Sales & Marketing

I contest the reference to the word 'becoming'. It has always been a distribution channel. To that end, I would also contest the designation that it be regulated solely by revenue management. If anything we have learned (at an accelerated pace due to the pandemic).

Given today's radical transparent online hotel marketplace, the dividing line between sales, marketing, e-commerce, revenue management, pricing and even loyalty needs to disappear. These traditional organisational structures only create silos that get in the way of insuring that we put the right product at the right price in front of the right customer at the appropriate time moment in their purchase cycle.

Hotel metasearch has become a distribution channel and is no longer an advertising channel ever since Google introduced its Pay-per-stay (PPS) fee model. Other metasearch players like Trivago and Kayak all offer CPA (Cost per acquisition) model, which is not in tune with the current era of high cancellation rates due to Covid uncertainties and ever-changing travel restrictions.

I am quite surprised we're still discussing this topic in "Them Vs. Us" terms. I've been in the travel industry since the late '90s, and I think, except for the early '00s (for obvious reasons), I've never seen a single property NOT listed on -at least one- OTA.

OTAs should educate hoteliers on the long-term benefits of improving their guest stay experiences vs burning time, capital and energy on trying to out-perform OTAs in online bookings. To put it simply, OTAs are perfect for a first-time visitor to your hotel destination.

Not working with OTAs is foolish. Their costs are within the average for distribution costs of other industries (auto industry is 30%, DTC e-commerce is 40-50%, Amazon sellers are around 45%). The problem with OTAs is, like many online distribution platforms, they are really bad at caring for their supply-partners.

This theme is re-occurring! Hoteliers have been late to adapt both operational and technological expertise to engage their guests through the world of 'add-ons.' Randomly test book any hotel and see what extras are available. Many great PMS allow for the integration of in-house activities: spa, golf, dining, but few do it well.

Generating ancillary revenues requires a) the implementation of merchandizing strategy and culture at the property/hotel company, b) incentivizing and training your staff, and c) adopting technology solutions to automate as many of the internal processes as possible.

One of the key opportunities overlooked by many hotels is upselling/cross selling in their pre-arrival email. Firstly, a startling number of properties don't even take this opportunity to reach out to the guest a few days before check-in.

This decision will most definitely impact hotels' digital marketing strategies, especially those which do not currently include the Google Ads Suite. One notable consequence is that tracking social media campaigns (among others with the Facebook pixel) will become very difficult and might incentivize hotels to move away from this kind of marketing.

To add some context: 42.7% of internet users worldwide (16-64 years old) use ad-blocking tools at least once a month (source: Hootsuite). When Google announced their intention to stop third-party cooking tracking on its Chrome browser by 2022, other browsers like Safari and Firefox already made that change years ago.

There is two parts to the problem: a) how does a hotel ensure that their ads now hit the right target and b) as you rightly said, how is the tracking going to work at a hotel level but more specifically - how are vendors currently tracking that data will change their mechanism, if at all required?Whilst its nothing new that google just gatecrashes parties and owns verticals once broken into (with travel being a major one i believe going forward) I find it highly interesting that google goes back to "segmentation" whilst always playing the "hyper personalization" card in all other areas.On the other hand - how do most hotels really use that information anyhow?

Welcome to 2020. Airbnb is part of the hospitality industry already. Get over it. I hope IPO cash might help them ease Expedia and Booking's oligopolistic power. I hope IPO cash might have them boost a faster global return to travel.

The Airbnb IPO is interesting but has nothing to do with the success (or failure) of their business. Airbnb is the game-changer in our industry. Their value reduction as stated above is representative and consistent with all publicly traded hotel companies.

A successful IPO will place Airbnb in a much stronger financial position so they can remove the high cost (at 11% interest) of their recent funding and prepare to operate profitably again. The threat of Airbnb will be felt by hotels that are perceived to be "risky" in terms of Covid-19 transmission prevention, eg.

Amazon has tried unsuccessfully to tackle the online travel space twice in the past. Back in 2013-2015, Amazon attempted to do this “organically” with its ill-conceived Amazon Local and Amazon Destinations. In 2019 Amazon launched a flight search and booking service in India, powered by online travel agency Cleartrip, buried deep into its Amazon Pay section.

Amazon is the world's #1 retailer. Period. There is no #2, with Walmart a distant #3 (perhaps). Walmart is expanding as fast as they can into the online space. Amazon needs to build revenue. They already sell pretty much every product on earth, so logically, the next frontier is services.

Amazon has to massively increase its top-line revenue if it is going to continue is share price growth. It gets more difficult to do that as it grows. What industries can it get into that can help deliver that? Travel will not be Amazon's number one choice but they will not ignore it either.

Venerable brands always have the potential for a renaissance. Of course, success hinges on forgiveness (forgetfulness?) of all those stranded travelers. And the continued focus on "fun in the sun" vacations is a smart way to maintain that differentiation and historical brand promise.

I am highly skeptical of Thomas Cook's resurrection as a B2C online travel player i.e. an OTA specializing in selling beach vacations and city breaks, and here is why: a) The traveling public does not know Thomas Cook as an OTA or B2C online vacation packager, hence the need for massive advertising spend to build relevant brand recognition.

I don't think there is a new TC. I think that this was the plan all along. I remember sitting in the UK in 2011/12 reading an article: Britain's Least Admired Companies of 2011 where TC was mentioned. It also let me to look at their share price and saw it tumbled to somewhat below 20c (which for me was surprising)...but then I saw they didn't have a CEO and no-one wanted to take the job since a few month....sinking ship comes to mind.

There are several major developments working against the bed banks sector: 1) Shrinkage of the brick-and-mortar distribution marketplace due to consumers shifting to online travel planning and booking. There are less than 7,500 travel agencies in the U.S.

In the non-US marketplace, bed banks continue to play an essential role, providing both offline and online intermediaries with a long tail of hotel inventory that would be impossible to source otherwise. Assuming historical bad behaviour regarding abuse of net rates can be controlled, newly consolidated and professionalised bed bank companies can have a long and happy future.

Bedbanks business may contract over time, however, they will remain a significant player in the online travel marketplace due to the large number of consumers who prefer to have their local travel agent make their travel arrangements.

Building a hotelier-owned OTA is such a hotelier's pipe dream! Expedia spent billions of dollars building its current CRS platform now being used across its portfolio(Expedia, Orbitz, Travelocity and Wotif). In addition, Expedia spends $6 billion on marketing EVERY YEAR.

No - that wouldn't have a strong chance of success. The hotel business is primarily a hospitality retail and real estate business - not a high-performance e-commerce business. The expertise and skills required to be successful as a hotelier are vastly different from the attributes required to succeed in the OTA business.

A hotel-owned OTA? Sorry, everyone, you may have the cart before the horse! How about an OTA that buys a hotel brand? I made this bold forecast back (maybe) six-seven years ago. What is a hotel brand, really, without distribution?

In my view, this new Expedia program is designed as a very clever additional entanglement of hoteliers to Expedia. It is just an additional length of rope that ties hotels closer to Expedia and increases their dependency on this OTA.Will hoteliers buy into Expedia's program?

Of more recent times there's been the beginning of a right sizing in the distribution world. Google's move to democratize the travel search experience has changed the dynamic on how people find their travel ideas and destinations.

In a nutshell: That's not a good deal and with these acquisition costs the hotel can do its own recovery programme.My math teacher at school used to tell me that speaking about a percentage of another percentage is something unused and generally wrong.

Ever hear of a pendulum swing? Finally, revenue managers will have to become real digital marketers, versus simply playing with past data to formulate their plans. This is an exciting, brave new world! What I would like to see is AI-generated marketing programs that look OUTSIDE of travel history, but cross reference psycho-graphics, based upon buying patterns and habits.

These are unprecedented times. Many have cited earlier events such as SARS, the global financial crisis and the Asian financial crisis. I was active in industry and in location through all of these. NONE of these remotely resemble the nature of COVID19.

Excellent post, Max. Thinking long term is hard right now and we can see that in the actions of many in the industry who are scrambling between laying off and furloughing employees, worrying about cash flow, trying to get refunds on media investments, and anticipating a rebound date that keeps moving.

Nothing will mark the end of paid search marketing on Google, quite the contrary, they are doing everything to increase the ad-spend. It will change the way websites are indexed and I think it will affect hotel branding. However, changes like this are more about indexing the content in ways that all replies can be given through simple requests to Google Assistant.

I would never have a black or white statement like this. Digital Marketing capabilities and Search in particular are very complex and cannot be isolated to all other digital marketing levers. Saying that Hotel Paid Search Marketing is changing, this is the right statement.

Google has become the greediest toll taker in online travel and wants to make money - in the form of referral fees and advertising revenue - at every stage of the online travel consumer's Digital Journey and its Dreaming, Planning, Booking, Experiencing and Sharing Phases.

Personalisation isn't dead, but its evolution is far from its final form. There are pockets of personalisation occurring today during the customer experience, such as; pre-arrival upselling offers; geo-location and guest segmented pricing strategies, to name a couple of popular trends.

Personalization in hospitality is not only here to stay, but it will become ubiquitous and indivisible part of the guest acquisition, guest services and guest retention. AI and ML powered technologies have already accelerated the adoption of personalization techniques across many industries and are making serious strides in hospitality: guest acquisition, revenue management, CRM, guest services, loyalty marketing, etc.

Notwithstanding media hype, no hotel company has ever truly committed to personalization. Despite the vast amounts of data that we collect and the potential this represents, we as a sector have largely failed to put appropriate systems in place to do anything above mass customization (if even that) of either marketing or customer experience.

I am a firm believer that rate parity for publicly available rates benefits hoteliers in the current “one-to-many” revenue management practices in hospitality, in which hoteliers come with pricing tiers for different categories of guests: corporate transient managed, corporate transient unmanaged, corporate group, SMERF, leisure transient, weekend, etc.

We can certainly ask if rate parity is good or bad for hoteliers, but do we wonder how customers feel about it? Is there a more annoying thing than researching online for an upcoming trip and seeing 8 different rates come up...

Rate parity benefits no one and should have been euthanized a long time ago. Enforcing it ignores each channels' cost of distribution; causes ill-feeling between distribution partners and limits competition resulting in unwelcome scrutiny from competition authorities.

Despite the many questions about its operating procedures and even its added value, OYO is challenging the stagnant thinking that has characterized hotel chains for nearly a generation. Despite claims about their innovativeness, hotel chains, and in particular their outdated, non-performance related, business models have stifled both creativity and change.

OYO Hotels' meteoric rise resembles a great extent the hyper-growth of WeWork. The question is: Is this rapid growth a good thing, especially in a traditional industry like hospitality? I believe Oyo's growth came at the expense of cutting corners, some big corners at that.

Is there a magic bullet out there for hoteliers? is there some sort of techno-wizard that will in a 'poof' eliminate your need for multiple (often futile) integrations and IT resource back-ups? The answer is NO, and thank goodness!

There are easily more than half a million hotels around the world, so there are naturally thousands and thousands of hotel tech suppliers servicing them. At the lower end of the scale, under 50 rooms, there are several suppliers who do indeed provide an 'all-in-one' solution, as defined by the basic requirements of that market segment.

This is not a question about one vendor or multiple or one stop solutions. Hoteliers are confused because everyone tells them a different story about how they are more important than the rest. On top, it is about the inconvenience and extra charges when dealing with multiple vendors.