Sales & Marketing

Amazon missed their one and only chance to enter the travel space by not acquiring Orbitz or Travelocity when these OTAs were for up for grabs. Now it is too late - the consolidation In the travel intermediary space has already happened.

Today Amazon has approximately 200 million Amazon Prime members globally. To put this into perspective, if Amazon Prime was a country, it would be the 8th biggest in the world measured by population. With this enormous membership size, or 'captive audience', Amazon has the necessary market reach to monetize any travel-related product or service.

I laughed at first when I saw this topic, as I recall vividly having had this discussion in the past. In fact, I wrote a blog post titled Will You Book Your Next Hotel on Amazon?... back in 2014!! Amazon did indeed tip its toes into travel distribution but the journey was short-lived.

Yes and no. A good comparison to rationalize how GPTs will be used by hotel marketers is to look back at the advent of front-end CMSs and visual composers for websites. Not only did these greatly reduce the costs of website development and updates, but now marketers could directly make simple edits on the fly, allowing them to test different copy / images.

Tools like ChatGPT or Google Gemini are phenomenal copywriters and should be used as enablers, tools to make our work easier, quicker, and more creative. Thus, it's not a matter of hoteliers "replacing" content creators with generative AI tools but rather making the most of them to become more productive and efficient.

Yes, these tools can provide a significant degree of heavy lifting. With a little more training and relevant targeted content these tools can also pick up on levels of nuance and style. Although care should be taken to ensure that the produced information is not in some ways plagiarized from the existing reference pool of content.

The question is fallacious, as it's set up in black-and-white terms. We're stuck in this loop of "traditional hospitality good, alternative hospitality bad." But, you know what? We have to stop thinking like that! Travelers certainly don't; for them, hospitality is hospitality, no fancy labels needed.Do vacation rentals speed up gentrification?

The impact of inventory loss within the travel and hospitality sector's key markets is a multifaceted issue with far-reaching consequences for both businesses and their clientele. These markets are often the lifeblood of demand, making any decline in resources a matter of significant concern.

I believe the vacation rental industry is to blame itself for these very restrictive regulations and all of its recent woes. For years it fought against licensing its hosts. Fought against including local hotel taxes in its pricing as if their customers didn"t need public infrastructure and safety, street lighting, etc.

AI can certainly do a lot of things and holds great promises at various levels in business and tourism. But let's not kid ourselves - OTAs are way ahead of the game not only in providing great platforms to book on - UX, imagery, etc.

I spoke at a conference in Norway last week and had the privilege of attending a keynote by Terry Jones. He said something that really resonated with me: "AI is the new UI." In traditional UI, the focus is primarily on how users interact with a system.

Ever the optimist, I believe that travelers are becoming increasingly aware of the benefits of booking direct, be that securing a better room, having access to more onsite rewards or accruing points within a loyalty program. Guests want to book direct, if only hotels would give them a user experience that's as seamless and convenient as what the OTAs offer.

In my view, people who claim that the OTAs generate travel demand completely ignore the complexity of the Digital Customer Journey and its five phases Dreaming, Planning, Booking, Experiencing and Sharing/Retention. According to them, the customer Journey consists of a very simplistic "cast the hook" (marketing) and "catch the fish" (booking).

The key word here is GENERATE versus STIMULATE. Generate implies production versus stimulate means raising the level or encouraging development. So, do the OTAs produce demand? Well, they are a distribution vehicle, not a producer.

In May 2023, during their annual Expedia Connect event in Seattle, Expedia shared recent insights from this latest "Path to purchase" report, due for publication this summer. At the inspiration stage, for example, we see that OTAs are NOT the main online source.