Wednesday 17 July 2019

Can hotels win the booking?


In the battle to win customers to direct channels, hotels need to adopt a multi-pronged strategy finds new report.

Hotels are struggling to win direct bookings in a hyper-competitive age of online travel booking. However, there is still room to improve performance and make major headway in this important arena by reaching consumers in the channels that matter and perfecting those channels for maximum effectiveness finds a new report. The State of Hospitality Distribution: Direct report, which is free to download now, notes that hotels that focus the efforts on a carefully crafted strategy across Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), metasearch, their own sites, loyalty programs and social media and User Generated Content (UGC) stand a good chance of boosting their direct bookings.


Looking at what tactics are viewed as most critical amongst the travel industry, SEO, content marketing and social are seen as the most critical for customer acquisition. The report notes an EyeforTravel industry survey, which found that travel suppliers reported that their top area of investment for customer acquisition is SEO, at 54% of respondents, followed by content marketing at just under half of respondents and then social media and blogs. Reinforcing the importance of SEO and social, as well the pervasiveness of the most powerful advertising networks on the internet, 63.7% of travel suppliers said that Facebook and Google were positive influences that help their businesses.

It is therefore critical that hoteliers address these fields. When it comes to SEO, the game has to be played cleverly as more generic keywords reaching the broadest segment of the market are already likely to be subject to fierce bidding and therefore difficult to generate strong returns from. The report suggests that hoteliers need to research their field of keywords, focusing on long-tail keywords more specific to their properties, as well as the following:
        Move to a responsive website: Responsive sites help with ranking as it is easier for search engines to crawl and uses a single URL, and Google has tweaked its algorithm with the release of Hummingbird to be more focused on the mobile experience.
        Look at code and content carefully to reduce page load times: Look at page weight and figure out where the biggest strains are as well as where there might be smaller savings. Approach imagery in a smart manner, looking to compress, run off an image server, and combine background images into a single image to reduce requests. Consider a Content Delivery Network (CDN) to reduce latency.
        Think about user purpose at all stages: Consider the user intent at all stages and make it easy for them to navigate to the next step.
        Create quality, original content: Focus on being trustworthy and authoritative. Poorly conceived and created content will mean low dwell times, a lack of backlinks, high bounce rates, and poor ClickThrough Rates (CTRs). Create content hubs related to your destinations or offerings that interlink with each other and answer specific things that visitors would want to know about the area or service.
        Remember search engines are mostly text-based and you need to make their lives easy: Look at underlying structural data that can help engines and therefore your position. These include: meta titles, meta descriptions and header tags, particularly the H1 tag, that use keywords appropriately and help describe the page; alt tags, related file names and descriptions for key images; and provision of a sitemap to Google.
        Set up a Google Search Console account: Google’s Search Console is an incredibly helpful tool to track site performance and organic SEO.

Alongside SEO, social is highly influential, particularly in initial phases of thinking about and researching a trip, most notably among younger consumers. “Social media plays a big part in who we are and how we reach new audiences,” said Kate Martin, General Manager of the Luma Hotel Times Square in New York City. “Because we’re new and hip, we find and connect with customer who appreciate us for being different and social media is a big part of that.”

Jason Lee, Senior Director of Product and Technology at Travel Media Group, finds that social media and in particular Facebook affect all phases of the buying process, with “Facebook delivering the most bang for the buck because there’s nothing like it in the social media sphere.”

Lee’s strategy for hotel clients is to both invest in promoted content and ads and to create content that builds engagement. Consumers will likely use social media as a research tool, going elsewhere to book and largely ignoring Calls to Action (CTAs) except when closely targeted, such as at choice moments of heightened interest. For one hotel client, Lee spent $10 on a Facebook post promoting room availability during dates when a high-profile artist was giving a concert at a venue near the property. Within minutes of the post going live, it was viewed several hundred times, shared 87 times and generated seven room nights.

Some of the above principles for social and search should be applied to the hotel’s website itself, which is perhaps the most crucial element of driving direct bookings. Similar to social, imagery is critical. For Sonesta International Hotel Corporation relaunch of its website it took the route of going “Much more visual that what we had previously,” said Scott Weiler, vice president, marketing and communications at Sonesta. “We commissioned a lot of new photos so that the site would be in lock step with the look and feel of the hotels.”  Much of the website balances a single hero image across the top of a page with tiles that Weiler described as visually providing users with a way of navigating a number of ideas very quickly

Honolulu-based Aqua-Aston Hospitality chose to position itself on its website as a Hawaii destination expert in addition to offering lodging facilities. Travel suggestions are tailored to users’ preferences and content themes change regularly and are tied together with customized itineraries created by local influencers and ambassadors. The company also amasses user data as they spend time exploring the site; that information is used to improve target marketing capabilities, serve up more relevant offers to users and further build its Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system and loyalty program.

It is the last point that is also perhaps being overlooked currently as the report finds that the loyalty program and hotel loyalty in general are not dead.

Loyalty programs continue to drive value for brands, attracting the highest spending consumers, driving positive views of the brand and being a way to reach younger consumers, surprisingly.
Over 90% of travel organizations believe that their loyalty program has had a positive effect on their brand’s perception among consumers according to an EyeforTravel industry survey featured in the report.

The results also note that 78.5% of hoteliers reported that their loyalty program members spent more than the average, with 30.8% reporting that they spend ‘considerably more’. In a consumer survey also within the report, membership for loyalty programs was skewed to higher income brackets, explaining this higher spend.



Furthermore, satisfaction regarding hotel loyalty programs was highest among the youngest age group. More than 80% of those aged 18 to 35 and members of at least one program think that hotels provide good or excellent service when it comes to loyalty membership. This declines to 73.8% for those aged 36 to 55 and 65.4% for over 55s.

Even better, the most engaged members are those aged 18-35. In this demographic cohort 70.3% report that they use their rewards on all or most of their journeys, falling to 66.1% from the middle-aged group and then to 51.8% for those over 55

This suggests that there is enormous value to be mined from a well-run loyalty program in targeting key groups of consumers and understanding the brand’s customer base, as well as generating repeat bookings.

For more, download the report now to get the inside track on direct bookings. This report features:
  • Industry and consumer survey data from hundreds of travel suppliers and thousands of consumers
  • Viewpoints from major hotel chains and independents on key tactics
  • Analysis of the state of direct booking rates to benchmark your performance against
  • Tactics to improve direct channel booking rates and increase loyalty
  • Strategies to increase channel visibility and get more guests into your funnel.

This report is part of the State of Hospitality Distribution Report Series. In this we cover metasearch, direct and OTA channels, assessing the health and landscape of each before giving you the information to maximise their effectiveness. Keep an eye out for our upcoming OTA report and click here for the metasearch report.

Monday 15 July 2019

Hotels no longer own their guests


Reaching the consumer is absolutely critical but hotels are failing to capture enough of the market and are paying the price says new report.

According to an EyeforTravel industry survey, which captured nearly 800 responses from travel suppliers, OTA ownership of the customer is the single biggest external challenge they face. The results featured EyeforTravel and Fornova’s new The State of Hospitality Distribution: Direct report, which is free to download now, show that hotel brands are struggling to reach the consumer and get them to make a direct booking, with the fierce competition hurting revenues.

This can be seen in the soaring cost of acquisition. When EyeforTravel asked travel suppliers what issues were standing in the way of getting their products in front of customers, cost of acquisition came top at 43.4% of respondents, followed by another highly relevant issue to the direct question: Intermediaries.



The position of intermediaries as the supreme sellers of hotel rooms has put hotels at a disadvantage, in large part due to the accumulation of data expertise, along with the resources to interrogate and fully utilize the findings in marketing campaigns.

OTAs have an advantage that hotels continue to struggle to match, from proper data analytics to being overmatched in PPC campaign spending.

The net result of this is that the major OTAs have created a sense of brand loyalty among travel consumers and created a powerful market position. In a consumer survey of more than 5,000 travelers from Australia, Canada, the UK and the US also featured in the report, OTAs came out strongly ahead of hotel and traditional travel agencies for driving consumer bookings. Expedia, Booking.com and Hotels.com were the brands attracting the most repeat bookings, far ahead of the big hotel brands, with Best Western, Hilton and Marriott the best performing of these but still far behind the OTAs.

This means hotels needs to look more carefully at how they attract and retain business from consumers, considering profit per guest and customer lifetime value, as well as the value of owning the data from each guest.

“The question is, do you look at it from the perspective of operational results, which means profitability for the transaction, or from the point of view of lifetime customer value or customer retention?” Posited Sanchit Rege, manager, distribution strategy at Hyatt Hotels Corporation. “Even if I have to spend five extra dollars [on metasearch costs] for someone to book direct, I have an advantage over the other transaction because now I know who this person is before he arrives and I have the ability to drive profitability on my food and beverage or some other form of ancillary revenue and I have the ability to actually make him loyal over a period of time.”

Kyle Mais, general manager of the Jamaica Inn in Ocho Rios, Jamaica, called guests who book directly “more sticky”. “Once the booking is made, we follow up with them directly to get them ready for the trip and create a relationship from an early stage,” he attested. The hotel will advise guests of packing needs, ground transportation and seasonal activities taking place on property during the guest’s travel dates. At check-in, these guests will ask to meet the reservationists with whom they’ve been communicating because of the relationship and want to thank them before their vacation has even begun. For guests who book through an OTA, their initial interaction with the hotel is upon arrival and the hotel is starting from square one without data on the customer to help them.

For more tactics from both major and independent hotel brands and data, download the report and receive:
  • Industry and consumer survey data from hundreds of travel suppliers and thousands of consumers
  • Viewpoints from major hotel chains and independents on key tactics
  • Analysis of the state of direct booking rates to benchmark your performance against
  • Tactics to improve direct channel booking rates and increase loyalty
  • Strategies to increase channel visibility and get more guests into your funnel.

This report is part of the State of Hospitality Distribution Report Series. In this we cover metasearch, direct and OTA channels, assessing the health and landscape of each before giving you the information to maximise their effectiveness. Keep an eye out for our upcoming OTA report and click here for the metasearch report.

Thursday 11 July 2019

What dynamic pricing leaders can teach the travel industry


Dynamic pricing promises major change and is already being used by a variety of brands says a new report.

Brands are waking up to the possibility of dynamic pricing and driving rich rewards from doing so finds the new Dynamic and Personalized Pricing report from EyeforTravel, which is free to download now. Dynamic pricing, the process of using data to more accurately segment consumers and automatically offer them differentiated prices based on various factors, is being deployed from both within and outside the travel industry. Early adopters include many players in the airline industry, Airbnb and Amazon. So, with so many waking up to dynamic pricing, what are some of these early adopters doing and what are the main lessons?

Airbnb has already built in sophisticated dynamic pricing algorithms to those hosts that select to use them. Property owners can choose to set a price manually or utilize the dynamic pricing algorithms provided by Airbnb to automatically determine the cost per night. The three key factors involved in the automated pricing of Airbnb space are seasonality, day of the week and special events. On a broader level, the company reputedly works across more than 70 categories to create the price. It lists the following as some of those criteria:
                     Lead-times
                     Search behaviors both within and outside the listings market, with prices rising as search popularity increases
                     Seasonality
                     The popularity of the listing at any given time, including how many users view and their dwell time on the listing
                     Listing amenities, such as WiFi, air conditioning or a pool
                     Number of bedrooms and bathrooms.
                     Prices paid for bookings in the past with adjustments made if host-set prices differentiate from the algorithm
                     Host review scores over time.

This allows Airbnb to maximize bookings for all available dates. The lesson here is to monitor the widest possible purview of variables when considering pricing and to take special consideration of events occurring in destinations.

Amazon has also built heavily on its data advantage, making it a leader in dynamic pricing in the retail industry. Amazon has access not only to one of the world’s largest online marketplaces but also an entire ecosystem of sellers who it can monitor to find bestselling products and pricing information.
This allows it to find key products that bring people to its site and price them in a manner that brings in a sale but also reinforces the customers view of Amazon as the best value marketplace. Meanwhile it looks for price inelastic goods and maintains margins on these to make up for low margins or even losses on other products.

Amazon does this through regular pricing adjustments that sometimes are made on an hourly basis depending on demand.  

It was also one of the first to move into the realm of personalized offers. The user is confronted with suggestions related to what they have purchased and what they are currently looking at. These suggestions are dynamically put together based on various factors such as past purchases the user has made, as well purchases that others have made with a similar interest profile.

The core lesson here is to think about how pricing can impact long-term loyalty and price aggressively to draw in first-time customers. 

Although more segmented pricing has potential rewards, it also does not come without risks. Tinder, the popular social match-maker and a fast-growing player in the platform economy has applied a pricing practice that may have been correct from a data perspective but came unstuck against legislation and consumer rights.

As with all pricing, it is a case of supply and demand, with older consumers more willing to pay for the service and were thus being charged more for their Tinder Plus and Tinder Gold services. Older consumers are operating from a smaller pool of potential partners, frequently have higher earnings or wealth and are less common on the Tinder app, making finding a partner harder, thus meaning it makes more sense from a user perspective to pay to level the playing field and improve their probability of generating successful matches.

However, Tinder ran afoul of ethics and the law with their strategy, settling a class action lawsuit for USD17.3 million in January 2019 through the California lawcourts.  

It will be paramount for travel companies to ensure that their pricing practices are based on segmentation using context and behavior, and on supply and demand, as opposed to factors which can be legally challenging due to being discriminatory.

  • Detailed analysis from a report written by a pricing expert and consultant.
  • A breakdown of modern pricing practice in travel to help you get to grips with the current environment and how it is changing.
  • Key rules to create your own advanced pricing regime.
  • Real-world examples of advanced pricing practices from Airbnb, Amazon and more.
  • How to integrate dynamic pricing into increasingly complex distribution networks.

Tuesday 9 July 2019

Why dynamic pricing will transform travel distribution


Smarter pricing structures will allow travel brands to create more relevant prices for their customers, boosting revenue and loyalty finds a new report.

Pricing within the travel industry is evolving to match consumers and what they are willing to pay far more accurately as a result of a better understanding of impacting variables and more ability to deploy granular prices across distribution networks. The upshot of this, according to a new report, is that travel brands can continuously adjust their pricing to suit their customers and thus maximize the revenue they get for each route or room. To explore the step change in capabilities and how they can be implemented, you can download the Dynamic and Personalized Pricing report completely for free here now.

Currently, most revenue management systems (and revenue managers) take into account things such as historical demand curves, events and conferences, seasonal factors and overall route capacity, etc. However, with the changing ability of systems to factor in a greater depth of information in very short timeframes and from an almost unlimited number of sources, the calculation of demand is starting to change.

Firstly, brands can bring in more information surrounding the destination and target market. For example, for a short leisure trip, a system could factor in the weather at different locations and use that as a component of the algorithm to calculate anticipated demand. Then there are customer personas that are growing increasingly detailed and only really limited by the amount of available data.

This is allowing micro-segmentation and fundamentally changing the way offers are created to the point where each individual could receive a different offer when considering all the possible combinations.

With micro-segmentation, the industry is moving away from the simplistic leisure versus business traveller divide and the other common segmentations that have been used to date. The idea is to apply a finer grained mesh – perhaps with dozens or even hundreds of micro-segments as opposed to five or ten. With this systematic approach, applying factors such as willingness to pay and demand-based factors to individual offers provides considerable price-point differentiation.

The fundamental processes can also be applied to ancillaries, in what is termed complete offer creation that creates the next level of differentiation. Complete offer creation involves bundling additional products that are probabilistically calculated to be desired by the consumer. In the case of the airlines, this could mean an offer in which the travel, wireless connectivity, a checked bag and a warm meal is included in the overall offer price. If the brand can add value to the customer’s request by addressing an additional need or desire, and the offer is within the consumer’s willingness to pay, an expanded offer can not only generate additional immediate revenue but also a higher level of customer satisfaction and potentially additional follow-on revenues.

This creates a huge range of possible combinations that means, effectively, pricing is coming down to the individual. The value created from this investment into more complex and granular pricing is leaps in revenue through maximizing the pricing level in each demand period and minimizing the amount of inventory left unused.

  • Detailed analysis from a report written by a pricing expert and consultant.
  • A breakdown of modern pricing practice in travel to help you get to grips with the current environment and how it is changing.
  • Key rules to create your own advanced pricing regime.
  • Real-world examples of advanced pricing practices from Airbnb, Amazon and more.
  • How to integrate dynamic pricing into increasingly complex distribution networks.

Wednesday 20 February 2019

Measuring and making the most of consumer data


Travel brands are sitting on huge value in their databases but are yet to unlock its full potential, which will be game changing

Virtually every consumer-facing travel brand is capturing critical data constantly from their site visitors but many are struggling to maximise its value says EyeforTravel and Datumize’s new Understanding Customer Behaviour Through Demand-Based Analytics white paper. This is because of the reams of information that are being constantly created across multiple channels and the need to be always on and live. These factors often prevent travel companies from getting down to the key metrics that matter and being able to fully extract and study them.

“Travel companies normally only have access to converted sales and aren’t able to track all the requests that customers are making though channels,” explains Datumize’s head of marketing Carlota Feliu.

“Some of them they can track, for example, through their own website. But the vast majority they are not capable of tracking this data with the technologies they are using. Everything that you want to do in demand forecasting starts with good data and good knowledge of your customers – without this, you won’t be able to understand demand, predict it, or increase it,” says Feliu.

She points to several key areas where brands can start to interrogate their data:
Inventory: Do you have the right offer at the right price in each area?
Availability: Do you have the stock available to action all requests, and in the right price range?
Experience: Are all software links in the chain performing as they should for a quick, smooth booking?

Vueling Airlines, a Spanish, low-cost provider, has around five million search queries a day, 50% of which come directly from customers and 50% from online travel agencies and other tour operators. But since its business goal is to answer all enquiries for a flight in a second or less, it was struggling to store and make use of all this demand data.

Jonathan Guerrero Corcho, innovation manager, explains that a Datumize solution – which monitors everything without adding any code to the main process or slowing anything down – means that the business can now understand more which kinds of routes and dates are most in-demand, with negligible noticeable effects to end users.

“We can see if a route is being asked for more times than we are operating on for those days and we can not only adjust the current schedule but we can adjust the next schedule,” he says. “We can say ‘this route is better to operate on Tuesday than Monday, as the numbers are saying that this route is more requested on Tuesday.’”

This kind of learning is particularly important for a business that does not operate the same flights each day, but a limited number of times a week.

For more case studies of brands that have driven performance gains from better utilisation of data, download the free white paper now.Demand-based analytics promise a step-change in travel brands’ capabilities, unlocking huge insights that will allow brands to better target consumers, build superior products and adjust faster to changing patterns. To understand how to unlock the value contained in demand-based data, download the Understanding Customer Behaviour Through Demand-Based Analytics white paper now! It includes:
  • Real-world examples and case studies
  • Industry survey data
  • Data-based techniques and areas of focus that can improve business performance immediately
  • Expert insight.

This white paper features insights from:
  • Europcar
  • IHG
  • The Travel Corporation
  • Thomas Cook Hotels & Resorts
  • Vueling
  • W2M.

Monday 18 February 2019

How simple measurements can make a big difference to travel brands’ performance

Travel brands can make huge leaps in performance through relatively simple measurements and metrics finds new white paper

Rigorously monitoring even the most basic of demand-based data can make a critical difference to overall performance says EyeforTravel and Datumize’s new Understanding Customer Behaviour Through Demand-Based Analytics white paper, which is available to download now. The paper finds tracking own-site searches, business-to-business requests, drop-outs across the funnel and service availability can result in major uplifts to bookings.

“All companies know what they sell – but they don’t know what they don’t sell,” says Josep Maria Gomis, Travel Solutions Architect, at Datumize. He suggests that travel brands can grab uplifts in conversions quickly by monitoring simple elements such as geographies for where requests are received. “When we deployed our solution with one of our clients five years ago, for example, we found that the first region they received requests for was Spain.” The sales director knew this already, and he was also blasé about the discovery that the second most common type of request was for inventory in France. But the fourth region – to his astonishment – was China. “He said – ‘you are wrong – we are not selling in China!’” says Gomis. “And we said, ‘you are not selling because you don’t have a product, but this is the fourth most popular market for which you receive requests. You should have a product for them! We consider this a lost sale.’ And after a month they started offering products for China. Profits went up.”

Another way of finding these lost sales and improving business performance quickly through monitoring requests is looking at the languages used: “One of our customers discovered that people were looking for products on its Polish webpage but typing in queries in the German language,” says Datumize founder Nacho Lafuente. “This might seem like a stupid case but it’s tens of thousands of euros that you are not converting. If you are looking for ‘Crete’, a Greek island, on a Polish page, then the result is not found.” Analysing requests can find that some customers are not finding products that you have available because of a language gap. Not every destination is the same in every language, which leaves an obvious measurement metric to judge whether the offering matches what your clients are searching for.

Demand-based analytics create opportunities to match a brand’s product with the true picture of what customers want and are looking for.  

Measuring relatively simple metrics, such as those above, also gives brands an opportunity to search for patterns and critically when anomalies occur in those patterns. For Spanish tour operator W2M, which receives 250 million availability requests per day, finding the mismatches has been a key driver of business performance. W2M has set up some automatic alarms to flag up higher-than-expected error ratios, so the IT team can respond immediately. “We went from a 10% level of error to under 5%,” says Ernesto Sigg Rodríguez, head of clients and supplier performance. “I would say that represents between 5% and 10% growth in terms of sales,” which has made major difference to his business where margins are very slim.

Making dynamic changes and working across a business to implement them requires constant inputs, says Lafuente. “When you are dealing with a highly competitive business such as travel, margins are so low that they need to squeeze [every] euro,” he says. “It’s not only about having a general understanding or perception of how things are going. You need to photograph every single minute and have alarms for things if they break certain thresholds.”

Demand-based analytics promise a step-change in travel brands’ capabilities, unlocking huge insights that will allow brands to better target consumers, build superior products and adjust faster to changing patterns. To understand how to unlock the value contained in demand-based data, download the Understanding Customer Behaviour Through Demand-Based Analytics white paper now! It includes:
  • Real-world examples and case studies
  • Industry survey data
  • Data-based techniques and areas of focus that can improve business performance immediately
  • Expert insight.

This white paper features insights from:
  • Europcar
  • IHG
  • The Travel Corporation
  • Thomas Cook Hotels & Resorts
  • Vueling
  • W2M.

Wednesday 13 February 2019

Why demand-based data matters

Demand-based analytics promise a step-change in travel brands’ capabilities, unlocking huge insights that will allow brands to better target consumers, build superior products and adjust faster to changing patterns says new research

Demand-based data is increasingly important and can allow travel brands to become both more agile in the short-term and better prepared for long-term trends according to the new Understanding Customer Behaviour Through Demand-Based Analytics white paper from EyeforTravel and Datumize, which is free to download now. Looking at ongoing demand patterns will arm travel brands with a wide-range of capabilities, such as more responsive marketing, better-adjusted pricing, more personalised products, superior forecasting capabilities and increased planning capabilities.

This kind of data is of utmost importance to a youth brand like Contiki, part of The Travel Corporation’s agglomeration of 30 international brands. Raj Dhawan, senior executive, technology at The Travel Corporation, explains that understanding and forecasting demand is critical to keeping Contiki’s catalogue of offerings appealing and up-to-date.

“The one area that we look at regularly is search terms on our website – the cities and countries where people are searching,” he explains. “That may result in us culling some trips and destinations or increasing our inventory on those destinations.

“There are areas and destinations that are hot in the market versus those that are not, and every year that changes a bit. Based on that, our product changes to some extent, with variations that could appeal to the audience that we have.”

Building on this monitoring, the business is experimenting with a machine learning pilot to give these learnings a concrete and immediate use: Depending on patterns of searches, for example for a particular area or cost bracket, Contiki customers will see a website personalised for their type of customer.

“When people search for certain terms, the website is curated based on this,” says Dhawan. “That’s something we are piloting, and that uses machine learning and the search product on the website.”

This is just one example of the insights from brands featured in the white paper. Download the full research now to get more from industry leaders, including Europcar, IHG, Thomas Cook Hotels & Resorts, Vueling and W2M.

Demand-based analytics promise a step-change in travel brands’ capabilities, unlocking huge insights that will allow brands to better target consumers, build superior products and adjust faster to changing patterns. To understand how to unlock the value contained in demand-based data, download the Understanding Customer Behaviour Through Demand-Based Analytics white paper now! It includes:
  • Real-world examples and case studies
  • Industry survey data
  • Data-based techniques and areas of focus that can improve business performance immediately
  • Expert insight.

This white paper features insights from:
  • Europcar
  • IHG
  • The Travel Corporation
  • Thomas Cook Hotels & Resorts
  • Vueling
  • W2M.