Would you love to switch to Google Apps and move your computing to the cloud – but don’t know how the process works?

Today I talk with Susan Cline and Jim McNelis of Dito, a firm that specializes in helping companies transition to Google Apps:

[Download the MP3 file]

I wanted to do this interview – and introduce you to Dito – because I know so many hoteliers that would gladly switch over to Google Apps, but don’t know anyone who could help them do this. So I hope this conversation helps explain the process.

On the call, we talked about:

• Advantages for switching over to Google Apps
• Common questions people have about switching
• What people need to know before they switch
• Data migration issues
• The deployment process
• A story of a company that switched over successfully
• Where Google falls short, and how to supplement their tools

Thanks to Jim and Susan for explaining the process!

In today’s conversation, I talk with Martin Schobert, a digital communications strategist and founder of tourismdesign. In it, we discuss….

1. What we mean by “Communication 2.0″
2. How you can improve the experience of a traveler
3. How to provide better service at each customer touchpoint
4. Why Service Design is so important
5. How to encourage your guests and customers to talk about their experience online
6. The process for finding the right tools to share this experience
7. The danger of knowing your area too well
8. How to see your hotel or destination through the eyes of someone who has never been there
9. How to act as a guide for those visiting your destination
10. Why hotel marketers need to act more like destination marketers
11. The importance of creating guest personas
12. How to encourage guests to provide support and service to other guests
13. Low-cost, but attractive, incentives you can offer to promote this
14. The #1 most important thing you can do today to create a better guest experience

Listen here:

[Or click here to download the MP3 audio file]

(This was less of a formal interview, and more of a brainstorming conversation I thought you may want to listen in on. Thanks to Martin for agreeing to do this spontaneously!)

You can follow Martin on Twitter or on his blog (written in German)

A few days ago I had the opportunity to discuss social media for luxury hotels with Terry Kane. Terry is Director of Digital Strategy at the Jumeirah Group – which includes some of the most iconic hotels in the world, including Burj Al Arab and Jumeirah Essex House in New York. Here are some excerpts from our conversation.

Is social media useful for luxury hotels? Do you know if your guests really even use it?

We know our guests use social media before, during, and after they stay with us.

Peer review sites are especially important for everyone in hospitality. We know our guests use the likes of TripAdvisor consistently across all our properties. And we’re not afraid of that. If you have a good product, you have nothing to be afraid of.

So we try to incorporate elements of social media throughout our websites. We encourage them to leave the hotel site and see what people are saying, but also to share information that they find on the site with their friends or family. It is about feeling comfortable, in your own environment and we like to ensure that we are open to this.

Read more…

Jim Zito is Vice President of Interactive Marketing for the Morgans Hotel Group, based in New York City. At last month’s EyeForTravel Social Media Strategies for Travel conference, Jim talked a little bit about how they are moving social media management responsibilities away from the corporate office and towards the local level. I sat down with him to ask a few questions and clarify his strategy.

“It’s a transition process that we’re involved in right now. We engaged the services of an outside Social Media agency, and we’re putting together training programs that will be used at a local level. Depending on what we deem appropriate, social media marketing will probably take place mostly on the local level. And I’m discussing with our Local PR agencies how what they work on locally at the hotels can be complimented by the social media agency.”

Josiah: What are your objectives in moving social media marketing to the property level?

Jim: A lot of the time at our hotels there a lot of things going on that we’re just not aware of at the corporate level. So there are obviously corporate-level initiatives, but locally there so many other things that are happening that the hotels are more in touch with, as well as the local fans/followers are engaged on a different level.

The hotels are also the best point of contact for response if there’s an event going on – they can coordinate with the local talents. They can tie in social media activity with the DJs or the music performers.

How do you encourage staff at the local level to share the stories? I know there are many front-line staff that could become aware of stories developing… do you have some sort of a mechanism to capture all this and then distribute it in social media?

Because we are a fairly small organization, we are fortunate – there are such ongoing contact daily between all the departments that it’s really easy to capture information on what’s going on. There’s no formalized structure right now, but I think it’s still too early for that.

I was interested in the social media triage concept you mentioned in your presentation. Do you have a ranking system to prioritize social media responses?

We can monitor if they are in influencer or a blogger – even their Google ranking. Fortunately, there’s not usually enough volume that we have to use that, it’s more one-on-one. Each customer is just as important as the others.

We just have this triage system in place in case there was an onslaught of online feedback, and we had to deal with a lot of responses quickly.

You mentioned the concept of having a ‘social media champion’ at each property. How do you select that person? What if some of their personality traits?

It’s the personality. First it’s usually interest for them, they tend to be the person on property that’s the most engaged and service oriented. All the staff may be great, but is usually one standout. And then we’ll ask if they have an interest to do this. If they do, we train them accordingly.

So it could be the concierge it could be assistant to general manager, could be the general manager. Or could be the front-office manager that has the most one-on-one relationships. It’s easy for them to address and respond to feedback – both positive and negative – that we get online.

I love talking with the managers of hotels and resorts that thrive online: we get a much more complete picture of how they are succeeding. TripAdvisor is one tool I use to locate the places that guests seem to love, and today’s interview features a resort that is rated by guests as #1 in the area.

Here, I talk with Michael Vogt, General Manager of the Layana Resort and Spa in Thailand.

Josiah: Tell us a little bit about your resort.

Michael: Layana Resort and Spa is a boutique 50-room resort, situated on Lanta island off the west coast of southern Thailand. The low-rise resort was built to take advantage of the beach setting forested hills behind.

How have you achieved the success you have on TripAdvisor?

Our philosophy is rooted in small size, luxurious accommodation, unobtrusive personalized attention, tranquility and peace, gracious Thai hospitality, and value for money. We work hard to ensure guest satisfaction based on our philosophy, and pay a lot of attention to detail.

Most of the time, this works well and is reflected in favourable guest comments on Internet forums such as TripAdvisor and HolidayCheck. But from time to time we drop the ball and this too is religiously reported, which in turn gives us the opportunity to further refine our product.

How are you encouraging guests at your hotel to talk about their stay online – and share their positive experiences with others?

This has been as issue of much Management debate. On balance, we have taken a conscious decision not to adopt any techniques to encourage our guests to talk about their experiences with us online. We have done this because we perceive the types of guests we attract don’t respond positively to being coerced or manipulated into becoming marketing tools for us. And yet they are glad to share their positive experiences as long as it remains their preserve to do so.

The closest we get to encouraging guests to write an online review is by providing direct links from our website to TripAdvisor and, for example, World Luxury Travel Awards to enable guests to vote for us.

In the past, which marketing tactics have performed best for you? Which ones don’t quite live up to the hype?

• Direct print advertising campaigns have provided disappointing returns
• Tour Operator brochure placements seem to be essential to keep a wide net of travel agents informed
• Returning guest loyalty programs are good – though we find guests tend to book with us because they want to, not because of the freebies
• Short-term tactical offers have limited impact from our experience
• Genuine added value promotions are attracting more bookings and are better than simple price discounting
• 3rd party representation in other countries is expensive but has shown positive returns when used as a new market entry tool

What’s the most exciting trend you see in hotel marketing? Why?

The internet is changing the way we market ourselves. But so is technology, and the ability to track guest online complaints, competitors pricing and promotions, and detailed and accurate guest preferences, provides us with powerful tools to target specific offerings with pinpoint accuracy

In time, the current reliance on tour operators to sell to the market will shift and instead we will be able to provide personally packaged on-line offerings directly to an internet-savvy audience

Mobile handheld devices and the applications they access, plus the enormous power of comparative shopping, will change the way the world buys goods and services. The hotels that understand, embrace and utilize this technology to the fullest will enjoy a marketing advantage over their less visible competitors.

Thank you, Michael!

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…

Today I had the opportunity to ask ReputationDefender CEO Michael Fertik how his company can help your hotel maintain a great reputation online.

“ReputationDefender is sort of like a ‘hyper Google alerts.’ It crawls the deep web of content that may not be indexed by Google.” This can include review sites and message boards not indexed by Google and other search engines, but still play an important role in an organization’s online reputation. “Often, problems, start here before they are even picked up with a service such as Google alerts.”

Although ReputationDefender manages brand reputation, its specialty is in monitoring and defending the personal brands of individuals. Today, a search engine is one of the first places people go to find information about people, and so having a good presence is very important. “We can help hotel executives establish their personal brand as they establish their careers,” said Michael. In the hotel industry, your employees are part of your brand. For this reason, several hotel chains are using ReputationDefender’s service for their executives.

ReputationDefender is probably most famous for their work and dealing with unwarranted or negative rumors online. I asked Michael how this process works.

“First, it’s important to understand what we do not do. We do not create fake reviews, and we do not pretend to be customers of our customers.” Instead, they work with existing information online to cast you in a positive light. We use search optimization to “hide” information they do not want to appear, and instead deliver good content to people who are searching.

“80% of clicks are on the top three results in a search engine. If you are on page 2 or beyond those results are practically invisible. So we can take a positive article on Condé Nast is currently in position number 15, a move that up to position number three … for example.” Moving this content to the top of search engine results can avoid the likelihood of people finding out dated or inaccurate information about your hotel.

Read more…

For the past 11 years, Christiane von Ulmenstein, owner of the Whale Cottage Guest Houses in South Africa, has been doing a very interesting experiment. Instead of trying to beat her competitors in Cape Town, she decided to work with them. The following is the story of why she did it, how she did it, and what the results have been.

There are many ideas here you can use, so I hope you enjoy her story…

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“I came from a big corporate environment where there are competitors, you do competitive intelligence, and you try to defeat your competitors. One does not usually consider working with them.

When we started out with the guesthouse we began doing print advertising, because that was the best way get the word out when you are new then. I decided to call a meeting with other guest house owners — we were about 20 at the time. I said let’s get together and have an informal association, which is now called Camps Bay Accommodation Association. (Camps Bay is a suburb of Cape Town.) And everyone was happy with that. We were all kind of new to the guesthouse industry.

We made a few firm rules for it. One of them was to realize the importance of referrals. We were all receiving inquiries, and if you can’t use it, it would be so wasteful to say “We’re sorry, we are fully booked.” So one of the first rules of our association was that if you were full, you had to refer the inquiry to other guesthouses. Our goal was that Camps Bay – as a whole – should get the business, and the business should be retained there. It did not matter if you had friends with other guesthouses and suburbs close by, you need to keep the business in Camps Bay. And it has worked fantastically.

Our guests are amazed, because they feel we offer incredible service as a suburb. Instead of inquiring through one or two websites, they now can have options at 24 different guesthouses. So they can choose in terms of quality of accommodation, and also a range of prices. So our guests have a far wider choice. They think we’re extremely organized!

Organizing the system

The association began as just a referral network, but as we grew we encountered two situations. The first was long-term bookings, where you could see in advance which rooms you have available. And then there was the very real scenario of someone arriving at your guesthouse when you’re full, and you need to send them somewhere else. The process of contacting 24 other guest houses was very time-consuming.

I drew up a template, where each of the members had to e-mail me their availability for the next five days, and I would put everything together and e-mail it to all the members. That was a lot of work, but I didn’t mind doing it because it helped us all know what was available, and helped the members become more efficient.

And then we decided to set up a website: CampsBayInfo.com. it’s just a general marketing platform for Camps Bay.  The hotels are obviously members, and we have an availability schedule that is now updated automatically. Each member has to update the information on the website using a system we set up.

We have learned how valuable this website is. People are finding out about the area from the website, and it is driving reservations to our member hotels.

How we developed the website

Read more…