Mr. Boni

Website / Online Mechandising / SEO

What Do Travelers Experience When They Walk Through Your Digital Front Door?

By Paolo Boni, President & Chief Executive Officer, VFM Leonardo, Inc.

“When I started in the hotel business 52 years ago, the first impression customers had of our hotels was the lobby when they walked through the front doors. But in this digital age, often the first impression comes when they visit Marriott.com. It's our digital front door.”
- Bill Marriott, Chairman & CEO of Marriott International ('Renovating Our Digital Front Door', Marriott.com)

It's increasingly likely that travel shoppers will first encounter and experience your hotel online. From desktops, laptops and hand-held devices, they consume images and anecdotes, offers and insights. They evaluate, compare and choose. The journey now starts with a search.

The mistake some hoteliers make is in underestimating the full power and potential of the travel shopper's online experience. It's online, in the initial leg of the journey, that expectations are set and decisions are made. As a result, hotel industry success will increasingly revolve around the stories we tell and impressions we make in this hyper-competitive, virtual marketplace.

There's no escaping the Internet's growing impact on the travel industry. In a recent report, the U.S. Travel Association noted that nearly 93 million American adults are now using the Internet to plan travel -- up from 90 million in 2007. In fact, more than three-quarters of all online travelers planned pleasure trips online in the past 12 months.

Given these trends, the USTA argues it's now imperative that hotels provide "complete, accurate and compelling information on their web sites." But it's not just your web site that matters. Considering Google's estimates that the average vacation planner now engages in 12 searches and visits 22 travel sites over a one month period, you would be smart to ensure your hotel can be found on a variety of other travel sites besides your own.

So it's clear that hotels must actively market themselves online if they wish to remain competitive and profitable -- if they hope to engage online travel shoppers. The question hoteliers now face is this: What will it take to provide a compelling experience online that will turn lookers into bookers?

Our recent study of hotel e-business practices revealed an array of interesting and actionable insights in this regard. The VFM Leonardo survey, which generated responses from 590 companies across the world, sought to identify the e-marketing tactics that are most actively being applied and the ones proving most effective at producing conversions.

Consistent with other studies of e-commerce behavior, we found that a combination of rich media and social media tactics tend to maximize outcomes in terms of customer experience and conversion. More specifically, e-business professionals are realizing their best results by marrying rich visual content -- such as videos and visual hotel tours -- with user generated reviews, ratings and rankings.

But here's where it gets interesting. There's a clear disparity between what hotel e-business professionals find most effective and what they are presently deploying.

The most widely used tactics at present are either rooted in social media or focused on visual merchandising. The top five tactics that are now deployed are branded social community pages such as Facebook and MySpace (71%), user ratings and rankings (65%), user comments and reviews (63%), videos for merchandising, advertising and demonstration (56%), and visual hotel tours (43%).

The most effective tactics -- rated "very effective" by more than 60% of respondents -- were somewhat different than the ones that are presently most popular. According to the survey, user ratings and rankings (67%) is followed by hotel tours (66%), user comments and reviews (64%), and videos for merchandising, advertising and demonstration (60%).

Here are some of the other disparities we identified:

• 38% believe “lifestyle imagery” is very effective yet only 19% have deployed this tactic.
• 48% believe “360 degree spin/panoramas" are very effective yet only 32% have deployed this tactic.
• 64% believe “hotel tours (combinations of guided spin, zoom imagery, videos or animation)” are very effective yet only 41% have deployed this tactic.
• 39% believe “branded social communities” are very effective yet 69% have deployed this tactic.

What this tells us that many hotel marketers are flocking to "flavor of the month" approaches while ignoring tactics that have proven to be more valuable. And while there is likely a great deal of value to be realized over time from social networking tools such as Facebook and Twitter, there are more immediate gains to be produced by deploying video, visual tours and user-generated content such as comments, ratings and rankings.

Maybe it's time for some new thinking. To fully enhance the travel shopper's digital experience, you should focus on the tactics that have proven most effective:

• User ratings and rankings
• Hotel tours
• User comments and reviews
• Videos for merchandising and advertising
• 360 degree spins/panoramas

Of course, it's one thing to embrace the power of such media as a driver of marketing conversions. It's entirely a different matter to apply this insight.

We've found that hotels often are held back by the perceived difficulties of developing video content. In one recent Webinar we produced, attendees claimed this was the number one barrier (74%) they faced. They tend to be intimidated by several mistaken beliefs. One is that video is expensive. Another is that it's difficult to produce. Still another is that it's hard to find a high quality vendor.

The reality? As our clients have been pleased to discover, specialists can produce a high quality hotel video on your behalf for less than one thousand dollars. Slide-show montages that look like full motion video can be produced for a few hundred dollars.

Given the minimal investments required to produce high quality visual content, a growing number of hotels are even producing specialty videos to serve particular audiences. One hotel produced a special video to demonstrate it's an excellent location for weddings in the Washington, D.C. area. This enabled the hotel to reach new and untapped markets.

The impact can be quite impressive. B.F. Saul Company, which operates a portfolio of different hotel brands, has proved to be exceptionally successful when it comes to visually merchandising its properties. “We experienced a 30% bump in bookings after we went from no video to video. We found our sites became better, more efficient and stickier and we experienced more revenue per site visit after we launched video,” says B.F. Saul’s Director of E-Commerce, David Attardi.

Attardi not only measures the impact of the company's marketing efforts on conversions and bookings, but also on number of views, quality and quantity of comments, and the number of times visitors share the content by forwarding (or "re-tweeting") it to others.

He counsels other hotel marketers to identify their strategies and then, execute. "Don’t be intimidated," he says. "Start trying things. It’s easy, it’s fun, it’s effective."

As a growing body of research and a growing number of success stories make clear, hotels must actively merchandise themselves online if they intend to engage travel shoppers at the earliest stage of their journeys. Moreover, they must actively syndicate their content to third party travel, search engine and social media sites to ensure that prospective guests are consuming it where they engage in travel research and booking activities.

So what will travelers experience when they encounter your hotel online -- either at your own site or a third party travel site that displays your content? If you tell them a compelling story and show them the powerful experience you can deliver, you can expect to see far more of them entering the front door of your hotel.

Paolo Boni has lead VFM Leonardo’s vision and strategic direction since 2001. Under his leadership, the company has expanded globally and now has over 80,000 hotels, over 30,000 travel related website partners worldwide and the largest online visual content distribution network for the travel industry. As a recognized travel industry expert, Mr. Boni frequently speaks at major travel conferences on subjects relating to online travel marketing, online hotel merchandising and rich media. He holds an LL.B. from Osgoode Hall Law School and a B.A. Economics from McGill University. Mr. Boni can be contacted at 1-877-593-6634 or press@vfmleonardo.com Extended Bio...

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