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

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

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

Content Continues To Be King

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

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

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

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

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.