Hi, my name is Pedro Gomes and I am GuestCentric Product Manager. Part of my job is to make sure things run smoothly for our customers and what a better way to know when this is accomplished than to receive enthusiastic feedback about the service. Over a month ago Mr. Gallego an independent hotel owner signed up for GuestCentric’s free trial. He is not what one could call a tech savvy person.

Recently I received news from him; he finished setting up his website, he was extremely proud of the results and very satisfied with how easy the entire process was. Using GuestCentric’s InstantHotel Technology which was developed specifically for hotels, he was able to create a professional looking website, from scratch, by himself in less than a week. He was surprised on how easy it was to develop the right menus structure and to populate the pages with content.

InstantHotel Technology helped Mr. Gallego developing content easily as it uses all the information added to the system to populate the website pages. He was especially pleased on how good his amateur pictures looked on the flash banners. He finished the page by adding some of the available gadgets like Google maps and picture gallery. This was one of those special events for me because Mr. Gallego had zero hours of training on GuestCentric service. It is encouraging for me to hear that all the hours spend on usability tests based on creating easy to use and time saving services for independent hotels has paid off with satisfied customers and it is definitely a motive to continue generating ways to ease up your workload.

Once the website was published he applied a direct marketing strategy provided by GuestCentric on how to increase website visitors, the results were extraordinary but I will tell you more about that some other time.
Check out Vale do Gaio Hotel website at www.valedogaio.com What do you think?

Article written for Hospitality Technology by Rodrigo Machaz, General Manager, Memmo  Baleeira Hotel

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Many of the discussions in our industry nowadays are centered on distribution. Should we rely mostly on online travel agents or should we invest in our websites? How should we build out our websites’ reach? Should we outsource or should we hire e-commerce managers?

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Managers of smaller independent hotels face tough challenges when it comes to promoting their brand: we don’t have an established brand, we don’t have the marketing and advertising budget and we certainly don’t have the information technology capabilities or the staff to be able to compete with the large chains that operate in our regions. However, we have two things they don’t have: we are more agile and we know our customers better. And these are two things that operators can use to their advantage, especially when it comes to leveraging the Internet to promote guest visits.

Choosing the right website partner

The first challenge that many operators will face is the mapping of their brand into a functional website that displays their product in the right light and provides some insight into the guests’ experience at their property. Look for an expert in promoting hotels online. At Memmo Baleeira Hotels, our first approach was to hire a design agency and although they designed a visually appealing website, it was not really directed at closing the sale. That is when we hired GuestCentric Systems, a company that focuses on providing independent hotels with tools to compete online.

Hotels need to have a management platform that provides a site with easy-to-understand menus, flash banners, and other interactive elements that they can manage themselves. The ability to change content that appeals to guests is essential in providing the customer experience that guests look for in independent hotels.

The right level of market visibility

With the right website in place, hotels can ramp up their online visibility even more by hiring a consultant to work with activities suppliers to get links exchanged and to utilize all online promotional outlets like press releases, article coverage, etc. We updated our hotel’s profile in TripAdvisor to ensure that it reflected the major improvements to the new brand and we signed up a few relevant channels like booking.com. All these actions can then be measured by website analytics that track the return of the effort put behind some of these activities. Once these major steps are accomplished, move the maintenance of your visibility strategy inside. Having good online distribution will not only provide you with incremental occupation, but, more importantly, it is a critical element in generating business on your direct website since as many as 50% of travelers start their search on OTAs, but prefer booking directly with the hotel.

Special offers: a hidden gem

One of the key elements in a successful website is a booking engine that makes it easy to book and upsells customers on special offers. One of the reasons that we chose GuestCentric was for their booking engine which creates an experience where potential guests can deal shop easily.

By doing so, the results can be tremendous. Since the introduction of our booking engine, our direct web revenues have surpassed all our other electronic channels, and during the week we introduced direct booking of promotions on our website we saw a 200% increase in bookings.

This is where the key lies: smaller independent hotels can make decisions quickly, and can differentiate via its products.

How to integrate guests into the process

Last, but not least, hotels should provide a special experience to their guests online, just as they would provide them with individual experiences on the property. At Memmo Baleeira Hotels, we embrace user-generated content and promote TripAdvisor reviews on our website. Hotels will also need a system that tracks guests’ preferences without being intrusive or too difficult to manage, that will also enable them to easily create targeted campaign for loyal guests.

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Rodrigo Machaz is the general manager of Memmo Baleeira Hotel in Sagres, Portugal. Rodrigo holds a bachelors degree in business administration and a masters in hotel management from Cornell University. Prior to Memmo Baleeira Hotels, Machaz worked as head of the European business development for Swisscom, and worked closely with chain hotels like NH and Hilton. For many years he worked with the Four Seasons Hotel & Resorts in Vancouver, San Diego and Lisbon.

One of the toughest challenges that independent hotels face is brand distribution. Although independent hotels lack many of the resources of the larger brands, there is one outlet that managers can turn to: the Internet. (read the article)