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.

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.

Content and Social Critical to Converting Travelers

Content and social media distribution are vital to reaching and converting travellers finds a new report from EyeforTravel, which can bedownloaded for free now.

Quality content marketing and a strong social media presence is helping brands build loyal customer bases and underpinning more effective sales and marketing funnels according to EyeforTravel’s new Converting the Customer report, which can be downloaded here.

Strong content can not only be used to make travellers aware of a destination or brand but it also gives brands critical clues about consumer intent that can then be used to build out their marketing. Combining this effectively with social media strategy and sharing tools turbocharges it and is giving brands a critical edge. 

“What helped us boost conversion is that we managed to build up a sustainable brand loyalty over social media so people are in contact with our brand every day or when they see things in their news feed,” says David Armstrong, CEO of HolidayPirates. “That’s why we have managed to have a lot of brand traffic and organic traffic on our website and on our mobile app, which helps conversion.”

HolidayPirates, however, has taken social to another level building its brand almost entirely through the medium. “We invest in content and viral content on social media [and] after six years we have over 30 million monthly visits, almost 10 million Facebook fans, over 10 million app downloads and last year an estimated TTV [total transaction value] of €362m,”  Armstrong told the EyeforTravel Europe summit 2018. This growth has come despite not spending anything on search engine marketing and last year, his business reckons it only paid for 7% of its traffic.

It helped, he said, that the business started as a travel blog recommending fantastic deals. Now, algorithms and technology do much of this leg work, and the results are posted on social media to hook in customers and stimulate viral sharing.

“Our recipe for virality has four components – an entertaining tone of voice, transparency, to be relevant with content deals and a call to action, and being controversial to foster engagement,” he added. “You have to inspire people.”

This shows that social media advertising and viral content can draw eyes to you, even if you are a smaller operator, such as Eurail, which sells all-in-one train tickets for Europe.

“Our struggle is our brand awareness,” said Roel Verhagen, head of e-commerce. “We are not top of mind when you think about travel…but we do have 2,500,000 in traffic a month. Our return on -investment on ad spend is hugely important.”

They came up with the marketing idea of creating two videos telling the story of a pair who met by chance in Amsterdam and travelled Europe together – with longer-play and short versions for paid adverts and social media pages. At the same time, the team started using Facebook Pixel to track customer response to this advertising and finding out where people fell out of the funnel through seven stages, from being made aware of Eurail, to having purchased a ticket.

“At a certain moment, the return on advertising spend was better on our own channels like Facebook, and we had success with the engagement rate,” says Verhagen. The videos of Chloe’s story and Justin’s story rose to 11 million views, and now the next video is in production with the firm Boomerang, and a permanent part of marketing policy.

Adding social and review functionality onto your digital experience doesn’t have to be intimidating either. A growing number of new digital media companies in this space allow smart partnerships to help host, monitor and improve social interactions.

Dan Christian, chief digital officer of The Travel Corporation, believes in harnessing the potential of advertising via social media recommendation. “Mary Meeker’s latest trend report says selling on social platforms is very real – people see social content and make purchases,” he told the EyeforTravel Europe Summit 2018 in London. “We were looking to get all of our travel directors active on social media.”

For his group – comprising 30 international brands – the solution was a partnership with a Toronto-based start-up, PostBeyond, which connects enthusiastic employee advocates with potential customers on social media, and Feefo, an independent online review site.

“PostBeyond was a tool that our team could use and with one click could share – their SaaS [software as a service] model worked perfectly. We also needed user generated reviews – independent reviews from people who had been on our trip [with Feefo]. We see consumer behavior changing and we won’t be relevant if we aren’t where they are spending their time, and we need the tools to do that.”

These case studies from the report demonstrate that content and social are intertwined with success in the marketing funnel for brands of all shapes and sizes. To learn more about how to drive up your conversion rates and revenues download the new Converting the Customer report for free now by clicking here. This report includes findings on:

• How to measure and understand intent to purchase.
• What content and marketing will drive up conversions.
• How to retarget and remarket in a way that brings customers back.
• How to use different channels effectively.
• Why social proof is critical and how it can dramatically raise revenues.

This report is part of our Behavioral Analytics Report Series, where we seek to uncover how brands can understand the modern traveler to drive higher conversion rates, lower acquisition costs, and ultimately give them the best possible product at the right price. You can find the first report, Understanding the Travel Consumer by clicking here. You can also sign up to EyeforTravel’s newsletter to be notified when our third report in the series, which covers dynamic and personalized pricing, is released. 

Why It Can Pay to Be Counterintuitive in Travel Marketing and Sales

Travel brands are discovering that driving up conversions requires counterintuitive design and a smart approach to testing

For almost every travel brand, their marketing and sales funnel is extremely porous, with consumers dropping out at every stage and low numbers eventually turning into bookings. Pushing up conversion rates isn’t straightforward either, find EyeforTravel’s new Converting the Customer report, which is free to download now. To succeed, designers, webmasters and analysts will need to be ready to take a journey into the sometimes illogical and counterintuitive world of marketing and sales psychology.

http://1.eyefortravel.com/LP=21727?extsource=prUnderstanding what does and doesn’t work all starts with a strong base in thorough testing. Steven Consiglio, product performance manager at Booking.com, said that it always has “countless, ever-present” different versions of its site on trial and uses A/B testing to measure the success rate of one version against another.

“Most of the concrete opinions we’ve brought to the table have been wrong,” he says. “In terms of hypotheses, we do worse than a coin flip on things that we feel will improve the guest experience – it really speaks to the importance of a testing culture. We added a shadow to the Booking.com search box and conversion increased. There are a hundred of those [kinds of example] that are nonsensical.”

Sam Nazari, head of solutions engineering at Sentient Technologies also finds that small changes can add up but trying to second guess which ones or why is borderline impossible: “One of our clients decided to reverse the payment and address fields. So instead of the customer filling out the address and the payment field, let them start with the payments and then the address field. We don’t necessarily know why, but our AI told us that that variation is a top performer.”

He has also found that it can even pay to create an ugly website! “Abub Media tested very odd colors, and non-obvious combinations of colours were actually the best performing design. So, a pink background and perform widget, a white call to action with black text and a lime green banner was a top performer. They call it the ugly widget creator! We generated that design, and it was a 45% lift [in bookings] over [the] control.”

Product choices and menus are also a place where travel brands need to apply testing and psychological know-how. Normally, putting in more product choices and steps before the final checkout leads to noticeable drop out at each stage and reduces conversion and revenues. However, by optimising the choice presented to the consumer, there are times when this is not the case and counterintuitively the opposite is true.

Take easyjet for example. They introduced new baggage options in 2018, offering consumers 15kg, 23kg and 26kg hold bag choices. This would seem to go against the grain of reducing cognitive load for the consumer by adding more choices in this instance. However, through site optimization, menu design, and some clever psychological pricing, this is paying off. Whilst the jump from a 15kg hold bag to a 23kg hold bag costs a few pounds or euros, the 26kg bag cost over 60% in the example we looked at on their website in August 2018. This is a classic pricing trick that makes the consumer assume the middle option is the best value, with the 26kg option essentially a redundant option, and the 15kg option acting as an anchor price to emphasise the value of the 23kg hold bag. 

These are all examples of why it is important not to assume your logic is the same as the customers and to examine any attempt to lift conversion through comprehensive testing. Whilst changing small items, such as the colour of the call-to-action, the position of menu items, or the wording behind ancillary sales items, can seem small and nonsensical, adding them all up can make a real difference to the bottom line. It therefore pays to test the counterintuitive and go against your instincts in the pursuit of higher conversion rates.

To learn more about how to drive up your conversion rates and revenues download the new Converting the Customer report for free now by clicking here. This report includes findings on:

• How to measure and understand intent to purchase.
• What content and marketing will drive up conversions.
• How to retarget and remarket in a way that brings customers back.
• How to use different channels effectively.
• Why social proof is critical and how it can dramatically raise revenues.

This report is part of our Behavioral Analytics Report Series, where we seek to uncover how brands can understand the modern traveler to drive higher conversion rates, lower acquisition costs, and ultimately give them the best possible product at the right price. You can find the first report, Understanding the Travel Consumer by clicking here. You can also sign up to EyeforTravel’s newsletter to be notified when our third report in the series, which covers dynamic and personalized pricing, is released.

Six Steps to Convert Travel Consumers

EyeforTravel’s new Converting the Customer report reveals six key tactics to push your site’s visitors from lookers to bookers. 

Converting a travel customer is a tricky business for any brand but EyeforTravel’s new Converting the Customer report, which is free to download now, is here to help with six key tactics that will help you go from booking bust to a conversion king!

Test and Test Consistently
What will and won’t succeed in increasing conversions when it comes to site look and layout is frequently not obvious and often frustratingly irrational. A/B testing is a must in this arena, as even the most adept of web designers may miss out on a conversion positive tactic. Note that you will need good levels of traffic to the test pages, especially for more subtle changes to avoid freak results or misleading conclusions. 

Reduce the Steps to the Completing the Booking 



















Once customers have reached checkout, keep it to crucial information only, or even confirm the booking and look at payments later in the case of hotels or tours and activities. This is especially true on mobile as reduced real estate makes it harder for the customer to enter details and move through stages. “On mobile, we have found that entering in credit card information, and/or address details, overwhelmingly became the highest bounce rate,” says Steven Consiglio, product performance manager at Booking.com. “It was a tremendous [source of] friction once you already shrink the screen and shrink the steps to book.” So, the business created a product to allow hotels to waive the need for a credit card to be entered, in certain circumstances. “It has a huge conversion-positive boost [for] last-minute [bookings],” he adds.

If They Haven’t Asked for the Product, You Need a Reason to Offer It

If consumers drop off for every extra hurdle they have to jump then why put them there? Keep your extra products simple and make it obvious what the benefit is to the customer at every single stage. If at all possible use previous sales data, intent information and cookie tracking to find out what products are most likely to be taken up by the customer and also an optimal pricing level. To return to testing again, run an A/B test to see if trying to sell an ancillary product is genuinely conversion and revenue positive versus not offering it or offering it more subtly. Small page changes or product variations can lead to big jumps.

Keep Friction as Low as Possible 

All of these points are really about keeping friction down for the customer at every stage of their journey. Think about user intent at each stage and what would get them to their desired outcome as fast and accurately as possible. ““We recommend taking a look at average order value and revenue per variation,” explains Sam Nazari, head of solutions engineering at Sentient Technologies. “Maybe you increase your overall conversion rate but AOV and revenue goes down, so you need to take account of that. Typically, as a best practice, removing any kind of distraction that takes the user away from going to the end of that funnel and converting, is always a good idea.” Nowadays it is very cheap to run user testing through on-demand services that can source large number of remote testers at short notice. Some have even taken it further, with Expedia running its own in-house user lab. 

Retarget Where Possible

Just because the customer dropped off, doesn’t mean they are gone forever. Indeed, the majority of final bookers will return to the product they last viewed or a similar one. This is a golden opportunity to close the deal. If you can track and retarget them then you are increasing your probability of conversion. While using banner ads is an established tactic, you can now get even more sophisticated. Saving their search criteria and viewed items can give you a crucial advantage in reducing their steps to checkout when they return. You can serve them their searches or preferred products via a chatbot offering a discount, or push notifications on-site or on-app to bring them back to their previous searches. 

Give Them Reasons to Believe

Social proof tactics are all relatively simple but are some of the most effective possible changes you can make to optimize an e-commerce process.

Adding in reviews and user feedback is the main method of social proof when it comes to online travel sales, but also you can create a sense that the booking may disappear due to demand from scarcity messaging, which can be combined with a deadline to purchase for an added psychological push. A meta-analysis of 6,700 A/B tests conducted by e-commerce company Qubit across 2014 to 2017 found that social proof, introducing the idea of inventory scarcity and using messages with sales deadlines to create urgency were by far the most effective tactics from the 29 categories they tested. This is because they increased consumer perception of product value and encouraged them to push on with the purchase. They found that these tactics gave the following bump to revenue per visitor:

• Scarcity created a +2.9% uplift.
• Social proof created a +2.3% uplift.
• Urgency created a +1.5% uplift.

Furthermore, out of all of the tactics tested, scarcity and social proof had the highest probability of creating an uplift in their experiments.

To learn more about how to drive up your conversion rates and revenues download the new Converting the Customer report for free now by clicking here. This report includes findings on:

• How to measure and understand intent to purchase. 
• What content and marketing will drive up conversions. 
• How to retarget and remarket in a way that brings customers back. 
• How to use different channels effectively. 
• Why social proof is critical and how it can dramatically raise revenues.

This report is part of our Behavioral Analytics Report Series, where we seek to uncover how brands can understand the modern traveler to drive higher conversion rates, lower acquisition costs, and ultimately give them the best possible product at the right price. You can find the first report, Understanding the Travel Consumer by clicking here. You can also sign up to EyeforTravel’s newsletter to be notified when our third report in the series, which covers dynamic and personalized pricing, is released.