IHG (InterContinental Hotels Group) recently commissioned PhotoWeb to update the photography for all 3,500 of their properties. In today’s interview, listen to PhotoWeb project manager David Firestone explain what he sees as the top trends in hotel photography:

[Click here to download the MP3 version]

For those of you that prefer to read, Samantha transcribed this summary for you….

Josiah: Why is great photography is so important for hotels?

David: Someone just said to me today that when they go and look at a hotel website and they realize that it’s very poor photography, not only is it hard to get a good picture of the hotel, it gives the impression that the hotel doesn’t care. If they don’t care what their photography looks like, and they don’t invest the money and time to get great photography, it looks to people that they may not care so much about the property itself.

Beyond that, things have changed so much in the industry; where it used to be, someone would always stay at the Hilton. They had total brand loyalty. But now, with third-party travel sites where you can look up immediately to see if the JW Marriott in the town you’re going to is cheaper than the Hilton, people can’t rely on that brand loyalty, and they have to make sure of the images that they provide.

Not only on the brand site, but even more importantly, on the travel sites where they’re compared to other hotels. They have to make sure that not only are they realistic and high-quality, but they also show everything that the guests want to see.

Josiah: I’d like to hear more about how you plan on shooting the photos. It sounds like you want to create more than just the standard set of photographs that most hotels do.

David: Exactly. That’s exactly right. We want to give a comprehensive view of the property. And also, one thing which I fully agree with that IHG is doing, is they want the property to look the way it will actually look when you get there. If we’re shooting a guest room, quite often the people at the hotel will want to bring a tree to put in every corner, wine glasses on the table, some golf clubs, and you’re trying to tell a little sales-related story by propping the images that way. But, IHG strictly requires that we not use models, that we not prop the images, that we simply show what the property will look like when the people arrive.

In fact, the only photo that we shoot where we’re allowed to have anyone is in the front desk shot. Simply because if you see a photo of a front desk with no one standing there, it gives you the impression that you’ve just arrived and there’s no one there to help you.

Josiah: Can you tell me a little more about the big trends that you see in hotel photography?

David: Sure. One of the big trends, I think, in hotel photography is more and more hotels are moving towards including virtual tours in what they offer. Part of the benefit in virtual tours showing that 360-degree view is it shows your guest that you’re not trying to hide anything and you’re happy to show them everything that you have in your hotel.

It’s quite easy to take a still photo and show a beautiful area, but to get a virtual tour that shows that same area and also everything in that 360-degree circle gives people the confidence that they’re actually seeing what the hotel’s gonna look like.

There are other differences, too. One of the old trends that’s really gone away is people used to light the hotel rooms for photography in kind of a studio setting. They would use so many studio lights that it really no longer looked like a guest room. It kind of looked like high-end advertising photography. There are no shadows, everything is extremely, brightly lit, but it really doesn’t look like your hotel room was gonna look like when you arrive.

So when we shoot a guest room, we only light the room organically; we only use two or three light sources, and we use natural light as well, and it gives a more realistic view of what the room’s gonna look like when you get there.

Josiah: From a guest perspective, what do you think is the most important thing they look for when looking at a library of hotel photos?

David: I think it varies so widely, and that’s why it’s really important that we get this comprehensive look at the whole hotel. I’ve talked to guests that’ve told me that the only thing they’re interested in is the bathroom. If the bathroom looks good, they’re happy. They know that the rest of the hotel will be good. For other people, it’s the dining outlets. Or, increasingly, the fitness room. They wanna see immediately if they have the type of fitness equipment that they expect or they use daily, and if they don’t, they simply move on to the next hotel.

To me, if I had to pick one type of image that’s the most important, I would say the guest room photos. But, having said that, depending on the guest, it could be the meeting rooms, the leisure facilities; but once you show the entire hotel, then at least you’re covering all the expectations the guests may have as far as photography.

Josiah: How difficult is it to produce a virtual tour? Is it realistic for each property to think about putting together multiple virtual tours?

David: From a hotel’s perspective, the photography of the virtual tours takes no longer than still photography. With any of our images, the majority of time is making sure that everything looks perfect in the room, the pillows are straight, the cords are hidden away as they normally are, things like that.

On our end, the virtual tours are a lot more intensive to create because each virtual tour is created from 6 still photos. So, where normally we’d take a single still photo and process that from raw, we have to take 6 still photos, process all of those from raw, do any necessary retouching for each of those photos and then stitch them together, which is the really intensive part. It takes quite a bit of time for the computer to work out the points where each of the images connects, and it’s very important to us that there are no stitch errors.

If you’re looking at the bed, there shouldn’t be a jagged line right in the middle of the bed. It should all come together so smoothly that you can’t tell where the stitch lines are in those six photos.

Josiah: Is there anything else you want to add about the project or hotel photography in general?

David: The only thing I’d like to mention that we’re doing differently with this project than we’ve done in the past, is that a lot of the hotels that we’re photographing don’t have much uplighting for their exterior shots and IHG is having us shoot an exterior both at daytime and at sunset, when you have that rich, blue, dark sky.

But a lot of the hotels don’t have uplighting, which lights up the hotel, so each of our photographers carries with them a 3-million candle-power spotlight; it’s a rechargable spotlight that can be used from up to a 100 feet away. So, when we take a sunset shot of the hotel, we’ll do a long exposure, say 25-seconds, which gives us time to paint the hotel with light.

We simply point the spotlight at the hotel and smoothly move it back and forth over the entire front and in effect, this can increase the brightness by up to 4 times. So a picture wouldn’t look dark and uninviting in the front, we can light it up with these portable spotlights that we carry with us.

Thank you for sharing your thoughts with us, David.

Charles Deyo of Cendyn joins us today to explain how hotels and guests can benefit from targeted behavioral advertising. Listen to the full program here, or read the summary below:

[Download the mp3 file here]

Josiah: Can you explain to us what behavioral advertising is and why it’s so important for hotels?

Charles: Basically, behavioral advertising looks at web users and determines their behavior relative to where they’re going on the internet, and sends them relevant communication to make their web experience better.

In the case of hotels, we might look at somebody who’s going to airline sites as an example, and put them in a bucket with someone that’s potentially looking for travel options. With the new technology that we have today, with some of the ad serving platforms, we can put that individual into a bucket and start doing things like advertising to that person through messaging, or we can actually change the messaging to make that more relevant to the user.

Josiah: From the perspective of the hotels — the people doing the advertising — this gives us a much higher level of targeting. Are you seeing conversion rates go up as a result of this?

Charles: Yes, absolutely. One of the metrics that we use in the industry is “return on ad-spend”, and we’ve seen it go up significantly. Not just on display, but across all integrated campaigns. For example, someone’s doing a display campaign and a paid search campaign on Google; the combination of those are greater than the sum of the parts. We see a lift on both the paid search and on the return on ad-spend on the display campaign.

It’s a great win/win for the hotel and to the web user who gets more relevant content and a better web experience.

Josiah: Can you give us some of the top things that hotel operators need to know about behavioral retargeting? For someone brand new to this, what do they need to know?

Charles: What you need to know is how the process works, so that you can make the messaging very relevant to the end user. Then, you need to have what’s being advertised correlate to the targets that you’re going after.

For example, if I’m looking at potentially geotargeting and time-based targeting — the location of the individual and time that they’re looking at information — that would dictate the type of offer or messaging that I want to put on the display ads. You need to understand not only how the process works but also the different attributes that would make sure that the messaging is very relevant to that particular campaign.

Josiah: Are big brands interested in this or is this something you can only do on a small scale?

Charles: No, big brands are investing a lot of money into this technology now. They’re doing it more at the brand level. In many cases, when you look at some of the big chains, you’re not seeing a lot of retail-oriented ads, you’re seeing a lot more brand-oriented ads where, “Come stay at any one of our hotels; click here to learn more about our special offers”, and that’ll bring them to a webpage with multiple properties listed as an example.

With individual properties, we’ve seen great success with targeted retail ads, so what you see is a combination of both. You see the big chains investing in brand oriented campaigns, and we’re seeing a lot of investment from retail properties. For example, with big casinos or big resort destinations, they’ll do very retail specific advertising.

Josiah: Is Google Advertising where most of the behavioral targeting is used or are there other options?

Charles: There are a lot of different networks out there. A lot of them can access the same websites, and a lot of the ad serving platforms all have retargeting capabilities built into them. What’s happening in the online advertising space is that we’re seeing less focus around the networks and more emphasis, now, on the data.

When we talk about data in the online advertising space, we’re talking about the anonymous cookies that are used to really track those behaviors that people move around the internet. We’re seeing opportunities where you can build a proprietary cookie pool.

For example, we’ve built a proprietary cookie pool of people that we know are frequent travelers. We have the ability to track those anonymous cookies across the internet so we can send them very relevant advertising that should make their web experience better.

Josiah: You had an article published in Hotel Online in June 2010 where you said you had 200 million of these frequent traveler profiles. How detailed is the information you have on these people?

Charles: These are anonymous cookie profiles –we don’t have any information about who they are, but we do know in most cases the sites that they’ve visited. And then in other cases we’ll have other attributes that are more useful for more complex targeting.

For example, if there’s registration data associated with those cookie profiles, we might know gender, we might know income levels, different things that the user has filled out as part of a registration process on a website that is then linked on a cookie profile. But, anytime that occurs, we take it as a prompt to send out an email, where somebody understands that the information is used to provide them more relevant product information that would be useful to them.

Josiah: Is this something you’re building proprietary to Cendyn?

Charles: It is proprietary to Cendyn, relative to what we’re doing with the cookie pool, but it’s not to say that other companies aren’t doing something similar. What’s proprietary around Cendyn, is we’ve got a 360 degree marketing platform, and I think the big difference with us — aside from the cookie pool — is that we look at how we don’t only send the right message to the right user at the right time, but also through the right channel.

I think the most important thing is not only having the right data and using it for the purpose of targeting, but also understanding that an integrated campaign always works better.

Josiah: What’s the best way to targeting groups or audiences together? What are some of the different attributes that you try for effectiveness?

Charles: What we do, is we have a first ring — this large pool of people that we know — for the purpose of discussion, very travel oriented, and based on the campaign, we look at the behavior of how those cookies interact with our ads so that we can take them out of the big pool and put them “in market”, so they’re “in market” for that campaign. That’s how we create those subsets.

Josiah: From that article, you also mentioned a “game over” mechanism and making sure that if people want to stop the ads from following them around there needs to be a place to stop. How does that look practically?

Charles: The way that it works is, of course, someone can turn off their cookies, and the process doesn’t work. A lot of the networks now are also building in capabilities for people to opt out of some of the retargeting and behavioral advertising process.

For example, Google just announced recently that they’re doing behavioral advertising and are making available a preference page that somebody can go in and adjust the settings relative to their web experience.

Josiah: Can you tell me a little bit of what you’re working on to take advantage of this platform?

Charles: One of the things we’re doing is continuing to make our 360 degree platform more robust and creating the ability to provide this behavioral targeting across any channel – whether that’s social media, mobile advertising or display advertising, it doesn’t matter. We should have the ability to send the right message via the right channel.

The other thing that we run is a product called Insight which is like a customer analytics and campaign management tool that we market to hotels. We have all the guest history data out of our property management system, and then we’ve got a lot of information about somebody, and we’re actually interfacing that as part of our 360 degree marketing platform so we can plan a sort of “best customer” profile and use that to go out and find additional customers that fit the “best customer” profile for a particular property.

Josiah: Is there any push-back from guests or people seeing the ads?

Charles: My personal opinion — but of course, I am a marketer — is that it makes the web experience better. People want relevant information. We learned this many years ago through the email campaign process. All of us in the email marketing world strived very diligently to make sure that we’re sending the most relevant content we can to a recipient, and the same philosophy applies to the advertising space. If we’re doing our job of sending relevant content, we will make the web user’s experience better.

Josiah: Can you give me a specific example of a hotel that’s taking advantage of this technology in a good way?

Charles: We did a case study not too long ago, because we really wanted to get some firm metrics on what the overall value of this type of technology would be. To make sure that our case study was very empirical, we not only tracked online revenue, but we put the voice tracking in place so that we could record the phone calls associated with the campaign, and had somebody listen to the calls and key in the revenue values associated with that.

We also tracked, not only hotel online bookings, but also RFPs — requests for proposals — for meetings, that type of thing. What we found was that we had a significant return on ad spend - 17 to 1, where every dollar spent on an ad was returned 17 times. It’s very significant, and I think that’s representative of what you can expect when you’re running these types of campaigns on an integrated basis.

Josiah: Thank you very much, Charles, for explaining this for us.

Charles: It was a pleasure, and I look forward to talking to you in the future!

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

—

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.

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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.

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