Hotel & Motel Management - November 3, 2008 - (Page 54)

54 Special Report AN INDUSTRY CONNECTED H&MM November 3, 2008 | HotelMotel.com www.HotelMotel.com/digital_edition Internet strategies Continued from page 28 redundant navigation items. After that, it helps to give customers what they are looking for. “We see that consumers really have a thirst for photography, video and virtual tours more so than anything,” Ettestad said. “Great photography is No. 1,” Gerstenzang said. “That’s what’s going to lure people in. You want to make sure they feel an experience through the site.” He recommends making an interactive map that highlights activities like hiking trails or theaters—anything to engage customers and tell them what they need to know. “The longer they stay on, the longer they have to book,” he said. One big sin is a lack of information. An example Ettestad gave is a hotel near a ski destination that was not getting as much booking as its competitors, despite having similar location and similar booking. The problem, TravelClick discovered, was the other hotel websites mentioned their hotels had free shuttle services to the slopes. This hotel did, too, but it didn’t specify so on its site. Once the hotel featured the offering on the site, bookings went back up. One last tenet for a good hotel site is the booking process itself. Make it easy to follow and uncomplicated. ““It’s great to make the site ﬂashier, but it has to be userfriendly and easy to book a reservation,” Gerstenzang said. Stunted growth? The percentage of online leisure bookings may indicate the Internet’s potential has been reached. “The data reveal that the incidence of both ‘looking’ and ‘booking’ online has ﬂat lined, suggesting that Internet penetration of the market has reached a plateau and the remarkable growth rate hotels and resorts have observed in online reservations during the past 57% 56% few years will ﬂatten out as well,” said Peter Yesawich, chairman 50% and CEO of 47% YPartnership. 45% 38% 32% Source: National Travel Monitor Branded efforts TravelClick’s numbers indicate a 23-percent growth in brand website booking in 2007, continuing this channel’s growth over the last few years. Strategies for these brand sites all differ and offer a variety of options. For Wyndham, the key is segmentation. The Days Inn site is different from the Microtel Inns and Suites’ site to maintain individual brand identity and to appeal to a particular demograph- ic. According to Peter, brand sites draw the most bookings for the Wyndham Hotel Group. Marriott focuses on its website’s “power alleys,” the parts of the site that see the most trafﬁc during any month, such as brand sites and booking pages. “The homepage is important, but in the age of Google, it’s not as important as other parts in the site,” said George Corbin, VP of e-commerce at Marriott International. “The search result won’t land you on the homepage. The result is for that speciﬁc site within Marriott.com.” Marriott also offers its elite members, and soon all of its rewards members, a forum to discuss their stays and how to best use the rewards program in an effort to further brand loyalty through its online presence. To take online booking a step closer to the customer, Best Western International introduced a downloadable widget called Knock Knock. When Best Western has a new promotion, a customer will be alerted by a noise and graphic on his or her desktop. “We are in the middle of redesigning it after getting feedback from elite members,” said Karmela Gaffney, managing director of advertising and e-commerce at Best Western. “It will provide a link directly to our website and give the weather and news related [to the destination].” ‘luxury spa destination,’ hopefully we come to the top.” In addition, hotels can purchase pay-per-click search engine ads to ensure they come up ahead of others for certain key words. “It’s auction style,” Gerstenzang said. “[A word or phrase] could be ﬁve cents or $10 per click. But it’s not just how much you’ll pay, it’s how relevant the content is.” Buying the phrase ‘New York City hotel’ would cost a lot per click and maybe not catch the right customers. The advantage to pay-per-click is its immediacy. Key-word optimization could take months to affect Google, whereas pay-per-click is yours upon purchase. “You can track how well your campaigns are doing and you can target who gets your promotional copy,” Gerstenzang said. “The big brands buy the banner ads to get a brand presence, not looking for immediate returns.” Online advertising can provide more value than advertising in traditional media because of the abiltiy to target very speciﬁc demographics. At Best Western, the ofﬂine to online advertising ratio still is about 2:1, but 67 percent of the ofﬂine ads have driven online bookings, according to Gaffney. “Down the line, I think people will be increasing [online advertising] signiﬁcantly,” Gaffney said. ccrowell@questex.com Widget 2005 2006 2004 2008 2003 2002 2007 Search out the site You have a clean website, with photos, videos, a list of amenities and a single-screen booking page. Great. Now how do you get people there? Gerstenzang cited search engine optimization as the biggest key in driving site trafﬁc. “There’s millions of words you could put in [a search engine] to ﬁnd a hotel, and you’re never going to be on the top for every key word. But you need a strategy of what’s important to you. The Royal Palms [Resort and Spa] in Phoenix is a luxury hotel and spa resort—that’s important to that hotel. So we make sure it’s optimized in the meta tags and copy so when someone types in Embedded code that can be downloaded to a desktop or added to a website and allows for constant, convenient updates, often used for marketing. Search engine optimization Process of improving the chances that your website will rank higher on search engine results, like Google, and increase site trafﬁc. Meta tags TWO CHANNELS MERGE ATG, an e-commerce software company, offers a service that brings an old favorite—the telephone—into the online world. For insight into how this software as a service can increase and improve a hotel’s online presence, visit our website: www.hotelmotel.com CIRCLE NO. 120 Keywords and description added to a webpage, not displayed to a visitor, that help increase a site’s ranking in search engine results. http://www.HotelMotel.com http://www.HotelMotel.com/digital_edition http://www.Marriott.com http://www.minibar.com http://www.minibar.com http://www.hotelmotel.com

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Hotel & Motel Management - November 3, 2008

Hotel & Motel Management - November 3, 2008 Contents The Rate Debate Accor Defines Motel 6 Prototype Rollout Holiday Inn Eyes Upscale, Timeshare Perspective Economy Sets Tone at The Lodging Conference Mellow Vibe Meets Bold Design at HD Boutique Expo IH/M&RS to Focus on Going Green Legally Speaking Sales Clinic On Finance Travel Trends Cornell Insights Franchise Law HotelWorld Update Trends & Stats Energy Star Update Energy Star Update An Industry Connected People on The Move Annual GM Survey Point-of-Sale Systems IH/M&RS Product Preview Outdoor Lighting Refrigeration Marketplace Ad/Editorial Index Classifieds Checking Out

Hotel & Motel Management - November 3, 2008

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