Josiah’s note: I finally bought myself an iPad this morning, after mixed feelings on how it would benefit me. It may be the first step in a new direction for how we consume media, and have a few posts planned for us to explore this concept. But because I think this trend could be bigger than just one device – the iPad – I’d like to give you another perspective. Here, Mihir Nayak discusses a new device he’s looking at, and how he may use it at his Mitaroy Goa Hotel.

It was after a gap of 5 long years that I met Sharat, my old friend from London. When I first came to London, it was Sharat who showed me London’s nightclub scene and took me to see the shimmering blue waters of Brighton.

So it was with great anticipation that I walked up the stairs to see my old friend at his new place of work.

Over some delicious and a bhurjee (egg fry) and tandoori rotis at the nearby Punjabi Rasoi Indian restaurant, Sharat told me about the Magnum – Sharat’s new iPad killer!

Being the geek that I am, I was all ears as Sharat told me about their concept of the fourth screen. Through life, we generally use 3 screens: the television screen, the computer screen and the mobile phone screen. Sharat plans to make the Lacs Magnum the fourth screen in our lives, thereby taking care of all our data, gaming and communication needs.

Back at his office, Sharat showed me some of the things that you can do with this little Touch Screen Device. For example, you can hook up the Lacs Magnum to both your mobile phone and your car stereo system (or any fm receiving device) and drive hands free while listening to what the other person has to say through the stereo speakers. I mean, how cool is that? Sharat tells me he uses it everyday while driving back from work, to the envy of the other motorists

If you link your smart phone to the Lacs Magnum device via Bluetooth, then you can use the wider touch screen of the Lacs Magnum instead of the smaller screen on your smartphone. Sharat feels however, that the Lacs Magnum will be used mostly for touch gaming and watching movies on the go, what with the 3G auction just complete in India.

How I could use tablet computing for my guests

As soon as guests to my Mitaroy Goa Hotel exit the Arrivals lounge at Goa’s Dabolim International Airport, they are received by our hotel chauffeur. With the Lacs Magnum (embedded in the back of the headrests, for example), my guests can now see a video of my Goa Hotel and the services we offer before they arrive at the Mitaroy.

However, as a techo-hotelier (boy, I love that term), what interested me the most was the location-based services that Sharat’s touch screen device offers.

For example, as our chauffeur drives my guests from Goa’s Dabolim International Airport to the Mitaroy Goa Hotel, they can receive location based information as they pass by the important sights of Goa. They can also choose to see a video that starts and stops as we pass by the important sights and sounds of Goa.

Tablets as a virtual tour guide

Last week, I also bounced off a few ideas with my good friend Vinay from Royal Mysore Walks about the concept of a virtual tour guide, a concept that could fit in perfectly with Lacs Magnum touch screen device.

Instead of a personal tour of the Unesco Heritage Zone of Fontainhas, Asia’s only Latin quarter and the location of my Mitaroy Goa Hotel, guests could be offered a technological alternative. Using the Lacs Magnum touch screen device, they can replay videos, search for more information on the internet or simply receive location based information on Fontainhas as they stroll its quaint bylanes without the need for an intrusive, personal guide.

Technology has been improving guest experiences for a long time now what with check in kiosks in major American hotels, check out via the Television, sensor based minibars that automatically record consumption, key cards etc.

But the future certainly lies in location based services that could offer personalised holiday experiences through technology.

With touch screen devices such as the Lacs Magnum, the future is already here. All we hoteliers need to do is reach out an touch it!

Josiah’s note: Mihir Nayak, owner of the Mitaroy Goa Hotel, has been a big supporter of this blog, and I’ve enjoyed getting to know him over the past few months. For the next few weeks, he will be posting a few guest posts on lessons he learned from running his hotel. Today, he discusses the ‘power of one.‘

Although it is a term that is thrown about a lot these days, the USP or Unique Selling Proposition is the most important weapon in any hotelier’s arsenal.

Last week I was sitting with a hotelier friend of mine while he and his team were designing their latest advertising brochure.

It was really amazing to see how his team of hotel marketers, who had surely studied the concept of the USP, were throwing everything and the kitchen sink onto their brochure.

Talk about our comfortable rooms, said one. Talk about our French chef, said another. Don’t forget our spa area, said the third. And on it went for the next hour or so.

They ended up with 4 slogans, 1 long title, 3 subtitles, 14 unique selling propositions and 8 different photos. As a result, the size of the hotel name had to be reduced so that it was barely visible and the website was in a font too small and tucked away in the right hand corner to be visible at all. Oh, and there was absolutely no call to action whatsoever!

At the end of it all, I was totally confused.

Research shows that guests are bombarded with so much advertising they find it hard to concentrate. If they want to even concentrate on advertisements at all. And in the hotel industry, the case is the same.

As I said earlier, the solution is to have a USP (there shouldn’t even be a plural) that sticks in peoples minds.

A wonderful book called the 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing dips into this concept. The authors say that as a hotelier, you should try and own one attribute in your customer’s mind. And that one attribute should have great importance for your guests.

Four Seasons is associated with luxury. Marriott is associated with standards. And W Hotel is associated with design.

I sat down and did the same exercise myself. What single word was special to my Goa Hotel? What attribute could I own?

And then it hit me.

Space.

Unlike other hotels in Goa or indeed the rest of the world that offered guests rooms of only 20 sq mts, my Suites at the Mitaroy Goa Hotel were a spacious 100 sq mts or 5 times the size of my competitors.

That was what was unique about my Goa Hotel and why guests would choose my Goa Hotel over the other hotels in Goa.

And I went about telling changing all my marketing to bring the point home.

• My website said “Stay at our spacious Suites!”
• My advertising said “Stay at our spacious Suites!”
• And my business card said “Stay at our spacious Suites!”

(See what I am trying to do here?)

I also stripped away all my other attributes from my marketing materials, concentrating on my spacious Suites – how they are 5 times larger than my competitors and why space is so important.

When concentrating on one attribute, you will be forced to sacrifice all the other attributes you may want to be associated with. But this has its advantages. Not only do you own an attribute in your guests’ minds but your advertising also becomes much clearer. And the best thing is that research shows that if your guests rate you highly on one attribute, they also rate you highly on all the other attributes that are important to them.

So, as a hotelier, you need to sit down and ask yourself what one attribute do you want to own. What is the single reason why guests should choose your hotel and not your competitors. In short, what is your USP?

Let me know what you come up with…

In today’s interview, I talk with Steve Lambert, General Manager of the Radisson Nashua Hotel. We discussed the practical details and day-to-day skills for using Twitter successfully, including:

1. How they took advantage of a renovation and rebranding to launch their social media activity
2. What types of content work best with Twitter
3. How to gather stories for sharing online
4. The system Steve built on his iPhone for capturing ideas as he finds them
5. Does syncing Twitter and Facebook updates automatically work well?
6. The metrics important to Steve
7. How he attracts new followers
8. Criteria for deciding who you should follow and interact with
9. How to stay on topic while at the same time maintaining diversity in your updates
10. Who in the hotel should be managing Twitter and your social media marketing
11. How Steve involves his whole team in the process
12. What’s next in social media

Listen here:

Bonus: The Twitter tools that Steve uses

Steve mentioned some of these tools in the interview – you may want to check them out for your own use:

• Itweet.net
• Twittearth
• Twinfluence
• Tweetmeme
• Futuretweets
• Song.ly
• Twiturm.com
• Tweetvisor
• Tweetvolume
• Asktwitr
• Backtweets
• Tweetbeep
• Friendorfollow

Trying something a little new today: an audio interview. My conversation with William Cotter of Net Affinity (Dublin, Ireland) was originally going to be about social media in Europe, but we ended up covering a lot more.

You should listen to this call – regardless of where you live.

Some of the topics we discuss include:

1. How to select social media networks for your hotel
2. If Twitter reaches actual guests (or just other hotels and marketing people!)
3. Does direct, proactive selling work in social media?
4. How to track social media activity to sales
5. Tips for building an online fan base
6. Do contests really work?
7. How to balance personality and procedures for consistency
8. The challenge of managing social media off-property (and ways to get around this)
9. How to manage social media campaigns in multiple languages

Listen here:

William Cotter is managing director of Net Affinity, a Dublin-based agency serving the hotel industry. He also runs the website MarketingTimes.com

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I think this audio format could be valuable, but I need to improve production quality. There were a few tech glitches on my side during this call, and I know my interview skills could use a lot of improvement. So please tell me: how can I make these better for you?

Josiah’s note: Although I was unable to be in Berlin this week to attend PhoCusWright@ITB 2010, Robert Cole of RockCheetah kindly agreed to share his top insights from the event in this guest post.

The PhoCusWright@ITB 2010 conference just concluded and, as always, provided a number of interesting points to consider within the travel industry marketing, distribution and technology landscape.

1)     PhoCusWright CEO Philip Wolf launched the conference with his keynote “Chaos Calls, Navigating the New” summarizing the disruptive forces at play that are complicating the travel industry landscape:

• Disparate Devices & Channels (new operating systems and platforms)
• Strains on Search (evolution of search changes search engine optimization)
• Tapping New Travelers (Look to the Asia Pacific region)
• See Me, Hear Me, Touch Me (new interfaces are predominantly visual)
• Significant Surprise (unexpected new player emerging)

2)     Gene Quinn, Chairman of PhoCusWright then hosted a group of analysts/investors to characterize the investment environment for travel technology companies:

• Investors are looking for recurring revenues, strong EBITDA (earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization), company growth, long term contracts, differentiated product, and especially, strong management
• Travelport’s failure to float its initial public offering was not about travel, it was about debt – the company was severely overleveraged. Investors are suspicious of big debt.

3)     Krista Pappas of Microsoft’s Bing search engine provided five lessons for travel media:

• Be Authentic (Million dollar homepage worked only once)
• Relentless Measurement & Optimization (TripAdvisor set the standard)
• Be Social (Starbucks deepening already strong relationships with their community)
• Be Opportunistic & Responsive (Ashton Kutcher’s growth to 1 Million – now 4.5 Million – followers)
• Ads are Content (Burger King’s sacrifice a Facebook friend campaign)

4)     David Roche, President of Hotels.com and Venere.com provided a number of interesting points:

• From a financial perspective, Expedia is basically a hotel selling company
• When comparing the commission model to the merchant model, the company discovered it does not confuse the public when selling both models together.
• Roche was also very complimentary of Priceline’s Booking.com, especially how they used Google as a demand source & a method measuring performance.

Read more…

Josiah’s note: In the second part of my conversation with Tom McCallum, we discuss what’s changed in PR and media relations.

PR is now a major element of your toolkit. This is true at all levels – even for a small bed & breakfast. Hotels don’t need to hire a PR agency, they can create their own blog. It’s next to free.

Don’t be boring

Reactive PR doesn’t work. Boring PR doesn’t work.

There is so much noise out there. Journalists must spend half their day throwing out boring pitches.

When girlfriend getaways were a big thing a few years ago, we did a “Guys Getaway.” It was nothing special until we included something unique: a sparring session with a Caribbean heavyweight boxing champion.

That cut through the noise. It made a full page article in USA Today. And as we all know, unpaid mentions carry so much more weight.

The importance of brand consistency

Effective story-based PR means that whatever you are offering should be consistent with your brand. The resort that did the Guys Getaway package was known for being irreverent and relaxed – so suggesting their guests spar with a boxer fit their persona. If I were a traditional grand, 5-star hotel there’s no way I would offer that package.

So try to develop a cool story a journalists can pick up through the noise. It should reflect the persona of the hotel and the unique value of the property to the customer.

You can’t hire a PR Agency to create the story

You need somebody on the property to come up with the stories. The PR agency will just guide you on how to pitch it. If you are going to use outside PR professionals, have them give you the mechanics of how to get the story out. But they can’t create the story, because they’re not imbued in the brand.

Be 100% sure that you can deliver

How many times have you read about some cool package, and thought there’s no way they can deliver that?

You have to be equipped to do deliver on your promises. I’m all about delivery and execution – I used to be a hotel GM.

Get somebody creative

This could be anyone. At one of the hotels I worked with, it was the head bartender. She was the one talking to everyone, and she was the one that came up with the stories.

Through a person she knew, the hotel was able to put together the package that received a full-page story in USA Today.

Thanks, Tom!

Learn more about Tom McCallum on his blog, or follow him @TomCayman

[Photo credit: Evil Erin]

Josiah’s note: The following comes from a conversation I recently had with Tom McCallum. In this article, Tom discusses the travel booking process, and how it takes place today.

As John Wanamaker famously said: “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.”

I blogged on this a while ago – it’s becoming increasingly difficult for marketers to track their campaigns. I’ve noticed that as I deal with conventional tourism marketing – they’re not so familiar with online media. Their methods of tracking in all cases — not just online marketing metrics –but off-line: what’s the value of print, what’s the value of TV, what’s the value of radio? All of these conventional media buying metrics in which the old-school media buyers have so much experience… they find very difficult to track new media.

Travel Booking Isn’t Linear

There’s no straight line from ad campaign to purchase in travel marketing anymore. There’s just so many factors that go into purchasing travel.

If you take Expedia as an example – their numbers are down in a number of areas. People are using them as the Amazon.com of travel, they research there first, but increasingly Expedia and other Online Travel Agents are finding it more difficult to give people reasons to book there. As I was recently reviewing a survey done for luxury hotels and brands, it was quite stunning to see the stats on how people are booking directly through the hotels.

So there are no easy answers.I think it comes down to that really scientific thing: gut feel!

I feel a little bit like a Steve Jobs of travel marketing sometimes — “To hell with the research! This is what we need to do.” And I think hotel marketing is really in a state of flux right now. We have all the people that we’ve been dealing with for years — ad buyers, media agencies — but they really don’t understand online behavior enough yet.

It’s a Branding Issue

And then when you look at social media brand building, for example, like Gary Vaynerchuk has been doing. It’s the whole personal brand thing, and is so applicable to hotels – especially independent hotels.

We’ve got a great example of this with what Joie de Vivre hotels has been doing: building almost a personal brand of each individual property.

We get far too hung up on metrics. I think you get buried in numbers and put off by numbers. So I’m sounding a bit like an ad rep — saying not to worry about the numbers, and just buy my ads. But I think with regard to online metrics, I’m really just interested in how many unique site visitors I have, how many new visitors I’m getting, where they’re coming from, and what type of search they used to find us. Not just direct referrals – but the phrases that people are using to find us online.

And that’s the disconnect. If you find that 40% of people are finding you by typing your hotel name into a search engine — you’ve completely lost connection to your metrics. Where are they coming from? It could be a print ad, it could be completely residual, it could be they saw a special promotion and the price is right.

This is the way I see people coming to my client’s sites. People don’t bookmark websites anymore – they simply type it into Google. For example, if I don’t know the name of your blog, I would just type in “hotel marketing blog” — and arrive at your site. People just do that for everything.

Focus on Website Optimization

The important thing is website optimization. Let’s concentrate on website efficiency. Get people onto the site in the first place, and that’s where you can begin creating some good metrics.Monitor their path through your website, and adjust for sales efficiency.

Obviously for hotels, the question is: are we making it possible for them to book a reservation in the way they want at any stage? You want to make sure there’s a widget on every single page that allows anyone to commence the booking process at any time.

So do everything you can that you think would be effective in bringing people to your website and then focus on converting those visitors to bookings.

Read more…

I received a number of emails recently from readers who enjoyed my interview with Hans Pfister, and so I wanted to explore these concepts in the context of larger hotels. To do this, we’re joined today by Christoph Schmidt, who manages operations for 5 hotels and 25 restaurants at LAAX resorts in Switzerland.

Christoph grew up in a small family hotel in the Swiss Alps, and was exposed to hospitality at a very young age. “I remember talking with guests since I was eight years old.” He entered hotel management school in Lausanne, before starting his career in the industry at Hilton.  He did two hotel openings, one in Zurich and one in Sofia – before heading to Berlin to work at the Four Seasons. He took a little time off to earn his MBA from the Berlin School of Economics, and used his skills to manage the Ritz-Carlton in Berlin for two years. Since returning to his home, Christoph has been managing operations for LAAX resorts.

What role do systems play in ensuring a consistently good guest experience?

Regardless of the size of the hotel, it is crucial to have some systems in place. Certainly, the type of system will differ depending on if it’s a small independent hotel or if it’s a large international company. I’ve seen both.

I think a system is certainly essential to assist the employees in fulfilling the guest experience. With a system, you can cover many things but ultimately the service happens in front of the guest. The employee can use the system, but at the end, they need to use their judgment in serving the guest.

For the small hotel, it may not be worth the effort to build a big computerized guest information system. For large hotel companies, it is important to share guest information between properties. You want your guests’ experience to be the same if they are staying in Madrid or Milan. Ideally, you want to have a detailed profile of your guest, knowing what he likes, what his preferences are, what his hobbies are. Sort of like a CRM system for hotels.

How do you develop this profile information? How would you discover a guest’s hobbies?

The system needs to work with guest communication. So the employee who knows that a gentleman likes a lot of strawberry marmalade at his breakfast needs to have a procedure where this information is saved. At one of the hotels I managed, we had small notepads where we could write this information down, and then it would be given to the guest relationship manager.

This process needs to exist in a small hotel as well. The software that you use to save this information is secondary, it’s more important to develop a good procedure for saving and recording information. You must have a workflow system like this before the software system. Employees must clearly know what to do with the information they receive.

Read more…

This is post from our friend Rajul at London Hotels Insight. He gives us some case studies how a couple hotels are doing this well, and I think you’ll get some good ideas here.

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Hoteliers in London often ask me how to deal with TripAdvisor comments.  A recent survey by TripAdvisor/Market Metrix found that 85% of hotels have no guidelines on how to handle negative guest reviews published online.

To address this issue, I would like to look at London hotels that appear to do this well.  I hope this will encourage others to follow suit, knowing that complaint recovery is one of the best ways to build customer loyalty.

We all love to use TripAdvisor, but it does have faults. Occasionally, people use the site malevolently.

I know one very solid London hotel where someone posted a lot of negative comments when they returned home and asked friends and family (who had of course never stayed at the hotel) to do the same. These negative comments went against the grain of most other reviews in a hotel where I personally know the management to be very diligent.

If the hotel can prove foul play in such cases, management should contact TripAdvisor directly to see if invalid comments can be removed.  TripAdvisor is usually understanding and even-handed in these situations. It’s not about whether a hotel gets complaints but how well – and how personally – it responds to them.

But back to the original question: assuming a negative comment is genuine, how should hotel management respond to it, if at all?

Some hotels put in standard responses – the worst possible solution.

By entering some “blah blah” about how you value their feedback, etc. (without addressing the specific underlying issue) a hotel’s management is simply being arrogant.  It’s better not to bother responding at all.

Other hotels respond to negative comments by thanking the guest (which is a good start) and then mentioning some specific steps they have taken.

Better still, they may actually give ownership of the issue to the hotel department head responsible for that area, who responds in person.

That for me underlines that complaints are a genuine improvement opportunity – if the hotel in question is fundamentally well-run of course.

Read more…

This is a guest article from Ran, an SEO specialist and Hotel Marketing Strategies reader in the UK.

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving your site to increase the volume of traffic from search engines such as Google, Yahoo, AOL and Bing via natural search results. Fundamentally, the higher your site is ranking for a particular search term, the more traffic you’ll get. Therefore your goal is to increase your ranking within the search engine guidelines as it will directly influence your revenue.

Here are 10 SEO tips to get a new site off to a great start:

1. Save On the Site’s Development – Whether you will own your SEO work or hire a 3rd party agency to manage it, optimizing your site will cost you time and money. Consider launching with the absolute basic of features in order to keep a decent budget for marketing and later on for site tweaks.

2. Don’t Save on Hosting – While saving on the initial development cost could work well, investing in quality and reliable hosting is where you should not save. Ensuring your website loads quickly is crucial for your optimization success and for user experience.

3. Get the Domain Name Right – Buying the right domain name is one of the most important decisions you’ll need to make at the very start. I would suggest buying a descriptive name which unlike a generic name can make life just a little easier when optimizing the site. An example for a descriptive name will be hotelmarketingstrategies.com, while Google.com is an example of a generic domain name.

4. List the Keywords You’d Like to Rank for – Normally optimizing your site means shortlisting the keywords which you’d like to rank for and optimizing each page around one key term. You should pick the keywords which describe your product or service and most importantly pick the keywords which are likely to convert well for the business.

5. Use the Metadata Tags Correctly – Once you have shortlisted your keywords you would need to insert them into your pages using the metadata tag location. Don’t stuff all those key terms into each page, but rather insert one term per page together with descriptive information. To optimize your site for Google, limit the page title to 70 characters and the page description to 140 characters. Here’s how the metadata comes into view when users search for a specific term:

6. Invest in Content – Original content in the form of articles, reviews, guest testimonials and even elaborate FAQs are very important for your optimization success. While not to underestimate other factors, the search engines place huge weight on the level of content on your site. By adding high quality original content closely related to your keywords the search engines will associate your site with the search term and over time it will become an authority site. The best example to demonstrate this point is probably Wikipedia.

7. Consolidate Homepage Versions – Some websites have multiple versions of their homepage which will result in poorer performance as your authority will be spread across a few homepage versions. The most common issue is having non www and www versions. To test how many versions of your page exist use a content duplication checker and fix the issues found.

8. Leverage Your Image – Traffic from users searching for images such as hotel locations could benefit your site. To optimize your images for Google Image Search, make sure you use a descriptive file name so park-hotel-ca.jpg is better than 9h80.jpg, images are hosted on your site on a folder /images/park-hotel-ca.jpg and always use alt text to describe the image.

9. Find and Fix Error Pages – Ensuring that all the site’s pages are working and loading quickly will increase their chances of getting indexed. If you have Google Analytics installed you can find this information under the content tab -> contact by title. Otherwise, try the free utility xenulink. This software will verify your internal link types such as normal links, images, etc and will highlight any issues found.

10. Add Privacy Policy or Terms and Conditions – It is important for the engines to send traffic to reputable websites. Adding privacy information and terms & conditions (when applicable) can help your ranking and it won’t cost anything if you use of the free privacy policy generator.

Now you’ll be off to a great start!

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Ran is the online marketing manager of hardwood flooring seller Wood and Beyond.