Hotel Strategy Blog by Bookassist

Five steps to engaging online with your customers' conversations

2010-01-20T13:00:00.003Z

It seems odd to have to make this obvious statement in 2010, but hotels' behavior still indicates that they are not seeing the obvious: Customer reviews are one side of a conversation - hotels need to answer back. Hotels not dealing with this are going to be increasingly in trouble when trying to build their online and offline revenue.

In the last number of years, the hospitality industry has witnessed an explosion of customer-generated content. Ask any average person what they think the highest-trafficked sites in travel are and you will generally get a list of high profile third party hotel booking sites. And of course there are plenty of big brand names dominating booking. But they are not dominating travel. Any ranking of travel sites by traffic will show you that bookings sites are nowhere near the top of the pile, but rather review sites and customer generated comment are the leaders in capturing people's eyeballs online.

What this tells us is that booking is the end point of a process, and that this process is increasingly dominated by online research. Potential customers want to explore, to read and to be informed before they eventually settle on the target for booking.

Yet a cursory look at some of the dominant online players in hotel reviews reveals the fact that hotels are still not engaging with this. Time and again we see review after review by guests online with no response or input from hotels. As a hotel, think about what this means to your potential customers: if a customer stood in the lobby and either complained or praised your staff or hotel, would you let them stand there without even acknowledging their presence? At the very least it would be rude, but more likely it would result in you losing that customer for life, as well as anybody that he might talk to. Your repeat custom would suffer rapidly.

The startling absense of hotels from the online conversation is very visually highlighted in Bookassist's recent launch of an iPhone mobile hotel app platform. Customer reviews that have been automatically collected by the booking system for hotels over the past number of years are displayed as a key feature of the iPhone app, and are represented by conversation "bubbles" coming from the customers. Yet many hotels have never used the system's opportunity to respond, leading to the iPhone app's review display looking like an unanswered conversation of one-sided bubbles, which of course is exactly what it is. Where hotels have responded, such as that shown in the image, the positive impact on the potential customer browsing the reviews is clear - this hotel cares, this hotel takes me seriously, this hotel fosters customer relations.

Hotels that respond to comments, such as ARCOTEL Kaiserwasser staff in the image above, are engaging in a conversation that speaks volumes about their commitment to customer relations.

Hotels, make it a resolution now to engage online with your customers in 2010. You need to put interaction with your potential online customers to center stage and not just treat it as an inconvenience. There is no hiding online and there's no point hoping it will all go away.

1. Set Google Alerts on your hotel name and variations of it so you can instantly see if someone is referring to you online. Make sure someone in your organisation has clear ownership of monitoring this.

2. Register with the major online review sites such as TripAdvisor and, again, make sure that someone in your organisation has ownership of the reading and responding process.

3. Get on Twitter, monitor Twitter for comments about your hotel, and assign that task to someone in your organisation as a primary role, not just something to do when they find a minute here and there.

4. Remember it is a conversation - you must respond to positive as well as negative comments just as you would if the person was standing in front of you. Refusing to make eye contact or ignoring the person talking to you gets you nowhere in real life, and if anything makes matters significantly worse. It is exactly the same online - except that this time the whole world is gauging your refusal to interact and what it might mean for them as a potential customer.

5. Get proactive, not just reactive. Conversation is a two-way street so instead of just responding, get out there and have your say first. Get online and tell people about new developments in your hotel, tell people about events, ask your guests their opinions. Use blogs, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and other approaches to get your name and your opinions out there. Remember, all of these have the added advantage of being found in the search engines when someone is looking for information about you.

Hotels shouldn't assume they will follow the same path through the economic cycle that they did before

2009-12-07T08:56:00.011Z

It's reasonably well documented that the hotel industry goes through a cycle of peaks and troughs in its economic behaviour. Data from STR Global, Forrester and our own Bookassist data, seasonally adjusted, all show cycles of 7-10 years depending on location. Current data on RevPAR, ADR and occupancy across European main destinations would seem to indicate that we are leveling out at the bottom of the trough, or have already done so, and that recovery is likely in mid to late 2010 on average, assuming nothing major throws a spanner in the works.

The idea of the cycle is a welcome one for the industry as a whole. But averages are averages - they are not an indication of what will happen to your hotel directly. Hotels shouldn't be complacent and assume that they will follow the same safe path through the economic recovery cycle that they did before. As usual, statistics need to be interpreted very carefully.

Economic Cycle, we are currently at about 5 or 6 o'clock in the cycle and some may begin to see upswing to recovery in the next 2 quarters

While the industry as a whole will undoubtedly rise again to another recovery and peak, the hotels that followed that path at any time in the past did so successfully because they seized the market opportunities and adjusted to the realities of the market at that time. Likewise, those who will lead the recovery and benefit from it this time are those who have to embrace the clear shift towards consumer direct booking online through hotel websites with hotel booking engines. Those who miss this opportunity will be left behind in the economic trough.

The recession has accelerated the consumer's use of the internet to research and book hotels. This is because the consumer has increasingly shifted towards examining the detail of what is on offer and searching for value before booking. The simplest way to do this research and comparison is online. Online booking through hotel websites with booking engines like Bookassist's, as a proportion of total business, has continued to have double-digit growth right through the recessionary period. Consumers are now used to this online approach and are likely to continue the trend of internet research and booking as recession gives way to recovery. Also, supply has altered since the last peak and trough, and in some locations it has done so dramatically. This will have a strong effect on the manner in which the recovery takes place, with weaker hotels being forced not just downwards but fully out of the market.

Hotels must seize the opportunities afforded by direct booking through their own websites, while managing distribution through third party channels appropriately. Hotels who cede control of their online inventory to third parties alone are increasingly losing control of their online presence and damaging their long term viability. Now is the time to develop and sharpen your hotel's online strategy to focus strongly on building business and loyalty through direct booking on your own website, ensuring that it becomes the primary revenue generator for your online business. Not only is it the cheapest channel, saving you multiple euros for each and every booking shifted from channel to direct, but it puts you rather than a third party in control of your revenue as the industry rises through recovery.

Dr Des O’Mahony is CEO and Founder of Bookassist, the leading online strategy and technology partner for the hotel industry. Follow Bookassist on Twitter at twitter.com/bookassist

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Variation also published on hotelmarketing.com as:

"What hotels must do to rise from recession" http://bit.ly/5AsgdX

Five Steps for Hotels to Build Repeat Business

2009-12-07T08:02:00.002Z

Marketers have long talked about the concept of customer Life Time Value (LTV). For hotels in an increasingly global and connected marketplace this is more important than ever. LTV is about future profitability of the customer to you, from future cash flows generated from that customer and their actions on your behalf.

Life Time Value is made up of multiple blocks of income over the lifetime of the customer relationship. There is the revenue from that first booking, the revenue from any additional purchases or services added during that stay. There is the value of good recommendations to other customers that this stay may generate, which nicely results in a reduction in the cost of acquiring new customers. And there is the premium obtained from future stays of that guest if, and this is the big if, they are satisfied with the first stay. All these blocks of income need to be considered in the LTV calculation of that customer.

For any first-time guest that comes through your door, there has already been a cost to you for gaining that customer. For customers delivered via channel websites, that cost is dominated by the larger commission fees paid to those site - but there is also the potential future loss to you of the customer loyalty whereby that customer may well use the channel site into the future and avail of different hotels instead of yours. For customers delivered directly via your own website, there are other charges such as the cost of building and maintaining your website, the cost of your own online marketing campaigns, cost of offline marketing, fees or commissions for your own online booking etc., all of which can be calculated as an average value, the Cost Per New Customer (CPNC) for your business.

In many cases, a careful calculation of the CPNC will reveal that the profit from a single stay is unlikely to outweigh that acquisition cost. Multiple stays, up-sells, or reducing cost of acquisition are therefore a must in order to grow revenue and profitability.

To calculate LTV and CPNC figures reliably, you need years of customer data. But the principles of the issue are usually sufficient as a starting point to help you improve LTV substantially.

1. Improve Front Line Service
Front line service levels are more critical now than ever. They need to be maintained and constantly monitored and improved where possible. Always ensure your staff are trained to be helpful, pleasant and accommodating at all times. Impress upon them the consequences of poor customer service for future earnings and the potential damage that can be caused by poor reviews and word of mouth. Ensure they realise that every action and every guest counts and that failure to meet standards has real financial consequences for the business, and by extension their job security. Staff training is a relatively cheap cost in comparison that the cost of offline and online marketing. Invest now and continually.

2. Aim For High Online Service Levels
You must ensure that the service afforded your guest online is as good as that offline. With more than 50% of all reservations in 2010 estimated to be completed online, your website is in a very competitive landscape. Ensure that you provide high quality imagery. Ensure that you anticipate your customers’ needs in terms of mapping, directions, local information. Above all, be sure that your online booking system is clear and informative, helps the user through the process, instills confidence through its security handling and security standards compliance such as PCI compliance, works in the user’s language and currency, and offers convenience such as SMS booking confirmation. Bookassist's booking engine covers all of these issues and more.

3. Listen To Your Guests, And Respond
Review and discussion sites and forums are the most popular tourist sites today. It is an old maxim that bad reviews that are dealt with and handled well result in the most loyal of customers. It is critical to manage your online presence on sites like TripAdvisor, ensuring that you answer the good as well as the bad reviews. Remember, if someone praises you person to person, you don’t just ignore them, you thank them. So do the same online. Use a review service, like that built into Bookassist's booking engine, that allows you feed genuine customer reviews right to your own website. Potential customers then see that their views are taken seriously, they know they have a direct forum if required and they know that the hotel will respond appropriately to issues they may have.

4. Don’t Abuse Email Marketing
Ensure your website or booking engine operates as an opt-in service for future communications. Apart from the legal requirements, opt-in is a very valuable concept. Batch emailing everyone simply annoys the majority, potentially damaging repeat business and referrals and lowering your LTV. With opt-in, you have a much smaller but much more dedicated list of those who specifically wish to see your special offers and other communications. The relative success rate is proven to be an order of magnitude higher without the concurrent annoyance to those who are not interested. But don’t let it lead to “email fatigue”, wearing out your welcome. Generally for hotels, emailing about once a month is not too high a frequency - but again it is proven that the higher the frequency the lower the response. Examine your client base carefully - if people on average return once a year, then isn’t emailing once a week a little excessive?

5. Reward Stays, Not Just Loyalty
We have all experienced this one, particular from telecoms or cable companies. The company advertises a great deal, but won’t let you avail of it unless you are a new customer. This is very negative marketing. It screams to existing customers that they are considered of less value to the company. It works to an extent for companies that require lock-in to long-term contracts. Hotels don’t have that luxury. As a hotel, you must therefore improve the chances of the customer returning to you by incentivising them as much as possible at all times. Consider upgrading guests when you have distressed inventory, for no reason other than that they are your guests. If there is some fee service at your hotel, consider sometimes giving it for free for a day. If the spa is underused today, offer a free spot to the first people who arrive down to breakfast. Random acts of kindness may be a small cost, but result in great reviews and goodwill.

Bottom line - be concerned about building and maintaining your customer relationship online and offline. Losing a customer is not just lost future income, but real cost too since reactivation costs are usually significant. You shouldn’t be too concerned at spending more than the average profit in order to generate the first sale, provided you have strategically planned on ensuring good life time value from your customer relationships.

Dr Des O’Mahony is CEO and Founder of Bookassist, the leading online strategy and technology partner for the hotel industry. Follow Bookassist on Twitter at twitter.com/bookassist

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Originally published on hotelmarketing.com as:
"Five steps to repeat booking success" http://bit.ly/8l7Aba

Google introduces sitelinks in PPC adverts

2009-11-10T16:40:00.006Z

Google today introduced sitelinks embeddable in the PPC advert to bring users directly to specific pages on the advertised website (live in Ireland campaigns this afternoon). The new sitelinks are configurable in the Adwords campaign and appear only when the advert is displayed in top of page position.

Google recently enhanced PPC adverts with mapping and address data also.

See Inside AdWords: Increasing choice and relevancy in search ads

Content Continues To Be King

2009-10-06T17:26:00.008+01:00

In late September, Google finally confirmed officially what many of us have suspected for years - that the <meta name=”keywords”...> tag attribute (hereafter simply “the keywords meta tag”) in web pages has no effect on Google search results rank.

Fundamentally, what this means is that attempts to tell Google what your web site is about don’t work - Google will figure this out for itself thank you. Pretending to be something you are not won’t work. Tricks to make yourself look better than you are won’t work. Google of course uses various methods of its own to determine where you should rank in search engine results and will largely see through attempts to spoof it. Primary among those methods is to ascertain what the content of a website really is. Getting the content right is the single best way to ensure Google’s approval - plus it serves to entice and engage online readers, and to build quality incoming links.

Some Tags Are Better Than Others

There’s a bit more to the tags issue though. Web developers/designers insert various tags and tag attributes into web pages that are either necessary or useful and that are used by search engines, but not necessarily for search rank. For example, if you choose “View > Page Source” for a web page in Firefox, for example, the code behind the page you can see will contain entries like:
  <title>
  <meta name=”description”...>
  <meta name=”keywords”...>
among many others, such as the example code snippet shown below (click to enlarge)

The keywords meta tag has traditionally been applied to inform search engines of the primary focus of the website. This is the one Google doesn’t read anymore, saying that “Because the keywords meta tag was so often abused, many years ago Google began disregarding the keywords meta tag”.

On the other hand, Google is not the only game in town, and Bing has a slightly different approach saying that the keywords meta tag “is not the page rank panacea it once was back in the prehistoric days of Internet search. It was abused far too much and lost most of its cachet. But there’s no need to ignore the tag. Take advantage of all legitimate opportunities to score keyword credit, even when the payoff is relatively low.”

Search results do make use of other tags however, at least for result display purposes. The page title and description meta tags are used by Google directly in displaying its search results - for example the first result in the figure below (click to enlarge) shows the title and description meta tag that we “fed” to Google using the code shown above. While the effect of the title and description meta tags on the actual search result position is not clear, it is certainly important to have them correct and meaningful for the user who ultimately looks at those search results since they must create an impact and give immediate information if you are to capitalise on your search ranking. At least this is one area over which you have definite control.

The Dual Online User

This highlights one key tenet in getting your website just right online. It needs to be right for dual users - firstly, for the search engine that has to read and assess the site and determine how to return the address in search results, and secondly for the viewer who will click on results and ultimately interact with your site. The approach to optimising for these dual users is quite different but there are overlaps, content being the primary one.

What Search Engines Like

Google works very hard to make sure that its search results are as relevant as possible to the search phrase used. The more accurate Google is, the more likely people will continue using it and the more money it will make from displaying relevant adverts. So Google really needs to get it right.

The Google webcrawler program trawls the web and reads the code behind web pages, attempting to categorise the sites in its database. While the algorithm it uses to assess websites is no doubt complex, it is basically a dumb machine and must make judgement calls only on what is presented to it in plain text. The domain name, page title, the description tag are a starting point, but unless the information and wording contained therein are backed up by solid content on the page that reinforces the title and description, then the Google webcrawler feels that something is amiss and the ranking of the site will suffer.

To take an extreme example, suppose your page title is “Boutique Hotel in Dublin”, and your description tag is “We are a boutique hotel in Dublin”, but then your entire page content is about dog kennels. Then the Google webcrawler won’t consider your site a good result to show to anyone who is searching for information about “boutique hotels in Dublin” or about “dog kennels” for that matter. The structure and the content are simply not matching up. A web page has to do exactly what it says on the tin or it will be punished.

When a person searches for a specific phrase, like “boutique hotels in Dublin”, then Google really wants to display information about “boutique hotels in Dublin” and about nothing else. The likely best candidates are websites that have domain names that use the terms “boutique”, “hotel” and “dublin” AND page titles that use the terms “boutique”, “hotel” and “dublin” AND page content that makes regular use of the words “boutique”, “hotel” and “dublin” (preferably repeated use to up the keyword “density” of the content, but not too much use so that Google again is suspicious of your motives!). If external websites have links to this site that use the terms “boutique”, “hotel” and “dublin” in the text of the link, then Google further approves since other websites appear to be sending people to the site based on the same search terms, so the external link endorsement is worth something to Google.

Getting To The Top

So it is clear that the content of your website really needs attention to ensure that any search terms you want to be found for are targeted in your copy and are matched with page titles, descriptions and where possible web domains. For example, if as a hotel, your location is a key issue for your business, then refer to it at least four or five times in the content on your home page. Likewise for any other issues important to your business: if your spa treatment is a primary earner, then have a spa treatment page, with a title referring to spa treatment, a file name referring to spa treatment, content mentioning the spa treatment a number of times, images with file names relating to spa treatment and image alt descriptions referring to spa treatment and so on. Remember, the webcrawler that is trying to assess your page has no interest in colour schemes, Flash content, text rendered as images, photographs or aesthetics - it can only read information clearly presented to it in text form, so you need to get every element of the page “singing off the same hymn sheet” in order to make your point.

Good Content

Writing good content that can target keywords of the right density to Google but still be interesting enough to catch the online user’s eye is a difficult task. But it is also important that the content evolves as far as Google is concerned. Continually refreshing content is therefore critical also for search ranking, and one of the best ways to tackle the content issue is through the use of blogs.

Blogs are an easy and natural way to write content. Hotels can write on specific events, festivals, nearby attractions, recipes from their kitchen, unusual guests requests, all sorts of things, and use the blog simply as the newspage for the site. These entries make for interesting reading and are naturally full of good keyword content about your hotel and your area. It is also a way to involve more of your staff in contributing content and give them more ownership of the customer experience, as well as inviting customers to comment also.

There are many hotels who now build their entire web presence around a blog and booking engine only, eliminating completely the static brochure approach that typifies many hotel websites. For a good introduction to what blogs can do for your hotel and for your hotel website’s content, check out the video Interview with Juli Lederhaus of Hawthorne Hotel in Massachusetts available on YouTube.

Get What You Deserve

The bottom line is: the best way to get to the top of the search engine results listings is to deserve it. Forget the tricks and instead strive to give information that people are actually looking for and are interested in. With the recent launch of Google’s Sidewiki, people will increasingly pass public comment on your website in any case, so chances are you will begin to get feedback that you must tend to through dynamic content whether you like it or not.

Content of websites continues to be king. In the end, for search engine position and keeping users interested, there really is nothing else to beat it.

Dr Des O’Mahony is CEO and Founder of Bookassist, the leading online strategy and technology partner for the hotel industry. Follow Bookassist on Twitter at twitter.com/bookassist

Google inserts Ads into iPhone maps - Pay Per Tap (PPT) ramps up

2009-10-05T22:25:00.014+01:00

Google has recently launched sponsored links directly on iPhone's (and iPod Touch's) native Google maps app. When searching for services in an area on the maps app, for example searching for hotels on a map, sponsored links can now appear alongside regular service links as shown in the example below of a "New York hotels" search. Sponsored links get a special marker compared to the usual pin also (as shown on the right).

If the user taps the sponsored link, the usual screen containing phone number, address, and directions appears but additionally shows some brief, italicised ad copy under the name of the business.

Can we propose a new acronym - Pay Per Tap?

The service doesn't appear to be live in Ireland yet. Clearly, the drive towards mobile advertising is in full swing, with mobile the next battleground for pay per "tap" (PPT) funds.

See Inside AdWords

The multiple (and often overlooked) advantages of separating out add-ons as part of the booking process

2009-09-21T15:59:00.010+01:00

Bookassist has allowed hoteliers to offer additional services as part of the booking engine for many years. For example, hoteliers can offer spa treatments, room services, transport to and from the airport as additions during online booking. Hotels can group similar add-ons into categories and add photographs to make the whole offer more appealing. The obvious advantage here is that it allows hoteliers to upsell and generate additional revenue from the online booking process. Our figures show that add-ons are a significant ongoing earner for hotels.

But there are additional advantages to the use of add-ons other than the straightforward upsell advantage.

#1 Dynamic Packaging
Add-ons give the guest the freedom to dynamically package their stay, to pick and choose what they want. This freedom is something the guest welcomes online. But the success of this requires that the hotel is clever about what they are offering in their add-ons list compared to the basic room offer so that proper dynamic packaging is possible. Your account manager can help to adjust your online offering in terms of rooms and add-ons to make the total offering more easily packagable and attractive to the online customer.

#2 Promoting Competitive Rates
By smart use of add-ons, you can split out extra services and keep basic packages and room types listed at the lowest possible online rate, thus gaining a competitive advantage online. A room-only rate can be listed in the booking engine, keeping the initial offering clean, simple and uncluttered which reduces confusion and increases the conversion rate. Simple room rates then allow the upsell of add-ons to deal with any required extras. It keeps your room rates stripped back to a low entry cost and helps build more direct business rather than losing it to third parties or competitors who are adept at advertising low rates.

#3 Strong Advertising Value
A comprehensive and attractive list of add-ons in the booking engine also advertises what your hotel is capable of providing. Even if they are not purchased by a customer immediately as part of the booking process, the customer now knows the kind of service levels that are possible and forms a higher opinion of the hotel before they even arrive. A good add-ons list may be the very factor that convinces an undecided online booker to actually book. Furthermore, it sticks in the customer's mind what this hotel can now offer, and the next time they are looking for something like spa treatments, or that perfect gift for someone, they may remember what they saw detailed on the hotel's booking engine, giving you another competitive advantage in future sales.

For more details on optimising add-ons in your booking engine set-up, contact your Bookassist account manager.

Dr Des O’Mahony is CEO and Founder of Bookassist, the leading online strategy and technology partner for the hotel industry. Follow Bookassist on Twitter at twitter.com/bookassist

Google folds Mapping and Address Extensions into Adwords

2009-08-24T15:03:00.003+01:00

Google Adwords now allows you to extend your advert content to include Google Local information right in the advert (in other words Google Maps) and further enhance the utility and visual appeal of your adverts.

As an example of this in action, Bookassist's Traffic Builder team have recently completed the addition of Google Local to a number of campaigns - for example a search for Camden Court Hotel (camdencourthotel.com) in Dublin reveals the map content added to the advert (the "show map" link at the bottom of the advert below):

When you click the "+" next to the map link, the location opens up directly in the advert. A similar search for the Mespil Hotel (mespilhotel.com) again shows this functionality, where the map is now embedded directly in the PPC advert, include the "get directions" functionality:

According to Emel Mutlu, a member of Google's AdWords team writing on their blog on July 24th: “Location extensions allow you to "extend" your AdWords campaigns by dynamically attaching your business address to your ads. This new feature will be fully available in the coming weeks, with some advertisers having access to the feature starting today.” The features have landed in Ireland now and are extending to other countries.

Local business adverts are now no longer a separate entity, but are identical in form to the new local-enhanced Adwords adverts. This also helps streamline the Adwords process for advertisers.

This extension to Google Local shows that the adverts are themselves beginning to mix the media available to Google - Google have already implemented blended search (see: article on blended search) where different search elements like maps, video, news are listed in search results along with the traditional website results.

Folding blended search ideas in Adwords seems to be the direction this is going - expect to see embedded video and other items soon.

Using social media to build customer relationships

2009-08-12T11:14:00.003+01:00

Online marketing for hotels is quite different from online marketing for other products. For example, a hotel is in a fixed location, so marketing to those to whom the location will appeal must form part of the strategy. Hotels have quite individual character, so finding something unique to ensure you stand out from the crowd in the busy hospitality storefront is also crucial. The hotel is rarely the reason for traveling (except for a lucky minority who manage to make the hotel the destination itself), so the choice of hotel is ancillary to the primary travel purpose and this must be factored in by trying to determine the most likely reason your guest are searching for a property like yours. And on and on it goes.

This sounds like a lot of work to get right, and it usually is. But Web 2.0 tools help get to the bottom of this quite quickly if you use them effectively. Fundamentally, the tools of social media online can not only help you market your hotel effectively, but their use can wake you up to how your customers perceive your business. The valuable and free information gleaned can allow you to rapidly improve customer satisfaction. Be prepared to be humble - the customer’s perception is often quite different from yours, but remember it is only theirs that matters.

Everyone and their dog is saying that social media tools such as Facebook, Twitter, Blogger and other Web 2.0 platforms such as YouTube, Picasa are increasingly important. But important for what exactly? Before jumping in, it is important to step back and appreciate what exactly you are trying to achieve by using such tools. Put simply, when you have a particular purpose in mind, you choose a tool or approach that best suits the purpose. You don’t find a tool and then look around for something to do with it.

Not the forum for the hard sell

With social networking, you are basically trying to build or enhance your brand through engaging your customers, and you are aiming to build deeper relationships with them. While the reason for this ultimately is to raise your profile and build potential future custom, this is not a forum for the hard sell. If you want the hard sell, invest in advertising. After all, social networking is “social”, meaning people-oriented, community, common interests, like-mindedness, and “networking”, the intercommunication of those people on a voluntary basis.

Social networking is all about being part of a conversation. To be successful with social media, just like in a conversation, you have to be prepared to listen, you have to have something interesting to say, you have to contribute something new so that people are bothered to listen, and you have to engage on the level of everyone else and avoid preaching. Sticking to those rules will ensure success in social media either personally or as a business.

Charleville Lodge Boosts Business by 59%

As an online strategy partner for hotels, Bookassist (bookassist.org) has been engaged in the social media and web 2.0 arena for some time and in recent years has been strongly encouraging their hotel clients to be proactive online. Following a Bookassist seminar on web 2.0 tools in mid 2008, owner/manager Paul Stenson of Charleville Lodge boutique hotel in Phibsboro, Dublin (www.charlevillelodge.ie) decided to focus on interacting with his customers via TripAdvisor and Facebook, as well as providing a richer web experience to them via Youtube and Picasa.

According to Stenson, they’ve seen “over 8000 views on the Youtube account in that first year. We can see that people move from there to the website and vice versa so it’s definitely something people are interested in seeing.” While he acknowledges that directly attributing bookings and revenue to his use of web 2.0 tools is hard to track, he has no doubt about the success of the strategy. “We’ve had a successful website for many years, but used Bookassist for a new website in 2008. We worked with them also to set up Youtube, Facebook and other tools. In the year since we started, we’ve seen a 59% increase in direct booking income through our website compared to the previous year. Bear in mind that this is in the middle of a recession and our booking value has been forced downwards also with increased competition”, says Stenson, “so we consider that pretty strong proof of the power of social networking”.

Stenson is also rigorous in his approach to TripAdvisor, ensuring that he deals with issues that may arise as quickly as possible. “There is no doubt that guests are cross-referencing TripAdvisor content with our website, our Facebook pages, the reviews we publish on our own website in the Bookassist booking engine, all of these things. People clearly want assurance before they book and we have to be sure we keep on top of it all.”

Using Facebook to talk with customers, answer queries and provide information is something that has become routine in Charleville Lodge, with staff always online to field queries. With hundreds of followers, tracking of incoming bookings for his hotel originating from Facebook hits is on the rise, according to Stenson. “The interest via Facebook is strong, but the drawback is that customers have to request to be a friend first before we can interact. We’re now working with Bookassist on a Twitter strategy so we can converse with potential customers in a more immediate and natural way and be even more proactive in getting the news out there about our property and getting guests’ views. It’s early days but Twitter seems the way to go.”

“Getting” or “not getting” Twitter

Stenson’s experience highlights one of the key differences between sites such as Facebook, MySpace, Bebo, and the Twitter service. While Facebook and the others are largely about keeping in touch with people you know, in a leisurely way, Twitter is about finding people you don’t know but who have information you need or questions you can answer. Twitter is extremely immediate, reflecting what’s on people’s minds right now.

Twitter is undoubtedly becoming more and more important, but it is still a mystery to most business owners in terms of where it sits in their online strategy. Bookassist’s view is that it can sit dead-centre if handled properly.

There’s a typical evolution that people go through in embracing the Twitter platform. They first see it as a useless fad and ignore it, but they eventually try it out to see what the fuss is about. At this stage they don’t quite “get” it. If they persist, then they get comfortable posting tweets but even now are really just using it “one-way” to make observations or statements. This is as far as most businesses go. But moving beyond this to a real “two-way” conversation is the real hard part. Persistence pays off.

Hotels should set up Twitter accounts and use tweets to advertise special offers or events they may have. Tweets should contain keywords that others may be searching for to improve your chances of being read, (“hotel”, “special”, “dublin” book”) and the offers should be immediate, for tonight, tomorrow etc., since Twitter is so immediate. This is the basic approach of using Twitter in an advertising strategy.

But hotels should also pose questions to their guests using Twitter, to try to get conversations going. For example, “do you think our atrium dining room is the best feature in the hotel?” might elicit responses where people say they didn’t realise you had an atrium and something else was far more important to them in their stay. You now have valuable information about what is important to your guests. You can ask if guests would like to see any other kind of events, or ask how specific services can be improved. Rather than waiting for comments or fielding complaints like in TripAdvisor, you can get into the driving seat with Twitter.

Going beyond this, the open approach of Twitter where your tweets are published to the entire world by default, as are your guests tweets, means that anyone can search for all conversations that involve your hotel and can therefore see an entire history of what you say online and how your interact with your guests. And how quickly you resolve issues. Likewise you can jump into conversations involving your competitors and legitimately highlight how you would have done it differently, or offered better service, giving you a marketing advantage. Once you tweet honestly, are not overly commercial in pushing your business, and remember that everything is public and forever, then you have nothing to fear from being part of the online chat.

Undoubtedly, time commitment is an issue for hoteliers. Once you begin with Twitter, you need to continue to do so or your lack of interaction itself becomes a negative. Because it is fundamentally “personal” in its approach, it puts you the business owner at the front line. But there is no better way to engender trust in your customer base than to interact with them on a personal level, with immediacy, and to show through your public interactions with others that you actually care.

According to Stenson at Charleville Lodge, “it all really just boils down to service. If you can show high service levels online before they even arrive at your hotel, which these tools help you to do, then you are already winning”.

Charleville lodge is online at www.charlevillelodge.ie, and is on Facebook, YouTube and just beginning to take the plunge on Twitter.

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Dr Des O’Mahony is CEO and Founder at Bookassist, the leading technology and online strategy partner for the hospitality industry.

Interview: Bookassist bucks the trend with continued growth in revenue and staff

2009-07-01T10:00:00.000+01:00

Bookassist CEO Dr Des O’Mahony in conversation with the Hotel & Restaurant Times, June 2009.

Bookassist is in an unusual situation compared to most firms in the current downturn. Bucking the trend, the Dublin-headquartered online marketing strategy and reservations technology company continues to grow its revenues. It has even embarked on another recruitment drive for its offices in Ireland and abroad, targeting skilled senior managers and employees in business development, search engine marketing and sales.

“We’re not entirely insulated from the economic situation, we do see significant changes across all our markets”, says Dr Des O’Mahony, Bookassist CEO and co-founder. “Ireland has certainly seen pressure on rates and on occupancy, but those issues also make hoteliers more aware of the value of the services being offered, so delivering on your promises is more important than ever, and Bookassist works hard on that.”

Bookassist has expanded its staff not just in Ireland, but has recruited a new team for Central Europe based at its Prague office and has begun to build significant business in Spain, Austria, Italy and France. “What we learn in one market, we can apply in another, so having a broad view of the industry and how it reacts in different ways in different countries is a great advantage that we can bring to our hotel clients”, says O’Mahony.

The optimistic view

Having recently given a presentation on the optimistic side of the fence at the Smile conference on May 21st in Dublin, O’Mahony plays down the doom and gloom that much of the industry is dwelling on at the moment and insists that there are opportunities to be tapped into right now.

“There is a big focus on the trends downwards, the averages in rates and occupancy looking bad compared to previous years etc. There’s a lot of negativity and some is undoubtedly justified. But there are two sides to this. Firstly, averages mean nothing to an individual hotel – the beauty of averages is that for every piece of data that’s below the line there’s one above the line, outperforming the average. This is where you want to be. Secondly, looking at rates only hides the fact that if the cost per acquisition can be reduced, lowering of rates is far less painful.”

The discussion on strategy is one that Bookassist staff increasingly try to have with hotels, insisting that despite the software products on offer, no piece of code is going to increase a hotel’s revenue without the hotel changing how they view the marketplace. Bookassist is about “providing strategic solutions to the hotel industry, not just software”, according to O’Mahony.

“We are pushing the strategic opportunities for hotels right now, and are proving directly to our clients that there are real gains to be made despite the situation most hotels find themselves in. Getting your strategy right in terms of diverting as much business as possible to direct bookings means that your cost of acquisition has dropped considerably compared to other channels. And getting that strategy working means that you are far better positioned to build repeat custom online and take advantage of the inevitable upswing that will come.”

Traditional marketing has been rapidly overtaken

Despite the success of the company’s approach in the Irish marketplace over the past 10 years, where in excess of 35% of Irish hotels now use Bookassist technology, O’Mahony still thinks Irish hoteliers have a way to go when it comes to online strategy: “The Irish marketplace is quite advanced in how it embraces the internet, compared to many markets we operate in. But we still find many situations where hotels expect, or want, say 30% to 40% of their total business to be done online, but wouldn’t for a second consider spending 30% to 40% of their marketing budget on that area. This makes no sense at all – traditional marketing has rapidly been overtaken by new online thinking that hotels are simply nowhere near keeping up with. The work that we are doing with our Web 2.0 enabled booking service, customer reviews, blogs, YouTube, Twitter etc, all of these things are not only paying dividends in terms of increasing a hotel’s exposure in the search results, but they are building a hotel’s brand and increasing their online revenue too.”

O’Mahony recently took a team of Bookassist expert staff on the road to highlight the rapidly changing internet environment to the hotel industry, holding all day seminars in the Czech Republic, France and throughout Ireland for the hotel sector. The roadshow continues in Spain and in Austria shortly. “We still find hotels talking about the importance of hits on their websites without realizing that the key issue is conversion. All the traffic in the world is worth nothing if people aren’t booking. To achieve conversion, to grow conversion, is often about good old-fashioned service levels being transferred to the web environment. This is where we believe Bookassist technology has the edge”.

“The innovative approach in Bookassist’s technology is that it is customer-centric, always has been. The quality of service that a hotel expects to give to a guest at the check-in desk, that’s what we aim to achieve with the online booking experience. Anything less is erosion of the hotel’s service levels and of the hotel’s brand and would not be good enough. If you get that online service level right, then you not only increase your conversion, but you significantly increase your chances of getting that customer’s repeat business online also. Service, attention to detail, these things really matter in an environment like the internet where the competition is pretty much cut-throat.”

The company was the first in the industry to directly integrate their booking engine data with Google’s Analytics tracking tool. This allows participating hotels to see which bookings were generated by which online advertising campaigns and how much was spent to get each booking. This analysis in turn leads to fine-tuning of the online spend budget and a significant increase in the conversion rate for online advertising compared to standard tracking methods. “The beauty of integrating Bookassist with Analytics is that you no longer simply say ‘a hundred euros spent gave me 20 bookings’, which is a standard tracking analysis”, explains O’Mahony. “With our approach, you can say that this advert here, displayed online at this time, cost me this many cents, generated that booking right there, and made me that many euros margin. It’s taken all of the guesswork out of online advertising.”

Bookassist goes far beyond booking and online marketing technology, offering content management system web design, corporate booking facilities, loyalty and rewards systems, GDS management and PMS connectivity. The company is working on a number of new technologies that will reach the market place in the autumn. “We are constantly asking our online customers and our hotels what they want us to do next. Practically everything we develop is driven by feedback, not just by what we ourselves feel we should do”, says O’Mahony, adding: “although sometimes we do surprise them all with something completely new and unexpected, just to keep it more interesting for us and for them!”

Bookassist products and services are described on their corporate website bookassist.org. Bookassist also carries out and publishes market research articles and whitepapers on blogs.bookassist.com/blogs/industry/. To stay up to date, you can follow Bookassist on Twitter at twitter.com/bookassist.

©2009 Hotel & Restaurant Times

Mechandising Your Rooms Online

2009-06-11T15:39:00.004+01:00

The old adage borrowed from another industry of “Retail is in the Detail” should be applied to how you promote your hotel rooms online. Customers who want to purchase online have the same needs and wants as those that come through your front door.

You wouldn’t ignore a customer who was hanging around the reception desk waiting for some information on a room rate before booking, and neither should your website.

Among the key factors that concern customer’s booking rooms online are,
- What does the room look like?
- What’s included in the rate?
- Is the rate good value for money?
- Can I picture myself staying in this room, at this hotel?

If you are on a hotel website and these questions cannot be answered quickly for you then you are much less likely to book. In some cases you may grudgingly call or email the property, if you really really want to stay, but it’s just as easy to go back to your search engine and find another hotel website which can answer your questions.

Bookassist Makes it Easy to Promote your Rooms
Every Room Package loaded onto a Bookassist Booking Engine benefits from clearly displayed rates, high resolution room images and lots of descriptive text, together with an accurate reflection of any applied discounts.

You can see the from the example image that the customer is drawn towards the discount information presented in brighter colours, thus illustrating the value for money. They can also see an image of room itself, which will expand when you mouse over it. And underneath the rate information, (which helpfully spans 7 days) there is significant text description that is persuasive and alluring.

In addition to these key features, the Booking Engine also enables you to group different packages together, as you can see in this example which shows the Superior Rooms options.

What to do next
To get advice on improving the display of your room offerings, contact your Bookassist account manager today.

Google Local launches in Ireland - Kinda

2009-05-20T16:04:00.007+01:00

It's not rolled out across all searches on Google in Ireland, but it is certainly alive and kicking for hotels.

Google recently enhanced their search results pages with the addition of local business results (Google Maps) to searches targeting locations within Ireland. While these results have been available for some time in other locations such as the US and UK, this is the first time that searches for Irish locations have triggered maps as well as web links.

The implications for website owners are that the nature of the results page on Google has changed dramatically. It is no longer sufficient to list highly for location searches in the standard results, if you do not perform well in the map results. The figure below shows the results for a search using the phrase ‘hotels in Dublin’. The clear winners of this change are the sites that appear high in the map listing, as the previous first web listing has now been relegated from first to eleventh place on the page.

Google Local in action today for the search "Dublin Hotels" with the top six hotels availing of Bookassist's Traffic Builder online marketing service

The blended search results are also triggered by property name searches (see below), so it is important to ensure that your listing in Google maps is well managed. We've previously highlighted the usefulness of Google Local as part of Google's drive towards blended search in this blog entry: Get high search ranking through blended search results.

A property name search on Google Ireland today, now showing Google Local information

To maximise the benefits of this change, go to http://www.google.com/local/add/ and log in with a Google account.
You can then claim your map listing by going http://maps.google.com/ and searching for your property by name. Click on the “more info” link and then on the “Add or edit your business” link. From here you can confirm your web and email addresses as well as your physical address and phone number. You can also correct any errors in the map location for your property. When all the important details are correct, you can the concentrate on enhancing your entry by adding a good description, uploading photos and videos, as well as other details such as free wifi or parking.

What hotels should and should not be doing in the current downturn

2009-04-17T10:00:00.005+01:00

In this economic climate, it is even more important to know exactly where your marketing money is being spent, what return on investment you are getting, and how you can maximise it.

What is clear is that the medium that is most easily analysed and maximised in terms of return on spend is the internet, specifically direct selling on the internet. Moving budgets now from offline to online is not only smart in terms of watching budgets, but it affords an opportunity to tap previously untried markets, lower costs per acquired booking, and even generate income growth through promotion of a mix of offerings.

The good news is that bookings online are continuing to grow. Bookassist figures across all our markets have shown a growth in the number of bookings year on year. Many current studies are continuing to show a growth in direct online bookings at the hotel website, at the expense of offline and indirect channel bookings. This is probably because the economic climate is causing people to look around more: the simplest way to look around is online, not offline, and the best chance a customer perceives of getting value is directly at the hotel. So hotels need to tap into this marketplace.

Here are some pointers.

1. Don’t cut your marketing budget. You need it now more than ever. But redirect your marketing spend to online now.
2. Get rid of your hunches, suppositions, feelings. You need facts. Don’t make sudden changes, for example switching suppliers because of a perceived better deal or trying completely new advertising approaches. Sudden changes are the result of panic - you need to hold your nerve until you have the facts. You may well lose the position you have in such a switch, rather than building on your position. Perception needs to be replaced by fact leading to informed rather than rash decisions.
3. Concentrate on direct booking. Be careful how you are using third party intermediary sites. They can commoditise your hotel in simple lists based on price, start rating etc which eliminates your unique qualities. They may be sending you lots of business, but these online customers can be yours directly if you adopt a proper direct booking online strategy as outlined below. The margins of third party intermediaries compared to direct booking on your own website means that you are losing 20% to 30% revenue per booking for each booking received from them. This makes no sense in today’s climate and some of that business can certainly be diverted directly to you with proper planning. And above all, ensure that the rate on your own website is always the best rate. Otherwise, you might as well close down your website.
4. Analyse. Analyse. Analyse. Ensure that services such as Google Analytics work for you by tracking all website usage. Have a clear picture of usage patterns on your website before you rush into changes. Use Google Analytics to analyse your online user base, in terms of their origin for example. It may surprise you and alter your strategy. Use a booking system that can integrate directly with Google Analytics Ecommerce, like the Bookassist Booking Engine. With Bookassist’s Ecommerce integration, every single booking is transferred to Google Analytics and linked to the customer’s path through the website and through the booking process. Any single booking can be directly linked to a specific cent spent on a specific pay per click campaign or email marketing campaign. This is very powerful data and shows instantly where your money is being spent most effectively in terms of return on investment measured in actual booking value. It eliminates the hunch and shows you the bare facts. Google Analytics for web usage is great, but it lacks the real meat: full Ecommerce integration goes way beyond web usage and is critical for optimising ROI.

Bookassist’s ECommerce integration with Google Analytics gives valuable strategic information and allows for fine-tuning of online advertising spend resulting in much higher conversion rates, 5.24% in this example from a Dublin hotel.

5. Act on information you glean from Google Analytics and Ecommerce integration. The conversion figures for lookers to bookers are your key indicator. All the visitors in the world are useless to you if they are not converting. Using Ecommerce integration you also get a much deeper insight into conversion in your target segments. For example, with a recent Dublin-based hotel of ours, visitor numbers alone in Google Analytics showed that the vast majority of the website visitors were UK based, with other countries being far down the list. The traditionalist would therefore target the marketing budget at the UK. But the Ecommerce integration showed us that conversion rates for German visitors to the website were a factor of 4 higher than the UK visitors. So targeting spend at the German market and using German language package descriptions in the booking engine resulted in higher bookings online. It was a safer bet. Only Ecommerce integration can give you this kind of analysis. Using this type of analysis has allowed Bookassist marketing teams to drive conversions on pay per click adverts to over 4% in many cases, a massive increase over industry norms.
6. Analyse your web presence holistically. Remember there are two users of your website, firstly the search engines who will analyse and position it based on its content, and secondly the customer who will use it. The customer won’t come if the search engine hasn’t been targeted. So be smart, you have two jobs to do. Invest your budget into ensuring that your website is optimised for search engines AND ensure it is easy to navigate and booking-friendly for customers and never loses an opportunity to convert. Do not waste your budget on rushing to build a new site just to give yourself a fresh look - remember, you see your website every day and customers see it once or twice a year, so fresh is relative. Be sensible about your spend, target improvements for measurable return on investment reasons, not aesthetics.
7. Structure your online pay per click advertising campaigns so that they promote key attractors and differentiators for your property. Advertise your name as a keyword so that customers who search for your name will get your advert. Advertise your location as a keyword, but be as specific as possible to avoid catch all phrases that are expensive like “Ireland”, “Dublin”. Promote unique qualities in your Adwords text. Alter them frequently and track their conversion to tweak their effectiveness.
8. Combat competition online. Search for your hotel name and see who is using your name to capture your customers. If third parties are using your name to capture search results position, then tell them not to. If competitors are using your name to leapfrog above you in search results, then trademark your name and take action to stop it. Adopting this approach will ensure that people searching for your name, those who are already your customers, will see your website first and
9. Use email marketing effectively. It takes time to build a proper (legal) opt-in email and phone list of customers, but the best way to do it is not to abuse the channel - always give something genuinely special and new in an email blast and use a booking service such as Bookassist’s which allows you to embed links in emails that bring people directly to the booking page for that special, not just to the website or to the general booking page. Use Twitter services to remind users of new offers via mobile phone. Think strategically - for example, advertise offers for this coming weekend so that a sense of urgency is created for the customer who feel they must act now or miss their chance. “Offer ends at midnight, unique offer available for this weekend only!”. Sounds familiar? Airlines have been doing this with a lot of success for some time now.
10. Listen to your online customers and correct issues quickly. Remember that over 80% of travel planning is now done online. Even if people are not booking, they are looking. This colours their future choices. Make sure that you are on top of social media sites such as TripAdvisor and others - be registered with them and monitor your property. Make use of your own customer comments on your website, for example availing of Bookassist’s automatic review system where customers who have booked online and stayed at your hotel are given a follow-up opportunity to submit their views. Above all, always respond to online reviews, whether positive or negative, so that potential customers see that you care. We all know that correcting a fault graciously often engenders more loyalty and satisfaction in a customer.

Be aware that the habits that customers are now learning could well become the norm for the future. Why? Because the approach is yielding value for the customer. Shopping around online, doing research online, making price comparisons online, reading reviews, going directly to source to book. These are all things that may have been enhanced by economic necessity, but are likely to stay as the norm as we exit recession.

Hotels that have tackled this climate constructively and strategically will likely emerge stronger and will be well positioned to capitalise on the upswing that will invariably come.

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Dr Des O’Mahony is CEO and Founder at Bookassist, the leading technology and online marketing supplier to the hospitality industry.

Should you discount your rates in a downturn?

2009-01-26T12:07:00.005Z

By making obvious cutbacks you will only damage your reputation with the people who matter most
Customers' expectation of price may change in a downturn, but their expectations of service levels don't drop. Lowering rates may be one response to weakening occupancy but the lower income generated may result in lower service levels which in the longer term can damage your brand - according to a recent article on Caterer Search on the pros and cons of lowering rates: "by making obvious cutbacks you will only damage your reputation with the people who matter most".

While many strongly advocate reducing rates, there are other avenues to explore.

It's all about value, not price
In discussions with our hotels, Bookassist has advocated the necessity to look at the mix in what you have on offer, showing more value, rather than across-the-board discounting of price which can damage not only an individual hotel brand but an entire sector. Hotels should "look at added-value options to hold price, such as including breakfast free of charge, and focus on increasing the overall revenue they get from clients during their stay", according to Caterer Search. Bookassist's advanced add-ons facility, allowing for upsell directly at the time of booking, is an invaluable tool for this approach to value rather than just price.

For a perspective from the British Hotelier of the Year conference, see: http://www.caterersearch.com/

Get high search ranking through blended search results

2009-01-22T12:42:00.026Z

Optimised web pages are far from the only way today of cruising to the top of the listings thanks to the increasing trend of blended search results

Google Universal Search, an approach also termed “blended search”, is about mixing sources in search results listings - for example giving you image search results and video search results in with traditional relevant website search results. Yahoo! and MSN do this too. To a large extent, the potential for optimising for such blended search has not been seized upon by the marketplace. Launched in May 2007, the second anniversary of Google’s Universal Search is fast approaching and in that short time some very interesting user patterns have emerged which should prompt online marketers to wake up to the very real opportunities being presented for getting your listings in front of customers.

Vertical searches

First, some background. Google and other such search engines are broad-based search engines which are not so good at zoning in on relevant information for more generic searches. Users regularly get a Google results page which states that millions of possible results exist for their query - for example a search today for the term “harmony” yielded the statement “Results 1 - 10 of about 72,200,000 for harmony [definition]”. Often, we have to think hard ourselves about how to narrow down the search to make Google perform more accurately for us.

To counter this problem for users, and to promote its own offerings more, Google continues to launch a number of so-called vertical or specialised searches to allow people confine their searches to certain criteria or avenues of interest. Examples of such vertical searches are Google Image Search, Google Blog Search, Google Local & Maps, Google Patent Search, Scholar etc. You can find these searches in the tabs bar at the top left of the Google home page. There are many other such searches which are proving increasingly useful and gaining in popularity for sophisticated targeted search (Google Accommodation as a vertical may not be that far off, who knows?). But with the exception of Images and Maps, none of these are reaching mainstream searching volumes.

Because many people still don’t use these vertical searches, Google is increasingly promoting results from these verticals in the standard Google results listings by folding in images, videos, books and of course local map results right into the standard search results. Web search is no longer simply “web” search.

An edited example of this is shown in Figure 1. A search for the term “galway” shows the standard results but it is highly mixed - label 1 in the figure shows Google Local & Maps results which might be relevant, placed right at the top. Natural listings of web results start at label 2 but are again interrupted by the insertion of YouTube relevant video results at label 3, before the results revert again to natural listings below the videos. You can do this search a number of times and find that the map or video results may not always appear so the approach from Google is not rigid.

Figure 1: (click image for larger view) Google’s approach to blended search results in its Universal Search interface, which is now the standard. Areas 1, 2 and 3 here show Google Local & Maps, natural listings and YouTube results respectively.

Often, for more specific searches relating to businesses, the Google Local & Maps area will concentrate more solidly on Google Local and show a series of relevant businesses related to your search, such as the Google Local listing shown in Figure 2 for the search term “Berlin Hotels”.

Figure 2: (click image for larger view) Google Local shows relevant businesses related to a search term on an interactive map embedded in the standard search results listings, in this case Berlin Hotels.

How people interact with search results

Probably because images, maps, and videos are more visually striking on a results listing than just plain old natural listings, their influence is far higher in terms of click through rate. Bookassist recognised this early on and has long advocated the use of such media for hotels to promote their business more effectively online and has been at the forefront of Web2.0 implementation in the accommodation sector, not just in Ireland where it is the market leader, but in all its marketplaces abroad.

Research in 2008 by iProspect(1) attempted to quantify what users are doing with these blended search results on Google, Yahoo! and MSN. A diverse user base of just over 2400 was surveyed, which in an ideal world gives an error margin of about 2% and, to be fair to iProspect, their methodology for balancing the backgrounds of the respondents brings them to a conclusion of a slightly wider error margin of about 3%. Some very interesting trends emerged. Summarising the results for users surveyed:

* 68% of users clicked a result on the first page of results, and 92% of users clicked a result within the first three pages of results.
* 36% of users clicked on a “news” result within the blended search results page, and 31% of users clicked on an “image” result within the blended search results page, while only 17% and 26% respectively click a “news” or “image” result after using the news and image vertical searches directly.
* 17% of search engine users surveyed click on a “video” results on a blended search results page, while only 10% click on a “video” result after conducting a video-specific search on the Video tab.

Basically, the research indicated that a user is around twice as likely to click on a specialised search result in a blended listing than on that same results in the vertical search results themselves.

Web 2.0 shines

There are two important lessons here. Firstly, we can get more clicks with good content in the images, news, maps, video, blogs and other “verticals”. But secondly, and more importantly, is that while an enormous amount of blood, sweat and tears is spent by search engine experts in optimising web pages for natural listings - getting keywords right, keyword densities, meta tags, image alt tags, incoming links etc. - the criteria for getting local business listings, videos, images, or other vertical search results into the first page of search results are far more lax at the moment.

Put simply, because there are less videos about “hotels in Berlin” than there are webpages, it is relatively more easy to get your services towards the top of a relevant search by using well-tagged videos, images, blogs etc than by optimising web pages. This is a great opportunity for Web 2.0 content to shine.

A recent Forrester research paper(2) highlighted this current advantage: “On the keywords for which Google offers video results, we found an average of 16,000 videos vying to appear on results pages containing an average of 1.5 video results -- giving each video about an 11,000-to-1 chance of making it onto the first page of results. By comparison, there were an average of 4.7 million text pages competing for a place on results pages with an average of just 9.4 text results -- giving each text page about a 500,000-to-1 chance of appearing on the first page of results.” This statement indicates that an optimised video could be about 45 times more likely to appear in a search result for a particular keyphrase than an optimised webpage. While these figures are again not strictly scientific and should be treated with caution, any user who has seen blended results would see the clear advantage to be had by having additional media available to reflect your business. This advantage clearly won’t last forever.

What to do

Here are some basics that will help you capitalise on these opportunities. Start by registering as a user with Google, then:

* Go to Google Local (local.google.com), and use "My Maps > Create new map" to get your business listed and positioned on the map so that it appears for search results on Google Local & Maps. Use good keywords and descriptions in the business description as you would with regular search engine optimisation.
* Get good quality videos, preferably entertaining and not just brochure-ware, and host your videos on YouTube (youtube.com). Give them keyword optimised titles, tags and descriptions, then use YouTube’s embed feature to embed the videos in your website as a video gallery.
* Get an image gallery of high quality pictures onto Google’s Picasa photo service (picasa.google.com) and embed the image gallery into your website, again with each image having keyword-driven titles, descriptions and tags.
* Go to blogger (blogger.com) and set up a blog and begin to write content on a daily or weekly basis ensuring you always have something relevant to say about your business. You can use basic blogger templates to link your blog to your website and ensure you also link your website to your blog.

Blogger in particular is so simple and effective to use. It is free and easy to set up and, in a hotel's case for example, can be used for advertising special events and other events that change on an ongoing basis rather than the traditional approach of just putting a paragraph on the hotel's events page or special offers page every once and a while. Good URLs are also easier to get with Blogger, for example hotels could set up a URL with prime keywords such as patricksdayindublin.blogspot.com or easteringalway.blogspot.com. Hotels could then create relevant content about such events, but in parallel push their own packages and websites as examples. For annual events, the blogs can remain up all the time, and they should generate more traffic year after year. Good URLs can be worth their weight in gold, figuratively speaking, if used properly.

The key here with all these opportunities is not just to get other vertical searches populated with good information about your business, but to also use these to pull your regular website up through embedding and linking with quality content.

You win on both fronts with your regular website and your new Web 2.0 content.

References
(1) iProspect
(http://www.iprospect.com/premiumPDFs/
researchstudy_apr2008_blendedsearchresults.pdf)
(2) Forrester
(http://blogs.forrester.com/marketing/
2009/01/the-easiest-way.html)

Authors
Dr Des O'Mahony is co-founder & Managing Director of Bookassist, Ciaran Rowe is Senior Search Specialist at Bookassist's Dublin office.

Booking buttons from the channels - proof of the power of direct booking

2009-01-22T09:53:00.000Z

The big name third party accommodation channels have served an important role in the online travel arena. In the years when search engines were only beginning (Google started in late '98) and hotels did not have the knowledge to market themselves properly online, third party channels were the very necessary middle-man between the online booker and the accommodation provider, facilitating indirect booking. Their generally high commission charges were justified by the delivery of business that otherwise was lost to the hotel.

As direct search moved to dominance, as online bookers became more savvy and in particular as hotels embrace online marketing, the need for customers to use third parties is rapidly diminishing and the opportunity for direct booking between customer to hotel is rapidly rising. Not only can this direct booking model providing better value for the online customer, it is also helping hotels strongly reduce their commission charges while allowing them build their own brand allegiance online to capture repeat business.

Bookassist was the first to push this direct booking model for hotels, since its foundation in 1999, constantly highlighting its growth and its importance as the key booking strategy for hotels. An average of 50% of hotel business is now generated online, and the more of this that comes direct, the better for the hotel.

In this changing environment, third party channels are beginning to recognise this shift in consumer habits which will begin to erode their indirect booking income stream. In recent months, two large third party accommodation channel sites have launched booking services of sorts to allow hotels capture bookings directly on their own websites, and others will surely follow. If anything proves the rising dominance of direct bookings on hotel websites versus indirect bookings on third party channels, it is the launch of these services by third parties. Hotels should recognise the reality in this move.

Typically, the third party offering has taken the form of a button or simple form which the hotel can embed on its website. The customer clicks to book and is taken back to the third party channel to complete the booking.

This is bad news for hotels, and here's why.

A booking button, form or link-off service to a third party channel is not a direct booking facility. It merely cannibalises the business that has already arrived directly at the hotel and which should be serviced by the hotel. The facility seriously devalues the service presented to the customer in the hotel's name, leaving the customer with a "passed over" feeling that the hotel would rather not deal with them. Usually, there is no way to continue navigating throughout the hotel website or returning to it with a single click. Customers can be re-directed to third party channel website where offers from other providers are displayed. Hotels will likely find it extremely difficult to request upgrades or new features and the technology will be limited, since this does not represent core business for the third party channel.

A booking button, form or link-off service to a third party channel is not a direct booking strategy. Direct booking is about more than a booking facility, it should be a key strategy to drive an increasing percentage of your online business to the hotel website and as such the booking facility chosen is only a small part of that. What a third party channel cannot and (for obvious reasons) will not do is aid the hotel in building a direct online marketing strategy and in reducing their reliance on high commission third party fees. This is where the long term damage can occur for hotels that do not adopt their own direct booking strategies.

We view this move by third party channels as a strategic move to increase control on the hotels as those hotels become more and more aware of the importance of direct distribution strategies and online marketing, and to placate hotels considering a direct strategy into thinking that their third party channel can provide one.

The fact is that while third parties can and do deliver valuable business to hotels, they are none the less in competition with the hotel website online. Using third party "direct" booking facilities can mean allowing those channels to have full information on the hotel's inventory, pricing strategies and yield strategies, as well as full access to the hotels customer's database. Such information could allow a third party channel to assess everything happening on a hotel website in comparison with a hotel's direct competitors.

Our advice for hotels is that they can still work with third parties on channel distribution, but when it comes to their direct distribution they should partner with a true technology company that understands their challenges and requirements, a company that shares the same goals as the hotels themselves: to build the hotel's own brand, to handle the customer online with the highest level of service and security, to make hotel websites the primary distribution channel with the lowest commission rate possible and the highest margin for the hotel.

Authors
Dr Des O'Mahony is co-founder & Managing Director of Bookassist, Yahya Fetchati is Head of Business and Operations at Bookassist.

Irish Data Protection Regulations combat misuse of email addresses in particular for marketing use - opt-ins essential

2009-01-20T16:56:00.004Z

Bookassist deals with hundreds of bookings daily where online customers must enter details to complete a booking. Following best PCI DSS standards, data protection is paramount to Bookassist operations.

But additionally to help hotels police their own data, the booking engine requires an opt-in for customers who are giving their personal details, where the customer must specifically consent to their information being used. Bookassist reports this choice to the hotel so that the hotel is fully aware of what they can and cannot do with the customer's contact details in the future.

To highlight the importance of this to all industries who handle personal data, the Data Protection Commissioner recently issued a press release on foot of new legislation introduced in December which significantly increases penalties for misuse of personal data. The full press release is reproduced below.

PRESS RELEASE

22 December, 2008

Data Protection Commissioner welcomes new Regulations on unsolicited communications

The Data Protection Commissioner, Billy Hawkes, today welcomed the introduction of new Regulations by the Minister for Communications, Energy and Natural Resources, Mr. Eamon Ryan T.D., to deal with unsolicited communications in the area of electronic communications networks and services. Statutory Instrument No. 526 of 2008 which has now come into effect amends Statutory Instrument No. 535 of 2003 which has been in force since November 2003. Amongst the changes in the new Statutory Instrument are:

An increase from €3,000 to €5,000 in the penalty for a summary offence in respect of a contravention of the regulation relating to unsolicited communications.
The creation of an indictable offence for a contravention of the regulation relating to unsolicited communications. Where the person tried is a body corporate the fine imposed may not exceed €250,000 or, if 10% of the turnover of the person is greater than that amount, an amount equal to that percentage. Where the person tried is a natural person, the fine imposed may not exceed €50,000.
Provision for the prosecution of an officer of a body corporate for an offence under the regulations whether or not the body corporate itself has been proceeded against or been convicted of the offence committed by the body.
In relation to offences concerning the contravention of the regulation relating to unsolicited communications if, in court proceedings concerning such offences, the question of whether or not a subscriber consented to receiving an unsolicited communication is in issue, the onus of establishing that the subscriber consented will lie on the defendant.
Speaking today, Billy Hawkes said: “The signing of these Regulations by the Minister is an important and significant step in the fight against unsolicited communications for marketing purposes. I welcome the increase in penalties which have come into effect I am confident that the strengthening of the law in this area will help me in my task to enforce the regulations concerning unsolicited communications. I want to take this opportunity to remind persons engaged in direct marketing activities that my Office continues to pay close attention to the whole area of unsolicited communications by telephone, fax, email and text message. The new regulations, together with the serving of a considerable volume of summonses by my Office in the past fifteen months, serve to send a strong message to all involved in direct marketing about the necessity of compliance with the law.”

Concluding, the Commissioner said: “I want, in particular, to send a message to all involved in business to familiarise themselves with the law which applies to unsolicited communications for direct marketing purposes. Increasingly, in this period of economic downturn, my Office is receiving complaints about businesses making unsolicited contact with their past customers for marketing purposes. In many cases, such contact is unlawful and, if carried out by telephone, text message or email it may be a criminal offence. Ignorance of the law is not an acceptable excuse for non-compliance and I will have no hesitation in applying the full force of the new regulations to offenders.”

Ends.

What's your commission? The wrong question to focus on.

2008-11-19T11:05:00.014Z

"What’s your commission rate?" is the wrong question to ask. "What value can you bring to my business?" is the question hoteliers need to be focusing on, in the current climate in particular.

If cost was the only consideration, everyone who travels would stay in hostels. Yet five star hotels do very well, and a whole spectrum of hospitality services is routinely bought into despite cheaper alternatives being available. Why is that? Because people rightly focus on value, not cost. An overall view of what is on offer is the intelligent approach to pricing because, despite possibly paying more, you stand to gain more. This is common sense.

Hoteliers are focused strongly on the bottom line at the best of times and in the current economic climate cost control is more important than ever. But often costs can be viewed too much in isolation by hoteliers or their financial advisors and, when considered out of context, can lead to very poor decisions being taken for the strategic strength of the business. There’s a reason why balance sheets have two sides.

As a company providing a booking engine capability to hotels, Bookassist operates on a commission-only basis. We feel this is the fairest and most equitable way to do business with hotels, since if we cannot generate revenue for the hotel, the hotel doesn’t pay. Thousands of clients agree. We don’t charge any other fees, like installation, monthly or annual fees, or upgrade fees, for the booking service.

Many other companies also operate on a commission-only basis, while others operate on what they may disingenuously refer to as a "no commission" basis, which means fees are payable whether the service delivers or not. In this latter case, the provider has no vested interest in growing your business at all so I won’t discuss that approach here.

For some third party websites and channels, hotels pay high commissions at 15 to 20% or more and indeed some of these channels have actually been increasing their commissions lately. Yet hotels seem happy to pay these hefty fees, typically on lowest rate rooms that they must invariably supply. And in terms of the GDS and travel agency services, hotels have traditionally paid relatively high commissions. Often a hotel is prepared to pay more when times are tight and their occupancy is low and this can be exploited by resellers. Hotels weigh the revenue against the cost of sale here and consider it overall an advantage, despite the tight margin. For some reason however, hotels seem less likely to apply the same basic logic to booking engine services on their own website where they can potentially generate more bookings for a lower cost, especially when they have low occupancy. Perhaps this is because they feel it is their website, their business, and any booking engine will do to capture it since the business "will come anyway". This view is very wide of the mark and shows no long-term strategic thinking. The industry is fast moving towards the direct model and it is advantageous to be embracing it as much as possible now and partnering with the relevant expertise to ensure you stay ahead of the game.

The Value Proposition

With a booking engine on their own website, hotels can capitalise on their own brand online, grow their online presence and direct bookings, enhance return business and project a customer-centric focus and an image of technical competence to their clientele. A good booking engine will do this well, facilitating the customer professionally. A bad booking engine will turn customers off. The simple fact is that not all booking services are created equal, and not all can be compared on commission alone. Commission charge is a red herring when viewed in isolation - the comparison to make is the potential upside on revenue versus cost, not cost alone. This is too often overlooked by those focusing on the cost side of the balance sheet only.

Does the booking engine allow you to showcase your product properly, with photographs, customer reviews, multiple languages, multiple currencies and secure transactions? If it does, this speaks volumes for how your treat your increasingly worldwide base of customers. If it doesn’t, well then it also speaks volumes for how you treat them and you will pay the price. Does it allow you to upsell additional services, offer vouchers, offer instant confirmed reservations via SMS for convenience? Think about these things, because these are likely to increase customer confidence and satisfaction and lead to return custom, therefore lowering your overall cost of sale. These represent the true value proposition inherent in a good booking engine service for the hotel website.

But equally important is the information gathered by the booking process and how it can help you improve your business strategically. Does the booking engine allow you to monitor and analyse how your online business is doing, what is working and what is not, where your customers are coming from? Does it use intelligence to warn you when your availability is low, so that you don’t miss a sale? Does it genuinely inform your online strategy so that you can work with it to grow your on line business to its full potential? Does it allow you to e-market to a confirmed customer base?

From a technology perspective, does it continue to develop, adopting best practice in design and security, relieving you of any concern or worry about being left behind with old technology? Continued development costs money and takes expertise. All of these things are significant advantages that can drive your business more towards direct bookings and therefore lower your overall cost of sale across your business. These are the things that you are paying commission for ultimately, the whole value proposition.

With all these advantages in mind, driving your online strategy is what direct booking engines are about. As a hotel, don’t make the mistake of thinking that any old service on your website will do and compare on commission or price alone. The success of the online strategy and the increasing delivery of low cost-of-sale bookings to your hotel is the true value of the online service provided.

That said, our commission rate is pretty competitive :-)

Dr Des O'Mahony is co-founder and Managing Director of Bookassist

Exploiting the Path-To-Purchase Online to Grow your Revenue Stream

2008-10-23T18:20:00.002+01:00

The importance of the internet as a tool for consumers wishing to book a hotel has been well documented, with estimates as high as 55% of total booking revenue coming from online bookings and up to 70% of that online revenue coming through the individual property website. But what are the underlying patterns of behaviour that result in an online booking being made and how can a hotel tap into that information to increase their revenue?

Let’s look at the approach of the typical online booker.

The amount of information available to an average internet user is staggering, and none more so than in the online travel industry, which was one of the early innovators in maximising the potential of online revenue generation.

Path-To-Purchase
By far the most popular method of research used by potential online bookers is the search engine, dominated by Google, Yahoo & MSN/Live. These search engines are also hugely important in driving direct traffic to the property website. Using the data we make available to Bookassist Trafficbuilder clients via Bookassist’s integration with Google Analytics, we have seen that up to 80% of property website visits originate in a search engine (including paid listings), with the majority of the remainder made up of referrals from directories and other sites, as well as email marketing campaigns.

Research presented by Google UK & Comscore (source: http://www.comscore.com/press/release.asp?press=1991) presents an interesting pattern of search usage by UK consumers, and highlights the opportunities available to website owners throughout the research process.

Key findings include:
• Consumers take an average of 29 days from their first search to making a purchase.
• 45% of consumers make a purchase four weeks or more from the initial search.
• On average they visit 22 different websites while researching their choice.
• They visit the purchase site an average of 2.5 times
• 54% of buyers started with a generic search term such as “hotels in Dublin”.
• The keywords used changed throughout the search phase, with 29% of purchasers who started with a generic search term, ending with a brand specific search term.

Path-to-purchase is therefore not about immediate offer and sale but is a far more complex time-driven process.

The Expanding Information Service
A more recent addition to these search engines has been meta search engines specialising in travel, such as Cheapflights and Travelzoo. The main difference between these two versions of search is that the main search engines such as Google, provide results by crawling the web, storing the information they find, indexing it and then presenting the results to the user based on their search parameters, whereas meta search engines gather their results from other search engines and databases, and present an aggregate of these results to the user, often on a direct comparison basis. While awareness of these meta search engines is still relatively low in Ireland, awareness in the US is high, and Ireland will soon follow suit.

Figure 1. Percent indicating prompted awareness of selected meta-search travel supplier. Findings based on survey of US online adults who traveled or looked for travel services in the past 12 months, n=469. Source: Prophis eResearch September 2006.

The main alternative to search is the use of third-party online intermediaries, such as Expedia.com, which create inventory through various models, including from the Global Distribution System (GDS). This inventory is presented to the user with an option to book through the third party site. As an aid to their users, these sites also present large amounts of information on the listed properties, and according to Expedia itself, 40% of users avail of this information to research their choice, and subsequently book direct with the supplier (Source: http://www.hsmai.org/Events/NewsDetail.cfm?id=4032987)

A third option, which is often neglected, is the recent emergence of Web 2.0 sites, which contain user generated content, such as reviews, blogs, photos, videos and travel advice. The most well known of these is Tripadvisor, but there are thousands of other popular sites where users can swap information and make informed choices based on others recommendations. This has led to a new phenomenon, which is the contrast between “official content” as displayed on the property website and on other third party sites, over which the property has full control, and “unofficial content” on reviews and blogs, over which the property has very little control, but is usually given the opportunity to reply. Until this new development, users had little option but to trust the “official content” as provided by the hotel or a travel agent, but this has now changed, with unbiased reports available with ease.
So, how do these main sources compare in actual usage and how important are the results?
Research provided by PhocusWright (The PhoCusWright Consumer Travel Trends Survey, Ninth Edition, 2007) shows the percentage of consumers who consulted the various online options when deciding on a purchase:
• Search Engines: 64%
• User-Generated Reviews: 47%
• Special Deal or Promotional Web Site: 34%
• Travel Search Engines: 25%
(Note: consumers could select more that one option)
Figure 2 shows the importance of these results in making the final decision.

Figure 2: Note that percents reflect those responding with a 4 or 5 on a 5 point importance scale. Findings based on a August 2008 survey of online US adults who travelled or looked for travel services in past 12 months, n=433. Consumers could select more that one option. Source Prophis eResearch.

Your Actions
Armed with this information on how a typical consumer behaves, what actions are required to maximise your online potential?
1. Search Engines: Take advantage of search engine optimisation and marketing services, such as Bookassist Trafficbuilder or other equivalent services in the industry, to increase your presence in the various stages of search. This can be done through a combination of search engine optimisation and search engine marketing using pay per click ads to target consumers during the decision making process. While it is difficult and expensive to appear on the first page of the results for generic search terms, campaigns can be tailored to work to your strengths and ensure that you appear for other relevant terms with a high search volume.
2. Third Party Online Intermediaries: It is important to maintain a presence on a selected number of sites such as Expedia. Your booking engine provider account manager should be able to advise you on the optimum level of exposure on these sites. Bear in mind that these sites are used for comparison shopping as well as for bookings, so it is important to offer the best rates and deals on your own site, and thereby take full advantage of third party sites for exposure, but direct bookers to your own site for the final transaction.
3. Web 2.0 sites: Take ownership of your online profile, by joining the online conversation. Respond to reviews in Tripadvisor, create your own profile on sites such as Facebook and Myspace, add your own photos and videos to Youtube and Flickr, monitor comments about your property in blogs. Remember that although these sites only generate a small percentage of your websites traffic, they are becoming an increasingly large part of the decision making process.

A careful strategic approach to your entire presence online will quickly make a difference to your bottom line and put you, rather than online intermediaries, in charge of your online revenue generation.

Ciarán Rowe is a senior search engine specialist at Bookassist and heads the Bookassist Traffic Builder search engine optimisation and marketing service for Bookassist Ireland.

Caution - Asia domain names scam

2008-10-07T14:55:00.010+01:00

Here's one that's been doing the rounds for a long time but that we've noticed surfacing again recently among our client hotels. So beware.

The email goes like this.
Its subject line is something formal like:

[yourcompanyname]. -Confirm (TO the Principal)

and appears to be a very helpful email from a concerned domain name registrar in Asia, or more specifically China usually, telling you that someone is trying to buy a whole list of Asia domains that really should be yours, for example

[yourcompanyname].cn    China
[yourcompanyname].tw    Taiwan
[yourcompanyname].hk    Hong Kong etc

and may also be trying to use the trademark [yourcompanyname] locally. The email is helpfully asking you to confirm that these people really have the rights to do that. It seems to be a very helpful warning just in the nick of time.

So suddenly you get worried about someone grabbing your name.

Now maybe this is someone who's being genuinely helpful but what's usually going on here is that this is a scam whereby if you express concern by responding, the supposed registrar could offer to get those domain names back for you from the so-called disreputable buyers, but of course at a settlement cost. So by responding, you have ended up in a situation where you might pay far more than is necessary for domain names that you never really wanted anyway.

Best to just ignore the email.
By not responding, they won't bother to buy the domains anyway since they can't make money out of them.

Here are other stories about the scam on the web:
http://blog.mindvalleylabs.com/
http://www.bloptimization.com/

If you really really want to be sure about your brand and domain name control in other countries or continents you can just go to a domain name registrar on the web (for example instra.com or networksolutions.com) and buy all the domains you want for yourself, cheaply. You'll find that those listed in the email are likely still available - but it's probably not worth your effort.

Flash-based websites still a no-no for Hotels

2008-08-18T10:23:00.010+01:00

We all know that Adobe’s Flash can be used to make great looking sites, with cool animation and interaction. We “humans” love this. But the problem is that search engines aren’t human, and the spider programmes they use to crawl and index the internet often have no idea what the purpose or content of a Flash-based site is. This can be a critical flaw if you are relying on search engine rankings, which most businesses do.

Getting a Flash-based website indexed properly and search engine optimized is a difficult task, far more difficult than a standard HTML-based site.

Google’s online help specifically state that their search engine is text based (see http://www.google.com/support/). In order to be crawled and indexed, your primary content needs to be in text format. Of course you can include images, Flash files, videos and any other media you wish – but any content embedded in these included files should also be available on your site in text or description format or it probably won’t be crawled.

Last month, Google with the help of Adobe began a project of spidering the content of Flash Shockwave files insofar as it could in order to try to properly index such sites (see http://www.adobe.com/devnet). In a press announcement that effectively admits to a serious problem with search engines and Flash sites, Adobe said it is “providing optimized Adobe Flash Player technology to Google and Yahoo! to enhance search engine indexing of the Flash file format (SWF) and uncover information that is currently undiscoverable by search engines. This will provide more relevant automatic search rankings of the millions of RIAs [rich internet applications] and other dynamic content that run in Adobe Flash Player.” Google doesn’t appear to be as optimistic as Adobe though (see http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com). Yahoo! hasn’t yet committed to a similar spidering project. There is no indication at all that Microsoft will ever follow suit, being a less than enthusiastic supporter of Flash, so it is likely MSN will never spider Flash-based sites.

While these approaches to Flash spidering are welcome, they are not the solution. In fact this can lead to additional problems through complacency. Flash content that is loaded via Javascript remains inaccessible (as does pretty much everything executed via Javascript). The design approach of Flash lends itself to less content in any case, tending to be far less text rich and far more image rich. Also, embedded text pages within Flash may contain the requisite content, but the information is likely to be completely out of context since it lacks the organizational tree structure of a standard HTML website. Context is as crucial as content for optimizing your search engine ranking, since it determines the authority of your content. Without context, you can easily see a site spidered as an authority on some completely different and unintended topic.

Also, all of this new search engine aware technology still relies on the designer getting it right with the back-end content. Flash designers need to become much more search engine savvy, since up to now many have tended to not be too concerned with this and concentrated mostly on the look. So we may see improvements for future Flash-based sites designed in this new way, but existing Flash-based sites are unlikely to gain much.

Things are certainly improving, but the potential for trouble remains. For now, best practice is to avoid Flash as the basis of critical information and use alternate, text based information if you do have Flash so that search engines can spider and understand your site.

Bottom line: If you are that individual or business that does not care about web rankings or search engine optimization, but just wants an eye-catching presence, then Flash is certainly a good option for you. But bear in mind that unless you are using some method other than search engines to get your web address in front of your desired audience, chances are few people will ever lay their eyes on your creation. Or if they do, it may be because they were searching for something else entirely.

Dr Des O'Mahony is co-founder and Managing Director of Bookassist

Act now to increase your online business in an economic downturn

2008-07-21T10:53:00.003+01:00

Bookassist clients represent the majority of the Irish hotel industry. Our feedback indicates that many hotels are experiencing a downturn in overall business in recent months, and recent news articles and industry press are saying the same (see Sunday Business Post July 20th, 2008).

But other hotels have genuinely been able to boost the online portion of their business by having a strong proactive internet strategy. Our experience shows that you can give yourself a competitive advantage if you act quickly and decisively, and we want to remind you of some tips to achieve this.

THE REAL ISSUE
Firstly, focus on the real issue. If total bookings have changed, it is not a problem with your booking technology. The problem in economic uncertainty is less bookers due to less discretionary spend, not a "booking process" issue. Sure, each booking engine provider has a different angle on the customer interface, but the technology from the main players all pretty much "works" and mostly they're just differences in approach, not serious flaws that prevent booking on a massive scale. The bigger weaknesses with online revenue generation lie elsewhere in online strategy but were perhaps less noticeable when customers were spending more. Bookassist handles tens of thousands of bookings monthly on behalf of our clients and we continue to see this volume increase not just in Ireland but in many countries. So don't waste time on small detail issues - look at the big picture because there is still room for growth.

Secondly, we see that overall booking volume online is still on the up so the key is to get a larger slice of that pie. Make no mistake, some hotels are feeling the pinch right now but others are generating more online business and with proper strategy you can certainly seek to improve your income. Since Google search is the primary storefront for your offering, you need to look very carefully at how that operates for you. In short you need to be as visible as possible, you need to be as clear as possible about what you are offering and your offer needs to be as compelling as possible for the online customer.

VISIBLITY
It is vital that you have your website regularly (not just annually!) analysed and optimised to ensure that it has the best possible chance of getting high up on the Google rankings, the natural listings, for the typical search phrases that your customers might use. You need to have a carefully orchestrated pay-per-click advertising campaign to complement that natural listing and you need to be prepared to budget for it. Tracking and analysis of spend on pay-per-click is so clear now that there is no need to be wondering whether it is working for you or not - you can see at a glance at any time. But you must act on the information and continually adjust strategy. You also need strong analysis of visitors and trends on your website so that you can act decisively to clear any bottlenecks and provide your visitors with exactly what they are looking for. These are continual and expert tasks that your online partner company may be better equipped to handle for you.

You can also broaden your visibility by ensuring that you tap into other new markets. Have multiple languages, promote your hotel in specific language target areas on Google. Bookassist clients have seen significant new business by focusing new multilingual websites on different untapped geographical areas and the Bookassist engine already operates in 9 languages so there is scope to unify your website and your booking process for a number of different foreign markets. But you must ensure that this is not a token effort that is done once and sits there - ensure that you have special offers etc regularly translated and perhaps targetted uniquely at specific markets based on what those markets might want.

From looking at Bookassist reports throughout Ireland, with hundreds of hotels, after Ireland, UK, US and Northern Ireland, the next 20 countries that generate business are displayed on the pie chart below. These are markets you can target to get more business (click the image for a larger view). If you need more localised information for your hotel, contact your Bookassist account manager.

Many hotels for example have foreign nationals working with them and this is a major advantage for visitors from their home countries who would feel much more comfortable dealing with a native speaker. So why not highlight the languages your hotel staff can offer on your website? It's one advantage over a competitor hotel who doesn't. Also, read our recent blog entry by an industry expert on why translation is so important in the wider marketplace.

CLARITY
You want to stand out from the crowd and you want the customer to click on your link. Look at how your hotel is displayed in Google results. Is the simple website title, page title and description good enough? Can it be tighter, more to the point? Is it clear to a customer who you are and what you are offering immediately, not muddied by having other similar websites with similar names appearing to offer similar offerings on your behalf? Do not confuse the customer at this vital search results stage. See for example Bookassist's opinion on operating multiple websites - you can't stand out from the crowd if you yourself create a crowd.

COMPELLING OFFERING
Focus on the quality of your online presentation and on differentiating your offering. Do the obvious stuff, like making sure the best prices are on your website, but look at other things like even seeing if you can reduce prices or have particularly good value specials where you might be able to offset that rate reduction against potential higher booking volume. Package more - engines like Bookassist allow you to have add-ons and room variations at booking time so consider better virtual packaging to have a stronger offering, perhaps partnering with local amenities to offer tickets or bundles with them.

You have to sell better and dispel any doubts, so ensure good quality photos for all room types offered, not just photos of your one best room. Engines like Bookassist allow you to have room specific photos built right into the booking process, so use those facilities. Consider more customer generated content, reviews online or video reviews which you can also post on YouTube. All of these things will enhance Google's opinion of your website, pushing you upwards, but they will certainly enhance your customers' opinion of your offering also and make it far more compelling than your competitors.

Hotels should consider exchanging links with other hotels who are not direct competitors to boost online traffic as well, featuring such hotels in a section of their website as a preferred or recommended partner.

At Bookassist we pride ourselves in getting it right, and we consistently do, for our clients (see some Bookassist testimonials). We can see clearly from our client base that those who listen to our advice and respond quickly and decisively are increasing online revenue right now.

Des O'Mahony, Roshan McPartland, Mary Collins, Christina Roche at Bookassist's Dublin office.

Multi-step booking approach proving superior to one-step single page versions

2008-07-18T11:59:00.005+01:00

With the array of different booking engines in the marketplace constantly growing, technology heavy companies often allow new technology to overshadow the fundamental point of the booking process, which is to ease the path for the user to make a booking.

Bookassist has always adopted a customer-centric approach to the booking process, keeping the technology hidden from the customer, and uses a multi-step approach to online reservations which allows the customer to have more detail about what they are booking, more clarity in the process, more feedback on what they are doing while booking, and a far higher sense of security during the crucial credit card step than a single page on screen could possibly provide. A significant body of research, and the approach of the top booking engine systems in the world, vindicates this multi-step approach and shows it to be best practice and superior to the single page flash-style booking solution which, while promising to allow a booking in one step, often simply frustrates the user with a lack of information and leads to a lower faith in the system. This could potentially damage future business in the eyes of some customers for a hotel deploying a one-step approach.

See for example the opinion of Hospitality Net on the issue at: www.hospitalitynet.org. While tracking and optimisation issues have certainly improved recently, especially since the Hospitality Net article was published, the fundamental issues of utility for the customer addressed in that article, and other research remains. The key is to serve the customer and relegate the technology to the background.

Multiple websites for your hotel might confuse your customers and erode your long term business

2008-07-11T15:46:00.020+01:00

So I’m a customer. I’m looking to book a hotel online in Galway. Last time I stayed at “The Green Fingers Hotel” so I’d be happy to go back again to the same hotel. Very friendly staff, and a great breakfast if I remember correctly.

I type the hotel name into Google and hit search, and up comes the results page.

There it is, the hotel website – “Book online at the Green Fingers Galway”, greenfingersgalway.com – right at the top of the Google results page. So I click through to the link. Nice hotel website this, I recognise the photos of the nice rooms, the view. I had a pretty good stay there! Prices seem ok too, still reasonable. I wonder if it’s any cheaper on other sites though, like listings sites? Only takes a few seconds to check on other sites. Back to my results page for a quick scan of my options, maybe read a review or two.

Hang on, the second result on the results page looks like the hotel website too – “Green Fingers Hotel Galway Book Now”, greenfingershotel.com. Similar web address too. So I click through on that link. Nice hotel website this, not the same as the last one though! But the same hotel? But this is the official website surely? But then what was the last one? I mean the photos are the same, even the prices are the same, or close enough. Two fairly legit looking but obviously different websites for the same place? What’s going on here? Multiple personalities?

This is like that scene at the end of The Life of Brian – “I’m Brian. No, I’m Brian! I’m Brian and so’s my wife!”

I really don’t like the look of this at all. They can't both be "official". I wonder if one of those sites is spoofing and is up to no good? I wonder if the hotel knows about this? Surely they must check their own Google results from time to time!? They must have agreed to this. Cleverly done though, I’ll give them that, because I have no idea which is actually the official site. They’re both pretty good and pretty representative, though I guess anyone could get photos and logos and run up a website that looks official. But why, I'm thinking, would a hotel have two different websites? Surely at best they'd just send a fraction of customers one way and a fraction the other, it can't generate more customers! Unless of course one is being marketed well to attract a higher fraction of the existing customers at the expense of the other. But if you can do successful marketing with one site, you could equally have just applied your skills to the other and not bothered with the second site. I can't see the business sense in this at all, for the hotel anyway.

But wait, this is getting even better - there are adverts there too on the results page, for both website addresses! Now that is hilarious because the hotel is just allowing someone else to bid on their name and drive up their own pay-per-click advertising costs in response. They’re bidding against themselves! An auctioneer’s dream. No wonder pay-per-click can make so much money for the search engines if people allow that to happen. Guess this hotel doesn’t know too much about online marketing. They really should be talking to experts about protecting their brand online for the long haul, because this marketplace is just getting more and more competitive all the time and customers are getting much more savvy.

Anyway, that’s their problem. I don’t have time to be trying to figure this out, and there’s no button on Google for “Will the real Green Fingers please stand up!”. (Mental note, I should patent a “Will the real … please stand up” button before Google thinks of it). Whatever's going on it doesn't look too healthy to me, no reason I should take a chance.

So I type “Hotels Galway” into Google and go find somewhere else to stay. Shame, I liked the breakfast at that place. Maybe the next place will be just as good if not better anyway.

PDF - Bookassist opinion on multiple websites and their potential problems

Dr Des O'Mahony is CEO and Founder at Bookassist

Hotels might be surprised to find who their real competitors are online.

2008-06-17T14:20:00.007+01:00

Christina Roche in Bookassist's Dublin office points out some not so obvious truths about competition online

Your hotel website is your cheapest form of distribution, sales and advertising all rolled into one. So it is vital for hoteliers to invest time, money and effort into constantly upgrading and managing it. Of course this is a lot of work, and hoteliers already have enough to do offline, so partnering with online technology and marketing providers can be an ideal solution.

At Bookassist, a key component of our strategy for hotels is to provide strong and continual account management involving constant monitoring of the hotels’ websites, rates and availability, combined with surveying the broader marketplace. In Ireland, the majority of hotel websites with booking engines use Bookassist technology, therefore we have valuable and real statistics on the Irish marketplace that we can provide to all our clients to optimise their business.

However, providing this intelligence is of little benefit if the hotelier does not actually use their Bookassist Admin reports or work closely with their account manager. This is why good account management of a hotel’s online presence must be a partnership – the hotel must be prepared to action the advice of their online partner. All hoteliers are keen on the idea of making more money through their own website, and decreasing commission costs. However achieving that goal must go hand in hand with decreasing the number of third party websites you work with.

Third party dependence

Hoteliers are understandably reluctant to reduce third party partnerships, which have been an excellent source of revenue in the past. But that’s exactly it, they’ve been great in the past! In 2004, 20% of all hotel bookings were online compared to 2% in 2000, and by the end of 2009 50% of all hotel bookings will be online (Phocuswright). Third party sites capitalised on this consumer interest long before hotels, and did so at a cost to the hotels of anywhere between 10 – 30% of each booking. But with hotels increasingly moving online and making their own presence felt in Google search results, the necessity for third party sites is waning and the opportunity for the individual hotel to sell directly is growing. It is now time to invest in your own site and cut the apron strings from the excess third party sites, sticking with your top producers only.

Your Website’s online struggle

In the current online marketplace you as the hotelier must understand that your own website is in an online struggle with not only your competitors but also third party websites. People who search for your hotel name are seeing results from a myriad of different suppliers – third party sites and competitors – not just your website. It is therefore imperative to give your website a chance of competing against the larger websites bidding on or using your trademarks. “Monitor who is bidding on or using your trademarks in pay-per-click (PPC) advertising. Competitors and third party intermediaries could be bidding on your hotel name and stealing part of your market share” (from Ten standards for promoting your hotel online). So although the hotel employs the third party sites for added exposure, your hotel website is actually in competition with them and can be undercut by them at a commission cost to you.

It is time for your website to perform alone. You need to generate traffic and you need to convert it to bookings.

Proactive packaging

Your online strategy should be a key focus of your business, and your own website should be the focus of your online strategy. But directing traffic to your site may not result in increased bookings if the site isn’t up to standard. Ask yourself, “Have I had essentially the same website for a few years?” If the answer is yes then it is definitely time to change your approach. Look at the options open to you for building a new website complete with Web 2.0 features that customers increasingly want, like Google maps, Blogs, Vlogs, Customer Generated Reviews etc.

Work to ensure that you get the most from your website and in particular from your engine. With proper market intelligence you can devise appropriate dynamic packages for your website to suit your target market. With booking engine technology, you only get out of it what you put in. If you stick with basic packages, with very little variety and your rates are static all year round then your revenue will likely remain static or may even drop. Not every property has a spa or golf course and some don’t have restaurants, so in that case it is imperative to get creative and devise dynamic, interesting packages that are going to tempt online lookers to book your property. Knock on the doors of local restaurants, buy tickets to local tours and concerts, the costs will be absorbed in the packages and you will be adding to the value of the booking and the guest’s experience.

The online business is there for the taking. Either you take it, or someone else will.

Christina Roche is Business Development Advisor at Bookassist's Dublin Office.