The Hotel Internet Marketing Blog

Hotel e-marketer - Hotel Internet Marketing Inspiration... for the Digital Hotelier

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Infographic - 10 Things I Hate About Hotel Websites

Here's a cheeky look at what's wrong with so many hotel websites out there...most of these issues are elementary and fixable...all that's required is some forethought and keeping users top-of-mind.

Click here to open the infographic in full size (to download, right-click on the link and use Save As)

Leave a comment and let us know what you think about these pet peeves...and share your own!

[hotelemarketer]

A Guide to Pinterest for Hotels, Resorts and Restaurants

Pinterest has been all the rage recently, with various news sites and brands sitting up and taking notice. Pinterest.com isn't new, though...it was (Beta) launched in 2010 and rose to fame in 2011 when it was declared one of the 50 best websites of the year by TIME magazine. By the end of last year, it garnered a lot more attention as it made it to the Hitwise list of top 10 social networks, Techcrunch's best new startup title and also gained a reputation for driving more referral traffic to online retailers than YouTube, Google+ or LinkedIN. 

So what's the big deal, you ask? And, what, pray tell...is it exactly? 

What Pinterest is (and isn't)

Pinterest is basically like a giant digital tack-board / notice-board / scrapbook. It is a social photo sharing website that allows users to create collections (essentially photos and videos) of the things they like. The site's mission statement is to "connect everyone in the world through the 'things' they find interesting." 

So essentially if you find an interesting photo or video that you like on the web, you can "Pin" it to an appropriate pinboard on your Pinterest profile and add a comment / tagline. You can also follow other users' pinboards and like or repin the content they share. To make "pinning" easier, you can add a browser bookmark so you can quickly pin the photos and videos you want without leaving the site you're on. 

What Pinterest isn't is another Flickr or Facebook...there are no status updates and most of the content you find on the site actually lives on other sites, so people can view your pinned content but also click through to the original site or webpage where you found it. 

Creating an account is easy, despite the invitation-only mode pinterest.com is still in...just request an invite and you should see one come through fairly quickly. 

Why is it popular...and who's actually using Pinterest?

A good question to ask, of course...after all, does every new social network deserve our attention? We've seen plenty of fads come and go in the social media space. While gauging long-term interest in social applications and the longevity of social sites is anybody's guess (remember MySpace?), Pinterest does seem to have carved out a niche for itself. The site is immensely popular with women and a vast majority of the content on the site is lifestyle based. A recent infographic by Mashable also suggests that the Pinterest.com user base is:

Fairly affluent, with $100k+ avg incomes and 28.1% users "well off"

The time (15.8 mins) users spend on the site is significant (more than Facebook and close to YouTube)

68.2% are women (an incredible 97% of Pinterest Facebook fans are women) and 50% of users have children

Attracts approx 1.36 million visitors a day and is growing at 2,702% since May 2011

Pinterest refers more traffic to retailer sites than YouTube, Google+ & Linkedin combined!

A vast majority of content is repinned / reshared amongst users on Pinterest

(View a larger version of the above infographic)

Why should hotels take notice of Pinterest?

While many hotels still need to get their social media basics right, there are quite a few that have invested the right resources in making social media work for them...these hotels can certainly benefit from experimenting with Pinterest. Here are just a few thoughts on applications of Pinterest for hotels:

Show off your design / style / brand credentials: Pinterest is a great visual way to showcase everything that makes your brand, hotel, resort, restaurant, bar or architercture & design unique. If you've invested in great photography and video, this is a great way to put it to use and showcase all the features, design elements and spaces that make up your hotel or brand personality. For long-term rich media content, professionally shot photos and videos are a must...but for regular social media posts even Instagram photos are a great, stylish & free way to showcase the best bits about your business. 

Act as a destination concierge: This has opportunity written all over it. The Pinterest boards you create are limited only to your imagination...a travel bucket list, must-see places, hidden gems from the city and locale, great places for fun, dining & entertainment, etc. Good planning and effort can transform your Pinterest profile into a virtual destination concierge. The beauty of this is you don't always have to shoot the photos or videos...you just need to find them on the web and showcase them with relevant commentary. 

Add a visual twist to your Food & Beverage marketing efforts: Think recipes, chef profiles, healthy eating tips, in-house / local sustainability efforts, amazing signature drinks, wine recommendations and more...Pinterest offers a great way to visually market everything that's great about your restaurants, bars, culinary talent and the food you serve. 

Special occasions and events: Pinterest is a natural fit to showcase your facilities and especially tips, layouts and experiential shots of your event, banqueting or wedding facilities. Wedding planning related content is a specific niche to explore if that is an important part of your business. A few choice photos of special events, personalities or setups you've hosted won't hurt either...as long as you have permission to use the photos / videos. 

Search Engine Optimization: Pinterest is a great way to positively impact your SEO efforts - it still does not utilize "nofollow" tags on links like Facebook & other sites, so you still benefit from the links coming in to your hotel / resort / restaurant websites. It's also another way to capture a natural search engine listing and drive 3rd party listings down for searches related to your brand or business name. 

Website Referrals & Traffic: Pinterest has already proven to be a great generator of direct referral traffic, especially for lifestyle content...this offers a great way to drive traffic to your own site/s, as long as the content you're pinning sits on your own web pages (another great argument to invest wisely in high quality photos and videos!)

Crowdsource inspiration and engage users: A pinboard it may be...but Pinterest is still very much a "social" network. Don't forget to connect with other users, engage with them and like / comment on relevant content. Growing a following is important, as is keeping your activity stream fresh and engaging. Pinterest may be a great way to crowdsource inspiration too...or have your followers contribure content or participate in competitions (e.g. your favourite holiday memories, the best feature you love about Hotel x, your hot tip when visiting xyz destination, etc). 

Remember to keep content experiential...Pinterest is not yet another site you can simply "push" content out to (as a matter of fact, if you're doing that on ANY social network...please stop now). Other tips and caveats:

Make sure you set up your profile right and remember to include links to your official site

Use the right captions, keywords and hashtags when pinning content

Be consistent with your brand values...after all, you're doing this for a good business & marketing reason

Pinterest is all about "interests" (therefore the name)...not about promotions, flyers, ads and boring old photography you'd find on your website anyway. 

Remember to observe, like, comment and engage with the Pinterest community

Be wary of copyright issues...own the content you re-publish, ask for permission if you're going to shoot and share photos / videos of people and give credit where it's due. There's very likely to be more changes to the way Pinterest handles copyright claims in the future (like YouTube does, for example), so that's something to watch out for. 

When running competitions and other interactive campaigns, remember to spell out the terms and conditions clearly, plus plan for tracking success and dealing with the fall-out if something goes wrong.

Hope you find the above Hotelier guide to Pinterest useful for your hotels or restaurants...here are some more sources of great practical info on Pinterest:

Pinterest.com

Pinterest Help and Frequently Asked Questions

26 Tips for Using Pinterest for Business

Mashable updates on Pinterest

Have tips or examples of hotels, resorts, restaurants or bars that are doing a great job of using Pinterest.com? Leave a comment and let us know!

JJ for Hotelemarketer.com

[hotelemarketer]

TripAdvisor Advertising - CPC Case Study and ROI

A great guest post by Piotr Majdan from Mirai Espana, that takes a deeper look at the performance of TripAdvisor PPC (not to be confused with Business LIstings) activity. Piotr had also published a case study on the ROI of TripAdvisor Business Listings as while back.

These conclusions were derived by Mirai after investing €27,000 in 58 hotels:

Your direct rates, your hotel’s website rates, can now appear on Tripadvisor dealing face to face with intermediaries such as booking.com and expedia.com. Should you join this program? What can you expect regarding the required investments and the return you will obtain? Does this return affect your hotel’s position within your city’s ranking? After a comprehensive three-month study, we have got answers.

Tripadvisor’s CPC (Cost per Click) program will generate new bookings in most of the hotels’ websites, mainly for the best rated hotels, but it is not predictable when it comes to cost and can generally be expensive “commission wise”.

In any case, “high” commission is a relative concept and should always be compared with the margin you get through intermediary sites (IDS) or classical tour operators . It still might be worth it for many hotels. Here is how we got to this conclusion.

In May 2010, Mirai pioneered the testing of the Tripadvisor Business Listing. Once again, we are the first ones to explore the new opportunity given by Tripadvisor – their CPC program. The difference between them is that the former is based on a fixed fee and the cost of the latter is variable depending on the traffic.

Other companies on the market offer this service (sometimes with a set-up fee or monthly fixed payment) directly to their clients promising new bookings. Before doing so, we at Mirai, have conducted a test to check the return you can expect by participating in this program. We invested €27,000 in 58 of our clients and analysed the results.

So what is the CPC program and how does it differ from Business Listing?

Business Listing allows you to add a link to your website, as well as the contact information (Blue).

On the other hand, the CPC Program allows you to compare the rates of many providers in real time (Green). We can see in detail how it works in the following screenshot.

The user selects a check-in date and clicks on the button to see the rates.

By default Tripadvisor opens three new windows with the first bidders. In this case, the official website montecarlobcn.com, booking.com and venere.com are the three that bid the most to be there, and therefore they get their reward.

Once the user has compared the three options, he/she will choose one of the websites to make the reservation (if this is what he/she decided to do). Let’s assume he/she has been persuaded to make the reservation through the official website. He/she could easily do so by selecting the room and concluding the process. We will not show you screenshots of the reservation process as they are not relevant for this analysis.

In the following table, we easily show the differences between both programs.

* Hoteliers can manage their business listing entry to Business Listing and pay directly to Tripadvisor.

** You can only participate in this program through “partner companies”. Apart from Mirai, other companies that offer this service are Flamingohotel, Fastbooking, AvailPro, Bookassist, WihpHotel , among others.

It is important to note that simply participating in either program does not improve your chances for getting higher rankings in your city. These two things are totally different.

The test.

Over the course of 3 months, we included 58 hotels from Spain and France of different characteristics, from the top ranked in Tripadvisor to some others placed at the bottom of the ranking, and with different features (rate, size, classification, location…) and checked their behaviour in terms of traffic volume, conversion rate, reservation value and return of investment. There are some interesting analyses already online, such as the one from wihphotel, but we are hoping to provide you with a more extensive view on the matter.

The first thing we notice is that 14 hotels (24%) did not receive any reservation.

Hotels that did not receive any reservation are those that brought little traffic, had low conversion rate and were usually lower ranked than the ones that did.

Traffic – the higher you rank, the better, but be prepared to put the money on the table.

The first thing we wanted to find out is the correlation between ranking of the hotel (per city) and traffic volume. A quite obvious assumption, but true, is that the better ranked hotels will have the bigger traffic volume.

This correlation is clearly seen especially when it comes to hotels ranked within big cities where the volume of searches and competition is big. Always in terms of traffic volume, you get more visibility if you rank high in big city (such as Barcelona, Rome, Paris, Madrid), than to rank #1 in a small town that travelers do not visit that often.

We cannot forget about the cost aspect, as the Tripadvisor system is based on the “Pay per click” model. Hotels pay from 0.6 to 0.8 euro per click. Being in the top ten in cities such as Madrid and Barcelona means thousands of clicks and euros spent every month, which is not the case in small cities that get less traffic.

Generally speaking, most of the traffic goes to those that rank on the first page in a large city searches. Apart from that, there is no difference between being on the 3rd or on the 10th page, even if you are lower in the ranking.

Traffic grows exponentially according to the position of the hotel’s search results.

Conversion – don’t expect too much.

Analysing conversions shows how many visits are needed to make a reservation. Visits to your website come from one of these sources: organic traffic (mostly from browsers such as Google, Yahoo or Bing), paid traffic (mostly Google Adwords), people typing the url directly into the browser (direct)traffic coming from links placed all over the web (referral). In order to check the effectiveness of Tripadvisor, we decided to compare the conversion rate across all the most popular traffic sources.

It is hard to draw any conclusions, but we clearly see that Tripadvisor’s conversion rate does not differ that much from other sources (with the exception of Google Adwords, where we obtain high conversion by means of campaign optimisation).

Note that there are other factors that may have influence on the conversion rate such as price, hotel location, service, price parity, etc. In this analysis, we will not go into detail about those factors.

Worth mentioning is that the cost per click of Tripadvisor’s CPC Program, compared to other paid channels such as Google Adwords, is significantly different. On average, a click in Google Adwords is charged €0.3, compared to Tripadvisor’s €0.65 to be in first position in the “check rates” box. So the profitability might be an issue here. Let’s take a closer look at the “commission” aspect comparing commissions depending on their origin.

Commission: the higher you rank, the lower commission you pay.

Most of the hoteliers are used to a commission-based system, mainly because it allows monitoring and comparing cost and benefits. Nowadays, the commission level of the intermediaries is between 12% and 20%. Above this margin, the profitability of using a channel is uncertain.

The cost of a Tripadvisor’s CPC program is not based on a commission model but in a cost per click system. The value of the generated reservations should cover this variable investment in exactly the same way as takes place in the commission-based model. This is why we must transform the cost into commission.

Transforming the investment in TripAdvisor into the commission-based model.

When using Google Analytics, we analysed the reservation value obtained from TripAdvisor and the cost of the service (current CPC spent). To enable us to compare the analysis with other booking channels based on a commission model, we calculated what percentage of the reservation value covers the investment in TripAdvisor’s PPC program. This allowed us to see the profitability in a clearer way.

(TripAdvisor’s CPC Cost) Divided into (Reservation Value)*100% = % Commission.

Is it economically justified to invest in the PPC Program on Tripadvisor? Does the ranking have anything to do with it?

Apparently, being in the top results in your city gives you a better chance to pay lower commission (25%), but we need to take into consideration an important factor – the average reservation value. Basically, hotels that rank high are those with higher prices per room, so having the same conversion rate as lower ranked hotels makes the commission lower.

Commission analysis takes into consideration the average of all 58 participant hotels, but we should mention that 22% of hotels (in spite of their ranking) got better numbers in the range of commission between 13%-18%, so the program can be very interesting for them. In some long tail hotels the costs were as little as €38 but they got reservations valued up to €839. A great result, but not very ascendable.

Conclusions.

So what is the key point in the decision making processes about whether to invest in Tripadvisor’s PPC program?

As a prerequisite, and as for any investment that will bring traffic to your official website, make sure that it is optimized to convert, offering the potential client the best experience regarding design, reservation engine, rates and also enough room availability.

High cost: 25-45% (again, this is related to your position). Compare it with other channels and decide whether the same investment would offer you a better return by other means. If you totally bet on your official website (which will probably collide with intermediation), the costs will be lower. Think that Tripadvisor is enabling the user to compare the rates, so even if the rate is not the only thing to take into consideration, the fact is that Tripadvisor really focuses on it.

Limited expenses control: Tripadvisor’s CPC Program doesn’t currently offer any control for the hotelier regarding the amount to invest because it doesn’t manage every account separately but rather in a global way along with other hotels. If you require to budget or control your cost in advance, this could be a problem for you. We hope this changes soon, but nowadays, you will be told the amount you invested by the end of the month instead of at the beginning.

The better your hotel’s position is within the pages of your destination, the more chances you will have to receive reservations by this means. Without a good position, it is even possible that you spend your money without getting any reservation at all.

It is better if your average reservation value is high. This will soften the fixed cost that involves the “pay per click” concept.

If you don’t participate directly, you will be feeding your intermediaries. Check out which of them are bidding. Paying 18%-25% in intermediation means that they are using a part of the incomes to bid in Tripadvisor, which would explain the current phenomenon: “booking/venere/expedia are selling more and more”. They are not going to pull out of the race, even if they pay the same or even more than you, so having a direct presence also comprises a political dimension that you should take into consideration.

Satisfy your clients. Life smiles at hotels that do so, and this test confirms it. The new ways of distribution that are arising, such as, Business Listing, and the social network, etc., need happy clients to work. Without their satisfaction, you’re out. Tripadvisor’s CPC, whose return is very sensitive to your ranking position within your city, is a materialised and quantifiable example of this trend of which everyone talks about abstractedly.

Trial and error. If you are in doubt, you’d better try it and see the numbers you get. No matter how far we take our analysis: every hotel is different from the rest and there is no way of checking whether this works for you other than trying it.

  About Piotr Majdan: Piotr is responsible for strategy and coordination of marketing products offered by Mirai (www.miraiespana.com)

[hotelemarketer]

The curse of too much choice

A great TED talks video by Sheena Iyengar that talks about the perils of too much choice. To quote from the video blurb:

We all want customized experiences and products -- but when faced with 700 options, consumers freeze up. With fascinating new research, Sheena Iyengar demonstrates how businesses (and others) can improve the experience of choosing.

We all know what happens when you're faced with too much choice...if you've ever stood in the local hypermarket aisle, facing endless brands of washing powder, you'll know exactly what I mean. We all love choice...but do we really need 25 varieties of washing powder? Humans are great at processing 6-7 pieces of information at a time and at eliminating the choices we know we DON'T want. 

Sheena offers some great, common-sense tips on how to approach this dilemma:

So how can we apply these learnings to digital and tactical hotel marketing online? The applications are endless, but here are some initial thoughts:

Cut - Less is more: A great place to start is website design and the special offers we offer hotel shoppers online. Why not identify the MOST popular content items on your website and simplify navigation? Why not cut down on the 20 special "packages" and offers on your tactical marketing page and offer just the top 2-4 offers, preferably one aimed at each type of customer you cater to? 

Concretize - Make it vivid: Visualization is a great marketing technique...and content is a great way to get your customers to imagine the end result of their shopping choices - use great photography and video to help the visualization process easier (and make the content real and relevant - too many people these days are skeptical of doctored images to 'buy the dream' just on that basis). Move away from just promoting features and amenities to actually highlighting benefits and experiences relevant to your target customer. If people can imagine it (and like it), they're more likely to buy it. 

Categorize - More categories, fewer choices: This one's great too...if there's no way you can avoid offering many choices, at least make it easier for your customers to mentally sort and process the information. Categorizing choices logically make the process of elimination much easier, so you can go straight to the good stuff. Again, this principle can be applied to variety of things ranging from website navigation to your traditional paper menus.

Condition for complexity: When building the booking and shopping process online, it's great to offer choice and help guests build their ideal experience, but break the steps down and move from simple decisions to the more complex, to avoid losing shoppers and causing mental fatigue halfway through the purchase process. 

What do you think about these approaches? How do you handle choice personally? Do you already use one or more of these techniques with customers? Leave a comment and let us know!

[hotelemarketer]

Are we overcomplicating Privacy

This recent article on Forbes has sparked a fair bit of interest and controversy - "How Target Figured Out A Teen Girl Was Pregnant Before Her Father Did". Essentially the piece is about how Target uses clever data mining techniques to discover (and sometimes predict) user behaviour and circumstance (as evidenced by the aforementioned case where they were able to predict a pregnancy...and recommend suitable baby products to the customer). 

Seth Godin followed this news (not sure if there was a connection) with a great blog post about "the illusion of privacy" which made a great point...despite all the hullabaloo about privacy (or lack thereof) these days, perhaps what we're most concerned about are unexpected surprises. This makes a lot of sense...after all, we only want so much "privacy" in our lives. Wikipedia defines the term privacy as "the ability of an individual or group to seclude themselves or information about themselves and thereby reveal themselves selectively." We constantly reveal details about ourselves selectively in the hopes of rewards (think loyalty programs, credit cards, shopping cards), access to free services (think Facebook...or even Google) or a personalized experience. So what we're really afraid of are people or companies that appear to know things you didn't selectively choose to share...or perhaps didn't realize they had access to. 

The Forbes article mentions how Target chose to deal with this problem...they just got a wee bit sneakier. In their coupons and promotions, the company started including items that the target would definitely NOT be interested in, to create the illusion of randomness. This works...till you get caught out, of course. 

So what's the best approach to Privacy in our increasinly cluttered, inter-connected world? Most of us love the freebies and benefits offered by the barter of personal information for a service or a personalization. As we get more and more reliant on data in our quest for the truly semantic web, privacy as we thought of it a decade or two ago may just be misplaced nostalgia...or about as useful as an appendix. 

Here's what ought to work though...Simplicity and transparency.

Ask for permission and ask it clearly and simply enough that people understand what the implications of their choices will be. Easier said than done...but probably an easier undertaking than cleaning up the mess from a secretive attempt at creating 'false' privacy. Trust, once lost, is often lost forever. 

[hotelemarketer]

What Digital Marketers Really Do

In the tradition of the most recent meme to hit the Interweb "What People Think I Do / What I Really Do" here's a low-down on What Digital Marketers really do...enjoy. 

Never heard of the meme? “What People Think I Do / What I Really Do” is a series of images / pictures illustrating a variety of preconceptions associated with various professions or areas of expertise. Learn more about the meme here. 

[hotelemarketer]

Recap - Google Think Travel 2012 Middle East - World Islands Dubai

The Google team hosted it's first ever "Think Travel" event here in the Middle East today at the Lebanon Island (World Islands) in Dubai. A well-chosen, buzz-worthy venue, no doubt...most attendees were equally keen about the event as they were to see the state of the (much touted) World Islands. All in all an eventful day with a great mix of insights and industry discussions, garnished liberally with rhetoric. 

Mohammad Gawdat, Google's VP for Emerging Markets (SEEMEA) kicked things off on a nostalgic note, putting the current rise of the Internet in perspective with other media like print, radio and TV. Obviously the internet calls for a new approach to marketing...and the opportunities to offer richer, more personalized experiences are only limited by marketer creativity these days (and budgets!). 

Nigel Huddleston, Google's seasoned Travel Industry head for EMEA followed with a good overview on the state of travel search, aided in part by Google Insights... no surprises here, but the message reinforced what digital marketers have been seeing...mobile taking its rightful place in the marketing arsenal, search queries maturing into more specific terms & phrases and travel shoppers becoming savvier about how, where & when they search + shop. 

Abdul Wahed Teffaha, Secretary General of the Arab Air Carriers Organization followed, with a brief overview of the air travel sector here in the Middle East...again, no surprises - two pieces of trivia that stood out for me: (1) The average age of the fleet for Arab owned airlines is approx 7 years, compared to 20+ years in the US and 15+ years in Europe (there are also plans to replace / add up to a 1000 planes over the next 10 years). (2) Despite acknowledging the importance of digital marketing and social media, the average increase in IT related spending by airlines in the region is roughly just 1.5% (given 1/3rd of airline costs are fuel related, this may still represent a significant absolute numeric amount, however it still seems quite miniscule related to the rapid pace of change and innovation in the digital space...not sure if it does justice?)

Damien Viel then took the stage and talked about YouTube and the rise of video...lots of great trivia here e.g. 10 years of video are added to YouTube every day now...plus 300 years of YouTube hosted video are watched globally on Facebook every day. It appears 68% of online shoppers also rely on some form of video when researching travel online...and exposure to 4 screens (e.g. mobile, desktop, etc) results in 24% more brand recall than using just TV to push video marketing content. 90% of instream video ads on YouTube will also likely be skippable, which of course is a great way to encourage the creation of more compelling content. Speaking to Damien over lunch it was clear that education / awareness was still a mountain to climb, with many creators / companies still not getting the basics right (for example...producing video in high definition as a standard for better engagement - many still don't do this despite no incremental cost involved).

Google is also looking to make the move beyond the US to introducing high-quality content channels in international markets, which is welcome news. 

A great low-budget, high-impact viral video from the travel vertical...STA Travel's "MOVE"

At the other end of the spectrum...the traditional (but experiential) product videos still do the trick too:

Here's a recent viral that Damien shared to illustrate the immense emotional power of video...(almost 8 million views in the 4 months since it was posted...a tear jerker that even had some men in the audience misty-eyed)

Waseem Sayegh, Google's Travel Lead here in the Middle East presented the now popular "Life in a Day" experiment conducted a while back with Ridley Scott... this is now being replicated with "Your Film Festival", with sponsors including Emirates Airlines. This should be a great one to watch in terms of local engagement with video enthusiasts and independent creators. 

Diego Lofeudo, Senior Director for Market Management for Expedia then provided an overview of everything the company is involved in and their diverse brands & presence globally...what would have been interesting here is to learn how they're planning to combat the rise of Booking.com in the region and tapping more aggressively into the local market & Arabic ecommerce, however we'll just have to wait and find out in time...

Venkat Chandramoleshwar, Regional Manager for ITA provided a much anticipated overview of what the company is engaged in (no controversial discussions or speculation here, though!)...it's interesting to see just how many airlines and OTAs actually rely on ITA's flight search software (even Bing Travel uses it!). Emma Burrows from the Engineering team based in Zurich provided a great demo of current testing being done with the Google Flights product, as well as the nifty new local area & travel time search features offered by Google Hotel Finder. Speed is regarded as paramount by the Google team and it shows in the jiffy responses these tools spit out...lots of cool, geeky features being incorporated into these new projects too (super useful though!). 

The last presentation was an engaging one, delivered by Guillaume Bacuvier, Director Mobile Sales and Operations in SEEMEA on all things mobile and social. Great insights overall...including the fact that mobile smartphones are mass media too, much like TV..and can be reached through mobile ad networks to cover a significant proportion of the population. Some great new ad formats also emerging on mobile to make content more appealing and native to smartphones. The end game for mobile (perhaps in 5-7 years tops) is to be as contextual, personalized and location based as possible. A common sense approach to mobile includes having a great presence, thinking local, being discoverable and tracking separately (...plus of course constantly testing & improving). The "mobile internet" will soon be just the "internet" as devices evolve and the desktop/mobile lines fade away. A great Google project that offers free stats and data on the mobile space in many countries can be found at: ourmobileplanet.com

On the social media front, Guillaume acknowledged we still have a way to go before social "really" works as it ought to, for example...messages are still rather impersonal, comments just aren't conversations yet, marketing is still fragmented and recommendations lack staying power on social networks. He then explained how Google+ is aiming to tackle these challenges using Circles, Hang outs, integrating +1 into everything else Google does (including search, as we've recently seen)... we'll have to wait and see if these bets pay off in the long run. An interesting video also showed Fiat's use of Google+ Hangouts to provide a sneak peek and discussion of a new car launch to fans in the Netherlands:

The event was wrapped up by Mohamad Mourad, Google's Regional Manager in the Gulf with a few words of inspiration and a call to action...overall quite a well organized event and a good chance to catch up with travel, media and tech industry colleagues. A note of thanks to the Google team in scaling up engagement efforts locally here in the Middle East....looking forward to many more such events!

- JJ (@hotelemarketer)

[hotelemarketer]

Love the new Max Travel Time feature on Google Hotel Finder

Just experimenting with the newly added feature on Google Hotel Finder that allows you to specify maximum travel time from an attraction or landmark... this would've come super handy when I was looking for hotel options near school a couple of years ago! 

Must say that this approach is far superior to the standard OTA method...guessing Google's dominance in the local search space combined with tons of great underlying data will make this an invaluable feature to the fast evolving Google Hotel Finder "experiment"!

[hotelemarketer]

RoomKey.com - What's the value proposition for customers?

There's a lot of buzz in the industry about the new meta search engine launched by 6 hotel giants...there's clearly a great value proposition here for hoteliers... but what about the customers? I still don't see any clear differentiators that would have customers used to popular OTAs switch over to using this site (no packaging options and limited choice are just two simple hurdles). 

Launching this new brand in a cluttered distribution space and competiting head-on with OTAs on search at sustainable / advantageous costs is another story altogether. 

It's still early days of course...but what do YOU think? "Hit" or "miss"?