banner ad from XYZ airline? The user then might book directly on the airline website 17 days later. That is called a post-click booking since the user clicked the banner and then booked on the airline’s website.

I have seen a travel supplier get ten bookings from post-click activity. But then that same travel supplier would see an additional 500 bookings from view-thru tracking.

You can see tremendous value and benefit from tracking both post click and view thru bookings. It will increase your ROI and allow you to see what is working and what is not performing.

The cons are very few but some critics make the case that users tend to shop around across six websites or more before they purchase.

While this may be true, the user would not have booked if it was not for seeing your $99 banner ad on Travel Site #9.

Just because the user visits six websites does not mean he will see your travel offer on all six sites without you promoting it.

Some travel suppliers will give partial credit for view-thru bookings compared to giving full credit for post-click bookings. But the ROI is still amazing when you factor in even partial credit on view-thrus plus the post-click bookings.

So how can you get started? There are many advertising platforms and tracking tools that can track both view thru and post click bookings.

What to do

Some of the top vendors that I have worked with include: Adtech, ZEDO, DART, Atlas and Mediaplex.

If you cannot afford to use one of these vendors, you can ask the advertisers that you buy banner ads from if they can track view thru bookings for you.

You would simply place their tracking code from their ad server on your confirmation page of your site before the campaign went live.

Then you run some banner ads on various websites and monitor the reports to see your ROI. Make sure to target as much as possible.

If you only fly from LAX, for example, then do not run banner ads to people living in NY. If your hotel is in Memphis and most of your visitors come from a five hour drive radius, then target users living in those cities or users looking to visit Memphis.

Keep in mind that view-thru tracking can work for both B2C and B2B travel organizations. So even if you sell travel technology or services in the industry, you can still run banner ads on B2B websites like Tnooz for example.

You would place the tracking code on your website where a prospect would purchase or perhaps fill out a contact us form.

If that user has viewed a banner ad on a B2B website, and then visited your website later on, you would know where that user came from.

I like to think of a banner ad as an outdoor billboard on the Internet.

You drive by that billboard and of course cannot click it. But you do read it, remember it and take action later on.

A banner ad it turns out has the same effect as it clearly influences purchases both online and even offline. One study from Comscore showed that running banner ads leads to a 274% boost in the number of searches for your brand on search engines.

This concept makes sense as people are more likely to type your product into Google after they have been exposed to your brand online. Another study from Media Post showed that a banner ad impression influences 70% of all user conversions or bookings.

Even beyond bookings you also should track anyone who signs up for your loyalty program or email newsletter after they have been exposed to your banner advertising.

So if you are not able to track all these bookings and traveler actions, then I highly recommend that you do not waste your money buying banner ads.

You will be disappointed if you only measure success based on banner clicks so make sure you track the full extent of your banner campaign.

NB: This is a guest article by Ryan Bifulco, founder and CEO of TravelSpike.

NB2: Image via Shutterstock.

Almost a month on since my series of posts on Fake Review Optimization, there is some still scepticism out there about the concept and its impact in travel.

As I’ve previously described, groups and individuals participating in it go to significant lengths to avoid detection – again, it is a very similar to the black-hat SEO and website security hacking specialists.

Here are some further thoughts after reading all the comments against the four original articles.

Are the authorities cracking down on it?

Outside the hospitality industry, the US Federal Trade Commission fined Legacy Learning Systems $250,000 for hiring affiliates to positively review their DVD series on various websites.

Ann Taylor Loft had the first FTC investigation for providing bloggers with $10 gift cards to attend and comment on a fashion show, with the bloggers failing to report the gift. The FTC also forced Reverb Communications to stop planting fake reviews in the iTunes Store.

But, heck, am I over-reacting about the threat of Fake Review Optimization? I have been asked to name names, so here are a few of the brazen ones which have websites professing black-hat tactics under the auspices of Online Reputation Management.

[NB: Disclosure - Stacey Higgins of Hotelnewsnow.com found some of these firms in August when researching a story on the topic that included some of my perspectives]

• PostingOnlyGoodReviews.com, now shut down, but which stated: “The process of managing an online reputation requires both displacing the negative search result(s) and replacing it with only positive search results. Achieving this mission needs a specialized set of skills: internet promotion and marketing, public relations, search engine optimization”
• OnlineReputationGroup.com, also shut down, which offered a variety of packages including one at $7,500 per month that included “10 websites with advance on page SEO optimization, 1000 reviews, 2500 backlinks, 5 video submissions on up to 150 video sites and listing research”

If you question the veracity of these citations, I have the screen shots to support them.

Here are a few of my favorites that are still in business:

PaladinRep promotes that clients should “immunize your reputation” by “Posting hundreds of positive articles, blog, journal and forum entries, news items, press releases and other pages on a steady, on-going basis” and “posting positive experiences in other related forums.”

Plussem – Not reviews per se, but targeting a similar objective. It specializes in Google +1s, making the following commitments:

• All +1′s come from people with a google account that has been verified by phone (Phone Verified Accounts)
• All +1′s come from real people. No bots are being used!
• All +1′s are being given by manually going to your website and clicking the +1 button
• It’s untraceble because the +1′s are being given from different IP’s
• All +1′s are given dripped over a couple of days so it looks natural

Wow – it looks real, too bad it’s not…

I really like TheReputationProfessional. It is very specific about the process – probably because it charges $49 per review. Here is a description:

“In order to ensure that reviews go up and stay up on the most respected review sites, our process cannot be “automated” and we cannot use overseas labor forces. An actual person, physically located near your business and on a residential or business network will place your review.

“Usually their accounts will be linked with facebook and other social networking sites to give the review more legitimacy. Their accounts will also have placed other, respected reviews and will be taken seriously by the website they are placed on as well as the potential customers using the website to find your business.”

I also especially like the 10% discount offer on the “don’t stop until I tell you” tier of service.

Next is ReputationManagers which promises to “create and find unique positive content about your company” and “we artificially create this popularity to the tens (or hundreds) of sites that we create for you”

True, the descriptions of these services do not specifically mention TripAdvisor, but they do mention Yelp in context of eradicating negative reviews on the first two pages of Google organic search listings.

The solution at least one claims is that may take 4-6 months or longer “depending on how aggressive you want us to be, we will work to promote tens or hundreds of pages to try to push the negative websites into the deep depths of Google’s index and fight to keep them down there.”

Even the segment leader Reputation.com may be toeing a creepy line when it states:

“Our patented technology and patented, proprietary strategies, developed by world-class scientists, engineers and years of R&D, can make good content rank highly in your results, eventually displacing the negative content and bumping it out of your top results.”

That technology, backed by a bevy of A-list VCs, was recently honored as a World Economic Forum 2011 Technology Pioneer. Is Reputation.com breaking the law? Probably not.

Would someone armed with similar technological capabilities easily be able to break the law? Probably yes.

That decision depends solely on the ethical pedigree of the group’s management. For firms lacking the sound financial backing of Reputation.com, it might be more difficult to stay on the right side of the creepy line, let alone ignore it.

Perhaps some are still unsure given that I haven’t provided a specific hotel example? Therefore, please meet a repuation management company solely (at least on first look) for the hospitality sector.

Now, it may be completely legit, but some suspicion might be reasonable because:

• As a .org, it does not fit the profile of a typical non-commercial entity.
• Its co-founder is a PR Consultant specializing in SEO, it is remarkably low key as there do not appear to be any profiles on LinkedIn or any websites referencing him or his previous company that represented the likes of a major US retail brand. He did apparently teach an SEO class for a law course last year.
• Two of its offices are all located in virtual office facilities in Washington, DC and nearby. A third is an apartment complex. The 100s of professionals they claim as a staff are obviously virtual and I would guess, not full time employees.
• The hotel reputation management site looks remarkably similar (and have the same domain URL structure) to review sites for attorneys, franchises, dentists, doctors and restaurants, all of which share the same addresses and telephone numbers.
• In the 1990s, a person of a similar name to the founder was then at a Baltimore company was convicted of securities fraud in the US. The prospectus for the shares in the adult entertainment company claimed he previously worked in an advisory capacity with the same major US retail brand.
• The company claims: “We Move And Force Negative Search Results And False Online Reviews About Your Hotel Off Of Page One, Page Two, Page Three, Page Four and Page Five…” and “The more content we create, the more we feed the monster and thus we bury the negative results deeper and deeper.”

That last point is somewhat unambiguous and possibly into black-hat territory in my book.

Of course, if you prefer to avoid the above firms, you can always go the low cost route by using Fiverr to find people willing to write reviews.

Or, if you have a bit more initiative, you can solicit review writers on Elance.com. For example, as I write this, the current listing was posted and had received 11 proposals:

“We require someone to write reviews for our products. They will need to be 2 – 3 sentences each, in informal english. Each product will require about 5 – 8 reviews, with unique content. There are about 20 products initially and this will goto about 200 if the work is of a high enough standard.”

These are only examples of organizations brazen enough to broach the subject on public websites. The covert black-hat folks are not prone to such visibility.

However, if you question the methods I describe to support a covert, black-hat online reputation management business, here’s an example of a fairly specific solicitation for a relatively sophisticated astroturfing/sockpuppet platform.

No, it was not targeting the hotel industry, but the US Air Force wanted it for some serious reputation management challenges in Iraq and Afghanistan. There were six components:

0001 – Online Persona Management Service. 50 User Licenses, 10 Personas per user

Software will allow 10 personas per user, replete with background , history, supporting details, and cyber presences that are technically, culturally and geographically consistent.

Individual applications will enable an operator to exercise a number of different online persons from the same workstation and without fear of being discovered by sophisticated adversaries.

Personas must be able to appear to originate in nearly any part of the world and can interact through conventional online services and social media platforms. The service includes a user friendly application environment to maximize the user’s situational awareness by displaying real-time local information.

0002- Secure Virtual Private Network (VPN). 1 each

VPN provides the ability for users to daily and automatically obtain randomly selected IP addresses through which they can access the internet.

The daily rotation of the user’s IP address prevents compromise during observation of likely or targeted web sites or services, while hiding the existence of the operation. In addition, may provide traffic mixing, blending the user s traffic with traffic from multitudes of users from outside the organization.

This traffic blending provides excellent cover and powerful deniability. Anonymizer Enterprise Chameleon or equal

0003- Static IP Address Management. 50 each

Licence protects the identity of government agencies and enterprise organizations. Enables organizations to manage their persistent online personas by assigning static IP addresses to each persona.

Individuals can perform static impersonations, which allow them to look like the same person over time. Also allows organizations that frequent same site/service often to easily switch IP addresses to look like ordinary users as opposed to one organization. Anonymizer IP Mapper License or equal

0004- Virtual Private Servers, CONUS. 1 each

Provides CONUS or OCONUS points of presence locations that are setup for each customer based on the geographic area of operations the customer is operating within and which allow a customer’s online persona(s) to appear to originate from.

Ability to provide virtual private servers that are procured using commercial hosting centers around the world and which are established anonymously. Once procured, the geosite is incorporated into the network and integrated within the customers environment and ready for use by the customer.

Unless specifically designated as shared, locations are dedicated for use by each customer and never shared among other customers. Anonymizer Annual Dedicated CONUS Light Geosite or equal

0005- Virtual Private Servers, OCONUS. 8 Each

Provides CONUS or OCONUS points of presence locations that are setup for each customer based on the geographic area of operations the customer is operating within and which allow a customer’s online persona(s) to appear to originate from.

Ability to provide virtual private servers that are procured using commercial hosting centers around the world and which are established anonymously. Once procured, the geosite is incorporated into the network and integrated within the customers environment and ready for use by the customer.

Unless specifically designated as shared, locations are dedicated for use by each customer and never shared among other customers. Anonymizer Annual Dedicated OCONUS Light Geosite or equal

0006- Remote Access Secure Virtual Private Network. 1 each

Secure Operating Environment provides a reliable and protected computing environment from which to stage and conduct operations. Every session uses a clean Virtual Machine (VM) image.

The solution is accessed through sets of Virtual Private Network (VPN) devices located at each Customer facility. The fully-managed VDI (Virtual Desktop Infrastructure) is an environment that allows users remote access from their desktop into a VM.

Upon session termination, the VM is deleted and any virus, worm, or malicious software that the user inadvertently downloaded is destroyed. Anonymizer Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) Solution or equal.

Solutions?

It does not take a lot of money or a government contract to build and deploy such a platform… One can argue that based on the financial benefit resulting from higher placements on hotel-related review sites, demand for such a product exists.

I look at any potentially disruptive technology or business model with a healthy dose of skepticism. However, just because one can’t see it, doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.

In this case, this is not a witch hunt – it is a growing problem facing not only the hotel industry, but all lines of businesses that benefit from consumer generated reviews.

My four part series of posts appropriately lays out the stakes, the tactics being employed and the methods to combat the problem.

I also hope that TripAdvisor and the global hospitality industry take the threat seriously. As I mention in the articles, fighting Fake Review Optimization is potentially a lot more challenging than fighting web spam.

NB: This is a guest article by Robert Cole, founder of hospitality and travel marketing strategy and technology consulting company RockCheetah. He also blogs at Views from a Corner Suite.

NB2: Image via Shutterstock.

Part One focused on thinking beyond reviews and ratings and the benefits of setting up forums and discussion boards within your website.

Today we look at some of the challenges…

1. Content – how to encourage conversation

One of the questions we are often asked is how can I make sure this application is used or that I gather content from my online visitors?

Here are a few pointers:

• Make it simple for them to contribute to your site
• Let them know about this new feature in your emails and other customer communications
• Pro-actively gather content from them – emailing them to start a discussion or ask a question on your site
• Incentivise them. You don’t have to give them a car but perhaps you can give a small prize to the most engaged discussions on your website?
• Navigation – add discussions and forums to relevant places on your website, such as destination pages or other information pages and allow them to start conversation around these areas. Don’t give them free reign to start chatting about anything in the world as it may not be relevant to your business

2. Moderation

Whenever you open a public forum or discussion board you are going to have to think about moderation and inappropriate content.

For some of the solutions we have delivered, we have found a very low percentage (less than 1%) of content is unfairly negative or inappropriate and most decent applications have spam filters, obscenity monitors, etc.

What about negative comments?

Click here to read an article specifically dealing with this but, remember, we’re not looking at product reviews here – therefore any negative content isn’t necessarily directed towards your services.

3. Spam

Like many things on the internet, a forum is an open target for spammers because when it grows then it inevitably has some weight in Google (and other search engines).

It is vital to consider how you will deal with this before it becomes a problem.  Again, most decent discussion and forum applications have the ability to block certain users and have complex and useful spam filters.

4. Kick starting your forum

It can initially be extremely difficult to attract visitors to a forum. And an empty forum basically has no hope of attracting people that participate.

People need to see content and be able to explore topics.

Creating all this content can be a lot of work and time. As mentioned previously, incentivise the best discussions, communicate with your existing user database to begin the conversations and you should also get your staff involved to drive the conversations.

Establishing a discussion forum can take some time and effort, but once people start contributing, you’ll quickly begin to see the benefits they can bring to a business.

NB: This is a guest article by Anthony Rawlins, CEO of Digital Visitor, a social media and marketing agency for travel and tourism organisations globally.

NB2: Image via Shutterstock.

The travel industry is more diversified than ever before. So beware…

With nearly every travel booking site, or intermediary, providing one-stop shops for everything from airfare and room and board to transportation and tours, these sites aren’t only competing against each other.

They’re now competing against the suppliers themselves – airlines, hotels, rental car and tour companies.

Intermediaries are offering dynamic packages across suppliers, and competitive websites are investing in new features, such as online reviews, to keep travelers looking and booking on their site.

Meanwhile, suppliers are investing in their websites to capture more direct bookings, as well as investing in loyalty programs and other initiatives that help them reconnect with the customer.

And midst all this, consumers are taking advantage of their battle to please them.

Always on the prowl for the best deal, bargain hunters can make life in the travel industry difficult—especially for companies that can’t compete price-wise.

For them, brand loyalty is of particular importance. But how do you create and maintain brand loyalty when consumers have hundreds, if not thousands, of choices?

It’s all about user experience

By ensuring that visitors have a successful browsing and booking experience. Doing this requires speaking to individual customers’ needs by providing an optimized and personalized travel experience – across all digital touch-points.

In other words, if you please them, they will return.

Whether you’re a supplier or an intermediary, providing an optimized and personalized travel experience – across all digital touch-points – is critical to building and maintaining customer loyalty.

Unfortunately, many travelers today still encounter problems with the simplest of tasks on travel sites.

According to recent Forrester research, one in five leisure travelers encounter problems booking online. Fundamental tasks, such as completing, modifying or cancelling reservations, proved to be the most problematic for this group.

Start by asking yourself a few key questions:

• When a visitor comes to your site to plan a trip, are they able to effectively search for what they’re looking for?
• Do they abandon your site after the first set of trip results are displayed? Or do they get deep into the checkout process only to then bounce to do more research?
• Of those who do not complete the checkout process, can you identify any specific trends, such as getting stuck on a certain page or form before leaving?

A common problem in the online travel booking process is for a user to nearly complete the checkout process, only to bounce out of the funnel at the last minute to continue researching.

In this case, information that influences a traveler’s decision is likely being presented too late in the process, such as revealing hidden fees that result in a higher-than-quoted price.

What to do?

This is where multivariate testing can be used to determine which information should be presented up-front in the process – well before the visitor advances to the final stages of booking.

This type of testing can also determine whether presenting this information reduces overall conversion rates or has a negative impact on revenue.

Continuous A/B and Multivariate Testing (MVT) are key methods when it comes to optimizing websites and achieving specific behavioral results, such as converting browsers into buyers, reducing last-minute bounces, and so forth.

For example, by testing content and layout variations of the home page, search interface, and layout of search results, while also measuring the corresponding impact of each of those changes on engagement and bookings, you can determine which content and page layouts result more engaging experiences for site visitors, which ultimately leads to higher online revenue.

Testing with live visitors will provide the insight you need to determine why certain segments of visitors might abandon the process.

You also don’t want to ignore the fact that your website may need additional features to improve the customer experience.

For example, during the research phase, many travelers tend to consult Google Maps. Since maps can provide convenience to determine how close a hotel is to walk to a local attraction, or the types of restaurants available nearby – and are therefore helpful to someone planning travel – don’t force visitors to toggle between your site and Google.

Instead, try embedding a Google map directly into your site. This will keep visitors on your site and help them progress into the booking funnel.

Past traveler reviews are extremely influential on the decision to book. Knowing that online travel bookers rely on sites such as TripAdvisor, Yelp, and Lonely Planet for reviews and discussions, online travel bookers often consult these sites before pulling the “Book Now” trigger.

As with Google Maps, if your visitors are distracted by additional sites and pages, your abandon rate could suffer.

Try testing out integration of travel reviews from these reliable sources into the booking funnel to improve conversions.

By giving visitors information they are already looking for (the good, the bad and the ugly) you’re more likely to get—and keep—them as customers.

Conclusions

Of course, all of this is just the beginning. But in the end, it’s really about providing a seamless (and painless) online experience to help customers plan, book, and modify their trips.

Doing so will provide a deeper connection with consumers, as well as drive more online bookings, revenue, and customer loyalty.

NB: This is a guest article by Mark Simpson, president and founder of Maxymiser.

NB2: Image via Shutterstock.

Reviews are so 2010. They were THE must-have for your website a couple of years ago and are still vital, but now your online visitor demands more… much more.

Don’t get me wrong; reviews and ratings are excellent for your website and if you don’t have them already, you really should implement them quickly.

Reviews drive traffic and can increase conversions and we’ve written many well received articles about this including;

• The importance of online customer reviews
• Tripadvisor verses your own review solution
• The Power of One Review

However next year, you need to go beyond reviews and begin thinking more broadly about what your online visitors want to see.

How can you inspire them more?  How can you breed loyalty when they visit your website?  How can you encourage more repeat visits and be THE place they get their trusted information from?

There can be so much more user generated content on your website than just reviews and ratings and if you explore each stage of the buying cycle on your website, you will see you can engage with your customers and gather social media at each point.

So, before reviews and ratings which are mainly used to drive the purchase/transaction phase, there is the dream/research phase of the buying cycle.

This is where visitors to your site are undecided on what to buy or even who to buy from. They need inspiration and advice.

You can inspire them on your website and if you do this right, you can access wider audiences at earlier stages of the decision making process.

Why write this article now?

Because the travel industry is about to enter its most intensive phase of research for the entire year and you need to know how you can maximize this in future.

One way of doing this is implementing discussions and forums on your website and today these have become some of the most popular ways of engaging and interacting with new audiences on your website.

Advantages having discussions and forums on your website

1. Increased sales

Discussions and forums play an important role when your customers are at the very first stage of the customer buying cycle on your website – the research/dream stage.

Capturing them at this stage makes it easier to channel them to your products and services and then drive sales as they browse your website in more detail.

2. Multimedia content

Discussions and forums lend themselves to photos and videos more than reviews do.

Photos and videos are much more engaging than just text and numbers and when looking to inspire people to book with you, there isn’t a much better way than with engaging photos and videos of destinations and your excellent products and experiences.

Photos and videos also help increase browsing time on your site so whilst people are researching online, they will spend more time on your site than with competitors.

3. Organic traffic

One of the key advantages of including a forum and discussion feature on your own website is that it will generate new content which drives new organic search engine traffic.

4. Social media traffic

Your discussion/forum should be shared with Facebook and other social media channels. This will drive social networkers back to your website from these channels.

Discussions and forums are often a much better way of introducing your brand to new social media audiences than a product review.

5. Increased repeat visits

A forum or discussion area on your website gives new online visitors, clients and potential customers a reason to return to your site and they should be notified when there are new postings against discussions or forums they ware following.

6. Market research

Being in direct contact with your customers and potential customers allows you to be better informed about their needs, wants, questions and general interests.

What questions are being asked – can you ask questions of your own? Your forums and discussions area can become a great research tool for your business.

7. Community building

Forums are ideal for providing your online visitors with a base around which to build a community loyal to your brand.

You’re not trying to replicate Facebook – but you are creating more engagement and reinforcing your brand rather than anyone elses.

8. Interacting with your customers and prospects

A discussion forum is a fairly informal place but you can share announcements about your business, answer questions about your products and services, and generally talk about features and benefits of doing business with you.

Part two of the article, including the challenges around social media in travel, runs tomorrow……

NB: This is a guest article by Anthony Rawlins, CEO of Digital Visitor, a social media and marketing agency for travel and tourism organizations globally.

Because travelers are inherently “mobile”, it’s natural that travel companies have been early adopters in mobile, often blazing the trail in the mobile industry.

They were the first to have a transactional mobile site, first to leverage mobile apps, first to reach a global audience, and so forth.

By understanding the mobile traveler’s behavior, companies can leverage different mobile technologies to create new experiences that ease a traveler’s journey.

A notification strategy, for instance, is a great way to capitalize on existing technologies that can benefit the mobile traveler.

This article outlines top tips on how travel brands can use push notifications, SMS, and email notifications to maximize their customer engagement in the travel space.

1. Pushing information to plugged-in users

Push notifications is a native functionality in an app, where data can be sent to a user’s smartphone based on their location. Even if the app is closed, these messages can pop up on the user’s home screen to alert users with targeted messages.

This provides an effective way for travel companies to notify consumers of the latest travel warnings, deals, offers, flight changes, and more.

Delta Airlines is a great example of a travel company that has not only been successful in its overall mobile presence but has also effectively used push notifications that add value to the traveler.

In the era of smartphones, Delta recognized the importance of providing their customers with up-to-the-minute travel alerts, incorporating push notifications into their native app that immediately updates travelers with relevant flight information, warnings, deals, and more.

2. Texting campaigns have a real impact

With the rapid expansion of mobile broadband and wireless technology, travel companies have found that SMS allows them to effectively communicate with consumers in both a personal and timely manner.

Consumers must opt in to receive SMS alerts, ensuring that travel brands only send messages to consumers who are receptive to receiving them. SMS is an extremely effective means for travel companies to interact with consumers on an ongoing basis to deepen brand loyalty.

The Hilton Hotel Group has successfully leveraged text messaging to increase guest numbers to its hotels and build customer loyalty. SMS enables Hilton to instantly send out important marketing messages such as on-site specials and promotions, at the most appropriate time of day.

As a result of their text messaging efforts, the hotel has seen a 10-25% increase in offer redemptions, an increase in conversion that is a direct result of putting relevant content in front of the right people.

Similarly, Delta Airlines uses text messages as a way to keep travelers up to speed on crucial flight information. Users can choose to subscribe and get updates on all flights, or receive a one-time alert on a specific flight.

Both options provide users with up-to-the minute alerts on flight cancellations, delays, and schedule changes.

3. Maximizing email notifications in mobile

With more than 20% of email marketing messages read on mobile devices, it’s essential for travel brands make sure that all links users visit from their smartphones direct them to a mobile optimized view of the site.

Additionally, deep links, which are links that bring users to a subsection of the website beyond the homepage, must also be optimized for mobile in order to maximize the traffic that is driven to the site from mobile devices.

For example, if a smartphone user follows a link from an email campaign that directs them to the standard desktop page view, they are likely to be discouraged by the slower load time and having to zoom in to properly engage with the promotion.

This reduces the change that the customer will convert and will decrease the likelihood of them engaging with the brand via mobile in the future.

US Airways is a great example of a travel company that has been leveraging the advantages of notifications. Through its flight notification system, BeNotified, travelers can sign up to receive emails with up-to-the minute departure, arrival, delay and cancellation information.

With email marketing messages increasingly read from mobile phones, all travel companies must ensure that their email notifications support links that direct readers to a version of the site properly formatted, regardless of the device they’re using at the time.

4. Use mobile to deliver timely content to travelers

Simply offering an optimized mobile site is no longer sufficient in fully engaging and retaining customers. In order to set themselves apart from competitors, travel companies must find new ways to actively engage and add value to their customers who are constantly on-the-go.

Offering an optimized mobile presence is a first step, but travel companies can build on this by actively delivering relevant information to the customer in a timely and effective manner.

Strategically incorporating tactics like push notifications, SMS, and email notifications allow travel companies to do just that.

NB: This is a guest article by Jason Taylor, head of platform strategy and innovation at Usablenet.

NB2: Image via Shutterstock.

The previous two articles on spa revenue management should have convinced you, in order to generate more profit with this business unit, a more strategic approach will need to be implemented, comparable to the way revenue management is applied to hotel rooms.

Key performance indicators have to be defined to help understand the patterns of demand and customer behavior. Now we will take a closer look at different pricing techniques.

Although it is possible to implement a dynamic pricing strategy based on the level of demand, customers may not always understand why the price for a specific treatment fluctuates.

They may perceive a higher price, during peak demand periods, as an unfair price difference.

It has been one of the biggest concerns and objections that communicated to us by spa managers while training them on revenue management techniques or during revenue management implementations in spas.

In most markets the spa offer often exceeds demand, and managers frequently offer discounts in an attempt to fill the empty treatment rooms. A “Rack Rate” is set based on the highest demand level, on which discounts are applied during periods of lower demand or for times when it is even very hard to sell a massage.

It seems this is a much more accepted and fairer approach to dynamic pricing.

But hold on, this is a “Discount Strategy”. Just imagine the marketing and communication strategy around “Mud Wrap, 40% off”, “Full Body Massage, 50% Discount”.

Is this the way we want to position our business? Do you want to give the consumer this kind of image of your beautiful Spa, that of a discount house?

What do do

While discounting is an easy way to attract extra demand, it is unfortunately only a short time solution. A discount strategy brings along dangers, and can have a negative impact on the consumer’s value perception consumers of your treatments and services.

It will actually probably erode your business more than anything, as customers will want access to the discounted prices all the time. We recommend you to stay away from discounting; you will only down trade your own revenue potential.

To implement differential pricing for a spa we will need to get more creative. So in which other way can we maximize revenue during peak periods and deviate demand to off-peak periods, by incentivizing consumers with lower priced treatments, in order to optimize the overall revenue stream of our spa?

The solution to implement different price levels for similar treatments lies in applying conditions associated to the price to justify supplements. You should develop both physical and non-physical hurdles as revenue managers call it.

Physical hurdles or barriers include the location of the treatment room, type of treatment and related services. Non-physical rate hurdles include time of day or day of week, length of treatment, membership of the spa, late bookings, advance reservation…

Practical tips

A simple example: someone who wants a treatment on a Saturday afternoon may pay a higher price for a 60-minute treat than booking a 45-minute product on a Tuesday morning.

A treatment in a private room may cost more than a treatment in a shared or with curtains separated treatment area. Views and level of comfort of a treatment room are great yield tools. Such barriers are necessary for a revenue management strategy to work effectively.

To achieve the best possible financial results in a spa, we have to implement a yield technique called Menu Engineering. With this approach we identify which treatments give us the highest profit margins.

So, as a first step we will need to segment the product / services offer according to volume of sales, duration time and profitability.

Once you have dissected out treatment menu in this way, you can now start planning what type of service to offer during peak hours. Those would be the ones with the highest profit margins of course.

Menu Engineering goes to the core of the definition of revenue management: offer the right product at the right time, at the right price.

Profitability can be optimized by offering treatment(s) with the highest margin during high demand times. This way a spa can increase its overall profit margin quite easily without significant changes.

An example:

• A spa has a strong demand on weekends, especially from 11h00 till 15h00. During these ours esthetical services like manicures which for this spa offer a low profit contribution value per hour will not be offered during this time frame, but will be available in the mornings or late afternoon.

During the peak hours the will only offer in this case highly profitable treatments like reflexology and full body scrubs.

The above yield technique is known as the dynamic availability and is a very effective approach to increase profit for a spa by replacing lower-margin sales by high-margin sales during peak hours.

Now that we understand the basics of Menu Engineering and Dynamic Availability let’s take the next step.

We need to identify the products most beneficial to a Spa resort segmenting the, according to volume of sales (demand) and the margin. Menu Engineering identifies four types or level of products:

• Stars – demand strong and high margins
• Plow Horses – demand strong and low margins
• Puzzles – low demand and high margins
• Dogs – low demand and low margins

Besides implementing dynamic availability of these different product types, it will be very important to also manage effectively the utilization of spa resources and facilities that can support various services.

For instance, a treatment room should only be available for treatment of higher margin in peak times. If a spa has three stations and four treatment rooms that can accommodate either manicures or massages, manicures should be made at the stations at any time and leave the treatment room available for a massage with more profitability.

There you will have a positive impact on revenues and margins. In the same way you can manage the working time of the team.

As an alternative method to increase revenue and profit for spas, we have also achieved good results through applying Dynamic Pricing. Here are some samples of our actions:

• Express Massage at a reduce price for only 45 minutes available only in the morning to attract customers during periods of low demand.
• Early Bird Massage to encourage advance sales. This massage was distributed through all sales channels to attract more customers and is nonrefundable, of course…
• In-Room Massage, off-site (If you have a pool, it’s even better)… to increase the total capacity of your spa

Due to the nature of spa operations and facilities, a strategy of dynamic availability is generally the most effective technique to apply. Such strategy has less impact on clients seeking experiences and more impact on the profitability of the spa.

Good luck on the implementation of Revenue Management to your Spa. And give us feedback on how it goes…

NB: Image via Shutterstock.

NB2: Visit the Xotels blog for more tips and guidance.