Starwood on hotel mobile websites and mobile booking
Wednesday, November 30th, 2011
Stephen Gates from Starwood Hotels on what mobile customers want from hotels and how HTML5 helps hotels meet those requirements. Great interview (courtesy of mobiThinking)
Defining a hotel digital marketing strategy
Tuesday, November 29th, 2011
Digital marketing for hotels is becoming increasingly complex. Hotel managers need not only to service guests, manage rooms, availabilities and pricing, but now are also expected to compete for guests in new channels and digital communities that emerge every day. Hence, many hotel managers are asking themselves how they can expand their brand online while still having the time to run their business.
The obvious choice has been to hire additional staff, but this tactic is just a temporary solution, because demand for digital marketing is unstoppable and the problem will continue to grow. The breakthrough solution for this complex problem is a digital marketing architecture and tools that provide a consistent multi-channel experience to hotel guests and prepare hotels for future digital marketing demands.
This article provides a quick checklist on five important items hotel managers should consider when defining a digital marketing strategy for their hotels:
Top five items in a hotel digital marketing strategy
- Hotel website and booking engine are Number One. This is probably nothing new to you, but your hotel’s website is the best opportunity that you have to engage and sell to your guests. On average, guests spend 6 minutes on hotel websites. 6 minutes is ample opportunity to engage your future guests with bold pictures, easy-to-read room descriptions and attractive offers that make the decision to book simple and predictable. One additional important item is to show what guests will experience when they come to your destination: ensure video is part of your web strategy and you will mesmerize your guests. So, when was the last time you updated your website? If the answer is more than 2 years ago, your website could probably be a lot better.
- 60% of consumers are social travelers. According to Forrester, 60% of guests use one or more social networking platforms during their search, shop and buy process. Hence, it is critical to manage tripadvisor ratings, have a professional-looking presence on facebook, and allow guests to engage over twitter. And to use the social network to amplify your message, ensure that good experiences your guests write about are shared on the different digital communities. For photos we see the best results using Flickr and for videos a dedicated YouTube channel. And don’t forget email: it is still the most widely mechanism used to share itineraries and ideas of trips.
- Mobile consumers will demand optimized content in 2012. Mobile traffic is the fastest growing category in digital marketing, and to no surprise also in travel. Google research states that 19% of all hotel searches are already executed on a mobile device. If you deployed a mobile solution in 2011, you will realize that mobile consumers have a much more utilitarian behavior – they are looking for the hotel’s address, phone number, or want to book a room for tonight or tomorrow night. Hence, the experience to conclude those tasks must be optimized in 2012. While success can be found using mobile as a stand-alone media, it provides the largest rewards when it is used as an integrated, multi-channel engagement platform. If you can provide consistent messages across web, social and mobile, while ensuring that the most relevant offers are prioritized then you truly have provided multi-channel digital marketing.
- Diversify online distribution channels. Recent studies indicate that booking.com is driving a whopping 50% of all hotel online bookings in Europe. This dominance is threatening to hotels as they become more dependent on (and therefore vulnerable to) a single channel that is already demanding higher commissions based on results. Therefore, it is critical to diversify your channels. If you are the manager of a boutique property you should consider signing up with tablethotels.com, mrandmrssmith.com or jetsetter.com. One good source of information for the latest trends in accommodation websites you should consider signing up for is tnooz.com’s roundup of top travel websites per market.
- Innovate with marketing campaigns. Digital marketing is not a one-time project. It is a new discipline that must be embraced by hotel managers. However, digital marketing does not necessarily require learning a lot of new tools and hiring a lot of new staff. Using the appropriate tools, hotel managers can use their existing e-commerce and reservations staff to create campaigns, follow-up and reap the rewards of increased marketing exposure: more and better bookings. So, choose your tools to minimize setup costs and provide maximum flexibility when creating your campaigns.
In conclusion, a successful digital marketing strategy must provide a consistent multi-channel experience to hotel guests. This can be achieved by using a multitude of tools or an all-in-one hotel digital marketing platform. But no matter which tools you select, at the core of your strategy should be a digital marketing architecture that prepares your hotel for future digital marketing demands.
If you want to learn more about what GuestCentric can do to improve your hotel’s digital marketing chat to one of our specialists online or sign up for our Coffee with GuestCentric webinar.
Chat now Register for Coffee with GuestCentric webinar
New clipboard for speedier hotel website images
Thursday, November 10th, 2011
With the introduction of the new media manager a few months ago, demand for picture-rich content has increased dramatically. Hence, we introduced today a new clipboard to make image manipulation easier and speedier. Picture uploading and inserting is now a breeze!
GuestCentric partners with hotelrooms.com to increase direct bookings
Tuesday, November 8th, 2011
We are delighted to announce that GuestCentric has joined efforts with HotelRooms.com to offer special pricing exclusively for GuestCentric clients for a six month listing on the ‘Official Hotel Search Engine’ . This is an excellent opportunity to power your online bookings through low season. Over the course of the next six months a HotelRooms.com listing is projected to generate 60-75 direct bookings.
For more information on this special offer, please contact your GuestCentric e-commerce manager.
Need a room right now? Go mobile – on msnbc.com
Saturday, November 5th, 2011
Need a room right now? Go mobile
By Rob Lovitt, msnbc.com contributor
This article is a copy from MSNBC’s travel kit
Looking for a hotel at the last minute? If you’re one of the millions of Americans with a smartphone or tablet, look no farther than the device in your hand. Between new apps and a better understanding of the mobile market, finding an empty bed is getting easier all the time.
“Mobile is really opening up a brand-new channel for hotels to sell rooms for tonight and tomorrow,” said Pedro Colaco, president and CEO of GuestCentric Systems, a developer of reservation systems for independent hotels.
In fact, according to GuestCentric’s data, 60 percent of people who booked a room at the company’s client hotels via a mobile device were booking for the same day or the day after.
“We’re seeing a lot more last-minute travel,” said Lindsey Wise, operations manager at the Aiken Hotel in Aiken, S.C. “A lot of our guests don’t book ahead anymore because they don’t know if they’ll need a room for the night or not.”
And third-party booking sites have taken note. Last month, Priceline launched Tonight-Only Deals, a same-day booking app for the iPhone designed to compete with HotelTonight, which went live last year.
The tool, which was recently expanded to the iPad, is bundled into the company’s Hotel & Rental Car Negotiator app. It offers same-day booking capability at select hotels in 34 cities and promises discounts of up to 35 percent off other published rates.
HotelTonight has also augmented its offerings recently, extending its network to include resort-style properties within a two-hour drive of select major markets. Currently, the app offers day-of-travel deals in 27 cities, plus so-called Getaways near Boston, New York, San Francisco and Washington, D.C.
Not surprisingly, both Priceline and HotelTonight make much of their discounts, which, depending on the day and the deal, can range from insignificant to impressive. As with all such claims, it’s always worth comparing the deals with other options before booking.
Ultimately, though, savings are only part of it; the real benefit may be the growing recognition that when you need a room right away, mobile is increasingly the way to go.
“When you’re on the road, you don’t really want all the bells and whistles that go with the usual booking experience,” said Colaco. “You want to be able to book your hotel with the least amount of clicks.”
Fall 2011 release
Wednesday, November 2nd, 2011
Expand your market: Italian and Russian now available
Friday, October 28th, 2011
Вау, это здорово! E anche in italiano.
(Wow, this is great! And in Italian, too.)
We continue our commitment to internationalize our platform thus allowing easier interactions with all guests and expanding your market reach. In this edition we added support for Italian and Russian.
GuestCentric Launches QuickBook Mobile to Maximize “Tonight” Hotel Bookings
Tuesday, October 18th, 2011
Boutique hotels can now promote last minute deals to mobile users in an easy way
GuestCentric, the award-winning provider of digital sales and marketing solutions for boutique hotels announced today the launch of its QuickBook Mobile booking engine. Based on intensive usability testing, QuickBook Mobile is a breakthrough innovation that is bound to dramatically increase bookings by providing mobile-optimized information to travelers on cell phones.
When booking a hotel with QuickBook Mobile, consumers are displayed a multi-touch calendar with the best rates and availability for tonight, tomorrow night and the following 4 nights. The next 6 nights cover 90% of all mobile bookings according to a study of mobile consumers performed by GuestCentric with 300 hotels over a period of 3 months. Some other highlights of the GuestCentric study:
- 60% of mobile consumers book for tonight or tomorrow night.
- 90% of mobile consumers book between one and three nights.
- 95% of mobile consumers book just one room.
Travelers looking to book other dates are walked through a more traditional availability check workflow.
“I was surprised at how many mobile bookings were for the same night or the night right after,” said Omar Casasola at Hotel Maria del Carmen Motel in Merida, Mexico. “GuestCentric understood this trend and launched the QuickBook Mobile booking engine. This ability to read what is important to consumers is the reason why we selected GuestCentric in the first place, and QuickBook mobile just reconfirmed our decision to go with GuestCentric.”
QuickBook Mobile leverages the latest HTML5 and CSS3 techniques to provide a fast, interactive experience to consumers. In addition, QuickBook Mobile takes advantage of GuestCentric’s leading all-in-one hotel revenue generation platform that includes its multi-device booking engine, award-winning website solutions, channel management and social marketing.
“We spend a very large amount of time looking at consumer patterns and anticipating where online travel is going. Providing innovation that adds value to the consumer is what keeps GuestCentric ahead of the competition,” said Pedro Colaco, President and CEO of GuestCentric. “QuickBook Mobile is part of our continued effort to provide our hotel customers with the strongest solution possible to grow their brand, visibility online and ultimately, increase their revenue.”
The QuickBook Mobile booking engine is immediately available for all GuestCentric customers and the upgrade to QuickBook Mobile is free of charge.
A few examples of customers that have deployed QuickBook Mobile:
New features alert
Thursday, October 6th, 2011
Keping on top of new features
As many of you may have noticed, we moved to continuous feature deployment in June 2011. This means that your GuestCentric service is continually being improved. In order to keep you informed of all the relevant changes we introduced a new area in the Setup section of your extranet that highlights the new features, and allows for upgrade requests.
