Visual Marketing Turning Heads, Filling Beds

ICE Portal Says Hotels Which Edit Online Hotel Images to Accurately Represent

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. October 14, 2008

MIAMI, FL, April 25, 2006. Hoteliers who have embraced online marketing say travelers consider visuals the most important factor, after location and price, in making their travel destination decision. Companies specializing in destination travel, such as Mexico's Palace Resorts and Fiesta Americana (a Grupo Posadas brand) and branded hotel companies such as Starwood Hotels & Resorts, rely on ICE Portal to manage and distribute their visuals to more than 20,000 travel distribution channels globally, and with the proper specifications, formatting, sizing and meta-tagging.

"Visual marketing is simple, effective and very inexpensive," said Henry Woodman, president of ICE Portal, a hospitality company specializing in the production, management and delivery of moving media content, such as virtual tours, streaming videos and flash in multiple languages. "Some travel marketers, however, still view E-marketing as complicated, technical and costly. Just the opposite is true. As our customers will attest, it's almost as if the Internet were designed specifically for selling travel."

Cancun -based Palace Resorts, a company that provides five-star, all-inclusive resort accommodations across Mexico, has been working with ICE Portal over the past five years. Ana Paradela, Palace Resorts' director of sales for North America, said adding moving content to their destination Web site has resulted in increase bookings across all properties.

"Because travelers are so Internet savvy, they continually look for more and more detailed information prior to making a purchase," Paradela said. "Pictures provide the detail that savvy online bookers are looking for - and moving pictures really help to build business. We have found that a 360 degree view provides a better vision or understanding of what our properties have to offer - not from a guestroom perspective, but from an overall property or destination viewpoint. It's incredible how much more detail comes through streaming videos and other moving pictures."

Maira Briceno, Palace Resorts' director of marketing for North America agreed. She said more than 5,000 unique visitors view one of the company's online brochures each week. Palace Resorts couldn't keep up with such demand in the print world, she said.

"As people stumble around on the Internet looking for something to buy, a great-looking picture will catch their attention and give them a reason to stop and read on," Briceno said. "Those visuals, especially if they are moving-will inevitably close the sale."

Destination photos seen on the various distribution channels often entice travelers to go directly to the destination's own Web site to book the reservation, she said.

Fiesta Americana, voted "The Best Hotel Chain in Mexico" at the World Travel Awards, is located in Mexico's leading beach and city destinations and has been working with ICE Portal for approximately two years. According to George Hunter, director of sales, department of leisure travel and e-commerce, "Rich, moving content sells rooms . . . period."

"Fiesta Americana has had tremendous year-over-year growth through online bookings," Hunter said. "The No. 1 e-commerce challenge we face is keeping our visual content current across all distribution channels. ICE makes this obstacle easy for us by sending our multimedia to everyone in the format that each requires.

"Having a large number of properties means providing lots of information to navigate and to keep refreshed," he said. "Our customers look straight to the visuals to help make their booking decision - whether to see specific features of the hotel or to get a glimpse of the overall destination. Unless our visuals are correctly represented, we can put ourselves at a significant disadvantage from our competition. ICE Portal gives us the technological capability and the competitive edge we need to stay a leader in the market."

As more hotel rooms and travel are researched and sold over the Internet, the ability to effectively show a product online becomes vital, ICE Portal's Woodman said.

"Current research indicates that rich media, like virtual tours, generate 46 percent more bookings than still images," he said. "From all indications, those numbers are growing, and so is our customers' satisfaction."