Mr. Federman

Website / Online Mechandising / SEO

A Day In the Life of an Online Traveler

By John Federman, CEO, eStara

It's happened to all of us. You wake up on a beautiful Saturday and head out to run a few errands with the intention of spending the rest of the day with friends or family. However, by the time you are finished at the hardware store, picking up the groceries, finding a new suit for next week's big meeting, and stopping to chat with your child's teacher who you saw outside the store, not only is your entire day gone, but also you are exhausted.

The frustrations felt by today's online traveler is quite analogous. Between booking a flight and hotel, and making dinner and theater reservations in an unfamiliar town, the process is both time consuming and difficult.

To ease the challenges inherent in travel planning, many hotel executives are beginning to view their Web sites as more than sales and branding tools, but as a resource for loyal customers and prospective bookers. In doing so, they're keeping customers on their sites for an extended period, creating cross-selling opportunities and generating incremental sales.

Hotels chains are doing a better job these days of creating a consistent look and feel throughout their Web sites and providing information about locations, rates and availability. Aside from information about your hotel, it's important to think about adding incremental value to customers via your site. One area that is ripe for improvement is the delivery of personalized content to your customers. Hotels have only scratched the surface of offering virtual concierge services that give customers a vague notion of what they can do and see while in town.

Currently, guests spend an average of 10-15 minutes with a concierge to accomplish these tasks, and maybe one of the nights they stay they make a reservation on their own. Even if you have a great concierge, most people would prefer to work out the details before they arrive, rather than waste time on their trip standing in line and spending time explaining what they are looking for, and then waiting some more while the concierge determines whether there is availability at an event.

You might be thinking, "it would be great to have more details about each local area where my hotels are located, but that seems like a lot of time, money and effort to generate and update that type of content." With today's emerging technologies, however, it could not be easier. Technology can help tap the two largest sources of local knowledge that each hotel branch has: its employees and its guests.

Take the case of Red Lion Hotels. Not long ago, the company undertook a massive overhaul of its Web site design and functionality to help deliver added-value to guests considering a stay at one of its properties. According to the company, among the site's new features were:

Reference Rates: By scanning the hotel's rates for the 14 days ahead of the current date, Red Lion Hotels automatically returns a range of rates to give customers an initial idea of costs.

Rate Compare: Without leaving the site, guests can immediately compare rates for the same room and travel dates on other travel booking engines including Travelocity, Expedia and Orbitz.

Talk to Us: Using a click to call service, consumers can initiate a web-based conversation from key pages within the site with a Red Lion guest service agent, either via telephone or an Internet connected PC. Calls are automatically directed to the appropriate person or department based on the page in which the inquiry is made including reservation agents, national sales, and GuestAwards loyalty program service agents.

Only4Me Web Deals: Red Lion's proprietary automated one-to-one marketing program that allows guests to redeem offers generated specifically by the guest's interaction with the hotels and the GuestAwards program. Each offer is assigned a unique redemption code that, when input on the website, displays an offer or range of offers unique to the requesting customer. The site also invalidates the redemption code once used so marketing offers are truly "one to one."

Guest Awards: Members of Red Lion's loyalty program can redeem their points for free nights online, with instant confirmations of their awards and automatic account updates performed at the time of booking. The site also allows Guest Awards redemption stays to be canceled online with the points automatically being re-deposited in members' account.

Destination Guides: Extensive city and area information has been custom-created for every Red Lion hotel, which gives detailed information on restaurants and attractions in the vicinity. Of particular note is the depth of content offered in smaller cities such as Pocatello, Idaho; Pendleton, Oregon; and Wenatchee, Washington to help those traveling to locations that are not typically featured in traditional travel guides and websites.

Extensive Content: The Web site features refreshed editorial content and new photography and 360 degree virtual tour images that showcase each hotel.

Packaging: Through the World Wide Travel Exchange, guests can now book air and car along with Red Lion hotel rooms. Unique to redlion.com are multiple packaging paths that enable customers to book travel with Red Lion's marketing partners.

Tickets to Local Events: Through the company's ticketing affiliate, TicketsWest (www.ticketswest.com), users of the site can readily search for and book TicketsWest events that are taking place in cities where Red Lion hotels are located.

Through cross-selling tools embedded in the Red Lion and TicketsWest Web sites, context sensitive hotel offers are displayed to TicketsWest customers and date sensitive events are displayed to redlion.com customers. This added value increases the usefulness of the sites to customers and competitively differentiates the sites.

Since launching these new services, Red Lion has seen tremendous gains. According to customer surveys, more than 60 percent of Red Lion customers felt the services improved or drastically improved the online experience. Perhaps most impressive is the fact that since implementing these changes to its Web site, Red Lion has witnessed a 68 percent increase in online revenue!

If Web browsers come to expect good content on your site, it will actually reduce strain on your staff. So often, your staff and concierge services are bogged down with the same questions about local activities or where to eat - even if your staff has great recommendations, it's often a tedious process of flipping through hardcopy menus and brochures with links to other relevant information. All of that information should be online and easily accessible.

The example of Red Lion makes it clear that way in which you structure your content and promotional offers has a lot to do with your brand and customer base. But it's easy to put the technology infrastructure in place to make your guests feel like you are providing great value, and leveraging the customer loyalty that creates to present opportunities for cross-selling and up-selling other services. The choice is yours on how will your online guests spend their day: with their family and friends, or endlessly searching online only to end up in a Web of frustration.

John Federman is CEO of eStara. eStara’s interaction tools increase marketing and sales conversion rates for large enterprises including Starwood, Hilton, Red Lion, and Club Med. Other clients include Verizon, Amazon.com and Continental Airlines. He is responsible for strategic direction, growth and corporate vision. Mr. Federman has 20 plus years of experience with information technology and media companies. Prior to eStara, Mr. Federman was co-founder, president and CEO of Dotomi, an Internet advertising company. Mr. Federman is a graduate of UMass and holds a BA in Business and Art. Mr. Federman can be contacted at 703-842-4436 or John.federman@estara.com Extended Bio...

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