by
Rich Siegel
3.22.2024

Siegel Sez 3/22/24

Siegel Sez 3/22/24

Definitely Doug 3/22/24: More Sales, Less Cost. What’s Not to Like?

CORPORATE NEWS

GUEST MANAGEMENT SYSTEMS

RESERVATIONS & DISTRIBUTION

REVENUE MANAGEMENT & ANALYTICS

GUEST FACING TECHNOLOGY

SALES & CATERING, GROUPS & MEETINGS

BACK OFFICE

SECURITY

HOSPITALITY EVENTS & ASSOCIATION NEWS

MARKET REPORTS

PIQUED OUR INTEREST

In the last edition of Siegel Sez, I wrote about my experience at ITB in Berlin. What a great event, though walking a million miles on a replaced knee was not my smartest move. It was well worth the effort for such an amazing experience, but I have been paying the price.

Yes, there are so many events to choose from today to attend. Of course, HITEC is at the top of the list and now that The Hospitality Show will take place in October, it will be easier to attend both of these important industry events - Hospitality Upgrade will be at both! Geneva and Kim from our team just attended the Hunter Hotel Investment Conference in Atlanta this week, and we will be at The Lodging Conference in Phoenix too, along with many other shows.

Because of my background as a hotelier and then working for a PMS company, my favorite events to attend will always be Users Groups. I just love interacting with those who use the technologies we write about. I thank Agilysys for inviting me to their Users Group called Inspire24 this week in Las Vegas. They had more than 500 attendees, fun social events and a great general session that truly amazed me. Of course reconnecting with people also happens and the photo is my catching up with Barbara Jablons, who I met many years ago when she was with Hyatt. The real purpose of a Users Group is learning about the products and interacting with fellow users to learn from each other. I loved when I worked for a PMS company and organized User Groups, bringing people together has always been my favorite thing to do. Again, I thank Agilysys for inviting me. Next month I will attend both the Oracle and Maestro User Groups in Orlando and Toronto respectively. Can’t wait!

Doug Rice in his Definitely Doug column that follows does a great job enlightening us to something that drives hoteliers crazy. Hoteliers want potential guests to book direct, but so many start there and then move to a third-party site like OTAs, never finishing the booking they started, costing the hotel money. Can this be avoided? There are now technological solutions to help with this, and they are pretty amazing. Take a few minutes to read Definitely Doug and learn what can be done to keep those who start on your site from going somewhere else. A very interesting read and we thank Doug for a great column again this week!

Wish us luck next week in Denver at our 19th annual Executive Vendor Summit. We will be hosting a great crowd, and we threw quite a bit of creativity into the mix this year. We have some great sessions scheduled, including a cyber security session with the FBI that will be amazing. If you’d like to check out the 2024 EVS program you can find it here or follow us next week on LinkedIn.

We have a panel of money people sharing insight on why they do (and more importantly why they don’t) invest in technology for the hotel industry. If what I’ve learned from them in the past month is any indication, this will be an eye-opening experience.  We thank all of the many CEOs, Presidents and other executives from the vendor community for joining us this year along with quite a few tech leaders from the hotel side of the fence. There will be no snow in Denver next week, what else could one ask for!

Here now is Definitely Doug along with the latest industry technology news. I will see you at the end with this week’s attempt at you-know-what. In case you are curious, the University of Illinois is going to win March Madness this year. You heard it here first!

Rich

rich@hospitalityupgrade.com

Most hoteliers want guests to book through direct channels rather than through third-parties such as Online Travel Agencies (OTAs). Loyalty programs, member-only rates, and search-engine advertising have commanded increasing shares of the marketing budget of many hotels trying to achieve this objective.

But surprisingly few hotels have focused on the blocking and tackling of guest engagement with direct channels, and that will be my topic this week. I refer to techniques that:

  • Increase the conversion rate by keeping visitors on your website or in your booking engine rather than looking elsewhere
  • Tailor product offerings to better appeal to each visitor
  • Focus visitors on higher-value offerings as opposed to lowest price, and
  • Bring them back to your website after they leave.

I will also include some tools that enable hotel reservations offices to automate routine operations so that agents can spend more time on sale opportunities where they can make a difference. Some of these can also improve conversion rate by enabling agents to respond to written requests much faster.

Much has been written elsewhere about website chatbots, and my last blog addressed opportunities with artificial-intelligence (AI) powered contact center technologies. However, this week I will focus on several other solutions that hotels and resorts are using successfully, but that are not yet mainstream. Some of these are simple and relatively inexpensive, while others are powerful and may make financial sense mostly for certain types of properties. Most of the capabilities can be incorporated into existing booking engines and (in some cases) other reservations software such as chatbots or back-office reservations operations.

Conversion rate and the direct-booking ratio are tightly intertwined. When your website or mobile app has the chance to make a sale but fails to do so, then the customer either chose a different hotel, or booked your hotel but on a different site.  You may or may not have had any real chance to convert the customer who ended up choosing a different hotel (that depends on the reason they chose it), but abandonment of the hotel booking site for a third-party channel is often preventable.

There are hundreds of hotel booking engines in the market, a few of which provide some of the capabilities I will cover here. But most do not, or offer only limited subsets. I have therefore focused on companies whose capabilities can be plugged into any of the common booking engines. This means they will be viable options for most hotels and groups. And because products like this tend to be laser-focused on doing a few things really well, they are therefore more likely to have developed and incorporated best practices. If your current solution includes some of these capabilities, you can use this material to help evaluate its feature set.

Senior executives from several innovative companies were instrumental to my research for this article. I want to thank those from Cartstack, Hotel Res Bot, Hotelverse, and 123compare.me.

I also got some great material from P3, which does not offer any tools independently of their own booking engine, but which was the lone customer I could find of some interesting technology previously offered by Arvoia that is no longer available on the market. The lessons were still very useful; P3’s conversion and upselling success using even just the earliest capabilities of Arvoia’s technology has left them wanting more (and unable to find it). The technology worked even if the company did not. Perhaps someone will fill that gap?

All but one of the companies included this week are based in Europe. The more fragmented booking landscape in Europe creates more opportunities for innovative products than many other markets, and especially North America. Europe’s proliferation of independent hotels has encouraged vendors to try new approaches that may be rejected as too costly or disruptive by major brands that would need to shoehorn them into legacy systems. That is a barrier to the commercial success of products targeting the brand-dominated North American market.

For easier reading, I have divided the tools into categories based on the specific issues they address, but there is overlap and any such division is going to be imperfect. I have mentioned vendors who showed me or discussed specific capabilities, but that does not mean that other products (whether mentioned here or not) do not offer similar capabilities.

Reengagement and Cart Recovery

Tools in this category come into play when users of a website and/or web booking engine leave without completing a booking.  This may occur before starting a booking (referred to as browse abandonment) or after starting one but before completing it (booking abandonment). In the latter case, details such as dates, the size and makeup of the party (e.g. adults and children), and certain user characteristics (such as country, browser type, or device type) are typically available. Depending how far the user got in the booking process, they may have also provided other information such as name, email address, or phone number.

For browse abandonment, the techniques are somewhat limited. If the user leaves your site by opening a new tab (perhaps to look at another hotel or booking channel, or maybe because they got distracted by another task), tools like Cartstack can provide reminders as long as the user does not close the tab for your site. They can, for example, change the icon or name on the tab itself, and/or sound a chime. And if a user closes the tab without booking, they can pop up a window asking if the user wants to continue later (and collect their email address if they do). Then they can send an email with a link that can effectively re-establish their session where they left off.

Alternatively, popup windows can be generated when a user tries to exit, potentially offering a better deal to stimulate conversions; both Cartstack and 123compare.me supported this. The offer may be targeted at specific time periods, products, or customer profiles, or they may offer services that reduce the perceived price or risk (such as buy-now-pay-later, weather guarantees for a resort, or trip insurance).

Exit popups may also provide information such as parity rates or review summaries from several online sites, to help nudge the user to complete the booking rather than doing further research on other sites. Images and text may be personalized; for example, a family visiting a beach resort might see visuals of childrens’ activities, while a weekend couple gets the pictures of the romantic restaurant.

Attempts to recover booking abandonment can be more aggressive than for browser abandonment, and several of the companies I spoke with used similar techniques. Integration with the web booking engine (often quite simple) will enable them to capture whatever information the user has entered, even before the first form has been completed and submitted. I was told that once a user starts a booking, there is a roughly even chance that they will enter an email address prior to abandonment (and the probability can be maximized if the email is one of the first fields requested). Hotel Res Bot did not support this for web booking engines, but did offer a similar capability for chatbot conversations that did not result in bookings.

Even if the user does not get far enough to enter an email address, contact information may be available if they are logged in, or if they have provided it on a prior visit to the site and have not cleared cookies since.

For abandoned bookings, the tools will typically gather information entered on the booking engine related to the stay, such as the specific hotel, the dates, the size and composition of the party, the number of rooms, the room type, and the rate. The tools will then send an email to the user, which will minimally provide a link back to a prepopulated page in the booking engine where they can complete the booking. Some tools allow the hotel to sweeten the offer, based on demand, on characteristics of the booking party, or other factors. The follow-up email is triggered when the tool detects that a user started a booking but never reached the final confirmation page.

Vendors report high conversion rates on these efforts, although it is difficult to determine how many bookers would have returned to the site anyway, so not all of those conversions may be incremental. But common sense suggests that some will be.

Site Stickiness

The tools offered different capabilities to keep guests engaged on the site; the longer a guest spends on a site, the better the conversion (and also the better the site will be positioned by major search engines).

For resorts and other complex hotels, immersive digital experiences were key. Hotelverse, for example, produces digital twins that enable users to fly over the entire property, look at specific buildings or even rooms, and drill down to images and videos of key features such as pools or restaurants. You can see an example here; scroll down to the “Guarantee yourself the perfect room” section, enter some dates, activate the image, and click wherever you see an icon or a price.  If a user reaches the web booking engine first, then they see a dropdown option labeled “Reserve the room you want!”

Such approaches can be truly immersive, but they do require a lot of original content that either the vendor or the hotel will need to collect, and this can increase the cost. But for the right type of property (particularly large, sprawling resorts), properly implemented, conversion has reportedly improved by 30-60%, and time spent on site visits roughly doubles. That kind of result can easily justify the cost of collecting the content.

Stickiness is also increased by offering capabilities that users would otherwise have to leave the site to find. Three key widgets that do this are:

  • Showing comparable rates from third-party booking sites to provide assurance that the user is getting the best rate. These should preferably be shopped in real time rather than by caching periodic updates. Some hotels may also want to adjust their own quoted rate if it is above any of the third-party quotes (123compare.me can do this).
  • Showing a summary for ratings (or an AI-generated summary of actual reviews) from common review sites such as Google, Booking.com, and Tripadvisor. 123compare.me’s tool can filter and personalize ratings based on attributes of the user (for example, showing reviews for couples when the booking is for two adults over a weekend). Ideally the widget also supports drill-down to see individual reviews.
  • Maps. We all know that the three most important factors in selecting a hotel are location, location, and location. Yet how many sites force the user to exit to Google Maps to find out what the hotel is near. Unlike a custom map shown from the hotel site, Google Maps will also show other hotels that might be more conveniently located, increasing the likelihood of abandonment.

Personalization and Segmentation

Some booking engines, as well as third-party add-ons like 123compare.me, offer the ability to generate popups on the website or booking engine that can be used for targeted marketing campaigns. The hotel selects a template, modifies photos, fonts, text, size, and positioning, identifies a target audience (which may be based on the booking profile, need dates, or both), specifies when they should be displayed (for example, 20 seconds after the user lands on a page, or as they exit), and provides a call to action. As before, what a family on a week’s summer holiday sees might be totally different than a lone traveler on a weeknight in midwinter.

While this requires deeper booking engine integration, personalization and segmentation can also be applied to customize the selection and order of presentation of room types and rate plans. Expert opinions differ, but most agree that a small number (typically 5-10) of relevant choices is much better than dozens of irrelevant ones (if you really need more, you can include a “see more options” link at the bottom of the page).

The order matters as well; while it may be critical to have a parity offer matching OTA rates on the first screen, AI testing I have seen in various tools suggests that for most audiences, the first rate should be moderately higher than the parity, as that puts the user in a psychological state where higher rates are associated with higher value, not just higher cost.

Tools like Hotelverse take personalization to a new level by enabling the user to tour the hotel visually from the outside, pick the building that best meets their needs, see the rooms (and rates) for the different views based on side of the building or floor, view specific photos of rooms, and ultimately select the exact room that best meets their needs and preferences.

Arvoia is no longer around today, but was doing some very interesting things in this arena, with AI used to test various segmentation approaches and extensive A/B testing to optimize ordering. P3 told me that by putting a higher “anchor” rate first and the parity rate second or third, they increased the average booking value by 6%.

Hotel Res Bot uses a similar approach when creating a booking link to send in response to an email, web form, or chatbot booking request, filtering the offer based on both explicit and implicit requests by the guest as well as the hotel’s availability and selling strategy. They allow agents to review and approve the choice, but in most cases the agents accept the bot’s proposal.

Finally, personalization can be supported by attribute-based selling, by letting the customer select the specific room features they want. I covered that topic in detail about a year ago in a two-part series here and here, so I will not address that in detail today.

Operational Tools

Several tools help to automate or speed up repetitive manual tasks in reservations offices. These can both reduce the agent workload, help them convert more bookings, and free up agents to focus on higher value sales opportunities.

In some parts of the world (especially Europe, where small hotels dominate), manual reservation requests are still common. According to an exhaustive recent study authored by Prof. Roland Schegg, email accounts for 17% of European hotel bookings, web booking engines 11%, and contact-us forms on websites 6%. Tools like Hotel Res Bot can draft responses for emails and contact-us form requests and (depending on the specific situation) send them automatically if the hotel so wishes, or present them to an agent to approve or modify first.

Where bots can be trained to respond automatically for some use cases, they provide an additional conversion benefit in that they operate 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and can respond in a matter of seconds. Email and web requests that are not answered within a short period of time often lead to the guest booking a different hotel, or the same hotel but via a third-party channel. Speed matters.

At the same time, the bots are not experts; good agents are much better. Hotel Res Bot confirmed that in their experience (similar to hotels’ experience with chatbots), the best way to implement them is to make them a tool for the agents first, and then let them decide over time what the bots should be allowed to respond to autonomously. And if the bot’s response generates a nontrivial rejoinder from the user (like anything other than “thanks”), that response should almost always be routed to a person, as at least some portion of the time it will mean that the bot did not correctly understand or action the request.

Hotel Res Bot is also about to launch an automation tool for bill-to-company rates, which in Europe are very common and typically handled by an email request followed by a complex paper/scan/fax process today that can require a lot of tedious work (and paper files) at both the corporate travel department and the hotel reservation office. The product automates the response by sending a link that allows an authorized person at the company to approve the booking electronically.

When a tool creates a draft response for human review, integration with the tools that manage communications (such as Outlook, a Customer Relationship Management system, or a help-desk ticketing system) are important. Ideally the agent should be able to modify key fields (such as room type), with related fields (such as the associated rates or restrictions) automatically refreshed in the background. With the right integration, this can reduce the average response time from 2-3 minutes (or more) to a few seconds on many transactions.

Tools like this tend to be custom designed for hospitality rather than generic. Text requests for bookings (whether by email, contact-us form, or web chat) may have challenging combinations of key fields; for example, if a message contains four dates, do they represent two different stays for the same guest, different arrival and departure dates for guests who will have separate rooms, alternative dates in case one pair cannot be accommodated, or four different one-night stays where only the arrival dates were provided?

Additionally, such requests contain personally identifiable information, meaning that they cannot simply be fed into commercial AI tools such as ChatGPT without violating privacy regulations in many jurisdictions.

Conclusion

Hotels are most profitable when they can convert the most business, through the lowest-cost channels, with the least time and effort on the part of human agents. This week’s article has explored tools that support some or all of these objectives. If your hotel hasn’t looked at the category in the past few years, you should be asking yourself why not. They continue to get more powerful, and when applied properly to the right types of hotels, they can become cash machines.

Energage Names M3 a Winner of the 2024 Top Workplaces USA
M3 has announced it has earned the 2024 Top Workplaces USA award, issued by Energage, a purpose-driven organization that develops solutions to build and brand Top Workplaces.
www.m3as.com

Jonas Hospitality at the Forefront: Unifying Our Trusted Brands
The individual companies within Jonas Hospitality are known for their customer-centric technology and innovative approach to hotelier’s needs. We’re making the connection between our brands more visible to ensure that when you see the Jonas name, you know it’s a brand you can trust.
jonashospitality.com
 
Hotel Internet Services Achieves Best Place to Work Recognition for 2024 by Business Intelligence Group
Accomplishment demonstrates HIS' commitment to fostering a positive environment that boosts collaboration and service quality while driving increased innovation.
www.hotelwifi.com

Longhorn Hotel & Casino Elevates Staff and Guest Experiences, Integrates Hotel and Casino Operations and Improves Reporting Insights Using Agilysys Hospitality Software
Longhorn Hotel and Casino executives sought to replace the property’s outdated software technology with modern, state-of-the-art solutions that would help them capture a greater revenue share while also operating as a cost-effective “right fit” for their comparatively small property.
www.agilysys.com

Château Élan Resort and Winery Partners with Travel Outlook, The Premier Hotel Call Center to Use AI to Increase Bookings and Enhance Customer Satisfaction
Travel Outlook converts up to 70% of the qualified reservation calls  it receives to revenue for the hotel.
traveloutlook.com
 
Remington Hospitality Expands Partnership with Amadeus to Include Demand360+
In addition to its current use of Amadeus solutions such as Delphi®, HotSOS®, Agency360+®, and Travel Seller Media, the hotel management company has now signed on for Demand360+®.
www.amadeus-hospitality.com

Amadeus and Duetto Expand Collaboration
The evolution will provide Duetto customers with seamless access to data from Amadeus' Demand360+® and RevenueStrategy360+® solutions directly within the Duetto platform, enabling hoteliers to make smarter, data-driven decisions to optimize their business.
www.amadeus-hospitality.com

IRIS Mobile Ordering Selected by Kimpton Overland Hotel Atlanta Airport to Revolutionize the Room Service Experience
The luxury hotel, part of IHG, deploys  IRIS' mobile ordering  to enhance the guest experience, boost F&B revenue and streamline processes.
www.iris.net

Newport Hospitality Group Successfully Transitions 22 Properties to STS Cloud Sales and Catering Solution
Upgrade to a cloud-based solution brings operational efficiency and optimizes group sales across a diverse portfolio of hotels for award-winning hotel management company
speed group sales
 
SalesAndCatering.com Launches New Data Intelligence Suite for STS Cloud
Single and multi-property operators speed group sales, drive revenue with actionable intelligence and insightful visualizations to address performance, trends, pipeline gaps and hit forecasts.
speed group sales

Otelier Launches Rec: The Automated Financial Reconciliation Tool to Drive Profits
Otelier Rec, a software tool that can automate reconciliation workflows to save hotels thousands of dollars per month, is the newest addition to Otelier's unified performance optimization platform.
otelier.io

VENZA Releases New Explore Security Testing Program
VENZA, a leading provider of data protection and regulatory compliance solutions for the hospitality industry, today announced the release of its new program for comprehensive security testing—Explore. Offering both on-property, in-person assessments and an expanded range of remote evaluations, Explore provides a uniquely comprehensive set of tools for hoteliers to address complex, multifaceted threats and establish an unparalleled defense.
www.venzagroup.co

HSMAI Announces New Commercial Strategy Conference
Commercial Strategy Conference — the evolution of HSMAI’s Marketing Strategy Conference and HSMAI ROC — take place in Charlotte, North Carolina from June 25-26, 2024 at the Charlotte Convention Center.
global.hsmai.org
 
UrVenue Showcases Latest Venue Management Technology at the 2024 Bar & Restaurant Expo
The company’s full-stack hospitality technology platform was purpose-built for individual lifestyle venues, including bars, lounges, nightclubs, dayclubs and mixed-use, eatertainment venues with multiple experiences.
www.urvenue.com
 
Industry-Leading Finance Technology to Be on Display at ‘Hunter Hotel Investment Conference’
As a Silver Sponsor, Aptech will showcase the latest in enterprise accounting, business intelligence, and budgeting/forecasting automation in Booth #812.
www.aptech-inc.com  


Registration Is Now Open for The Hospitality Show October 28 – 30, 2024
The Hospitality Show, produced by Questex and The American Hotel & Lodging Association (AHLA), announces today that registration is open for the second annual event, which will be held October 28-30, 2024 at The Henry B. González Convention Center in San Antonio, TX.
www.thehospitalityshow.com
 
SpaSoft to Showcase New Enhancements at ISPA Phoenix
The SpaSoft team is heading to Phoenix April 23-25, 2024, for the ISPA Conference. SpaSoft has been a leader in innovation in the spa, wellness, and hospitality industries for over 20 years, and 2024 is no exception.
jonashospitality.com

US Solar Eclipse Hotel Occupancy Increases by Another 10 Percent
Over the past few months, Amadeus has been tracking the impact of the eclipse on hotel booking patterns across America using forward-looking business intelligence data from Demand360+®.
www.amadeus-hospitality.com
 
Knowland Reports Tampa-St. Petersburg Florida Market Sees 20 Percent Year-Over-Year Growth in February
National associations and technology groups lead in four out of five markets.
www.knowland.com

In the last edition of Siegel Sez, I wrote about my experience at ITB in Berlin. What a great event, though walking a million miles on a replaced knee was not my smartest move. It was well worth the effort for such an amazing experience, but I have been paying the price.

Yes, there are so many events to choose from today to attend. Of course, HITEC is at the top of the list and now that The Hospitality Show will take place in October, it will be easier to attend both of these important industry events - Hospitality Upgrade will be at both! Geneva and Kim from our team just attended the Hunter Hotel Investment Conference in Atlanta this week, and we will be at The Lodging Conference in Phoenix too, along with many other shows.

Because of my background as a hotelier and then working for a PMS company, my favorite events to attend will always be Users Groups. I just love interacting with those who use the technologies we write about. I thank Agilysys for inviting me to their Users Group called Inspire24 this week in Las Vegas. They had more than 500 attendees, fun social events and a great general session that truly amazed me. Of course reconnecting with people also happens and the photo is my catching up with Barbara Jablons, who I met many years ago when she was with Hyatt. The real purpose of a Users Group is learning about the products and interacting with fellow users to learn from each other. I loved when I worked for a PMS company and organized User Groups, bringing people together has always been my favorite thing to do. Again, I thank Agilysys for inviting me. Next month I will attend both the Oracle and Maestro User Groups in Orlando and Toronto respectively. Can’t wait!

Doug Rice in his Definitely Doug column that follows does a great job enlightening us to something that drives hoteliers crazy. Hoteliers want potential guests to book direct, but so many start there and then move to a third-party site like OTAs, never finishing the booking they started, costing the hotel money. Can this be avoided? There are now technological solutions to help with this, and they are pretty amazing. Take a few minutes to read Definitely Doug and learn what can be done to keep those who start on your site from going somewhere else. A very interesting read and we thank Doug for a great column again this week!

Wish us luck next week in Denver at our 19th annual Executive Vendor Summit. We will be hosting a great crowd, and we threw quite a bit of creativity into the mix this year. We have some great sessions scheduled, including a cyber security session with the FBI that will be amazing. If you’d like to check out the 2024 EVS program you can find it here or follow us next week on LinkedIn.

We have a panel of money people sharing insight on why they do (and more importantly why they don’t) invest in technology for the hotel industry. If what I’ve learned from them in the past month is any indication, this will be an eye-opening experience.  We thank all of the many CEOs, Presidents and other executives from the vendor community for joining us this year along with quite a few tech leaders from the hotel side of the fence. There will be no snow in Denver next week, what else could one ask for!

Here now is Definitely Doug along with the latest industry technology news. I will see you at the end with this week’s attempt at you-know-what. In case you are curious, the University of Illinois is going to win March Madness this year. You heard it here first!

Rich

rich@hospitalityupgrade.com

Definitely Doug 3/22/24: More Sales, Less Cost. What’s Not to Like?

Most hoteliers want guests to book through direct channels rather than through third-parties such as Online Travel Agencies (OTAs). Loyalty programs, member-only rates, and search-engine advertising have commanded increasing shares of the marketing budget of many hotels trying to achieve this objective.

But surprisingly few hotels have focused on the blocking and tackling of guest engagement with direct channels, and that will be my topic this week. I refer to techniques that:

  • Increase the conversion rate by keeping visitors on your website or in your booking engine rather than looking elsewhere
  • Tailor product offerings to better appeal to each visitor
  • Focus visitors on higher-value offerings as opposed to lowest price, and
  • Bring them back to your website after they leave.

I will also include some tools that enable hotel reservations offices to automate routine operations so that agents can spend more time on sale opportunities where they can make a difference. Some of these can also improve conversion rate by enabling agents to respond to written requests much faster.

Much has been written elsewhere about website chatbots, and my last blog addressed opportunities with artificial-intelligence (AI) powered contact center technologies. However, this week I will focus on several other solutions that hotels and resorts are using successfully, but that are not yet mainstream. Some of these are simple and relatively inexpensive, while others are powerful and may make financial sense mostly for certain types of properties. Most of the capabilities can be incorporated into existing booking engines and (in some cases) other reservations software such as chatbots or back-office reservations operations.

Conversion rate and the direct-booking ratio are tightly intertwined. When your website or mobile app has the chance to make a sale but fails to do so, then the customer either chose a different hotel, or booked your hotel but on a different site.  You may or may not have had any real chance to convert the customer who ended up choosing a different hotel (that depends on the reason they chose it), but abandonment of the hotel booking site for a third-party channel is often preventable.

There are hundreds of hotel booking engines in the market, a few of which provide some of the capabilities I will cover here. But most do not, or offer only limited subsets. I have therefore focused on companies whose capabilities can be plugged into any of the common booking engines. This means they will be viable options for most hotels and groups. And because products like this tend to be laser-focused on doing a few things really well, they are therefore more likely to have developed and incorporated best practices. If your current solution includes some of these capabilities, you can use this material to help evaluate its feature set.

Most hoteliers want guests to book through direct channels rather than through third-parties such as Online Travel Agencies (OTAs). Loyalty programs, member-only rates, and search-engine advertising have commanded increasing shares of the marketing budget of many hotels trying to achieve this objective.

But surprisingly few hotels have focused on the blocking and tackling of guest engagement with direct channels, and that will be my topic this week. I refer to techniques that:

  • Increase the conversion rate by keeping visitors on your website or in your booking engine rather than looking elsewhere
  • Tailor product offerings to better appeal to each visitor
  • Focus visitors on higher-value offerings as opposed to lowest price, and
  • Bring them back to your website after they leave.

I will also include some tools that enable hotel reservations offices to automate routine operations so that agents can spend more time on sale opportunities where they can make a difference. Some of these can also improve conversion rate by enabling agents to respond to written requests much faster.

Much has been written elsewhere about website chatbots, and my last blog addressed opportunities with artificial-intelligence (AI) powered contact center technologies. However, this week I will focus on several other solutions that hotels and resorts are using successfully, but that are not yet mainstream. Some of these are simple and relatively inexpensive, while others are powerful and may make financial sense mostly for certain types of properties. Most of the capabilities can be incorporated into existing booking engines and (in some cases) other reservations software such as chatbots or back-office reservations operations.

Conversion rate and the direct-booking ratio are tightly intertwined. When your website or mobile app has the chance to make a sale but fails to do so, then the customer either chose a different hotel, or booked your hotel but on a different site.  You may or may not have had any real chance to convert the customer who ended up choosing a different hotel (that depends on the reason they chose it), but abandonment of the hotel booking site for a third-party channel is often preventable.

There are hundreds of hotel booking engines in the market, a few of which provide some of the capabilities I will cover here. But most do not, or offer only limited subsets. I have therefore focused on companies whose capabilities can be plugged into any of the common booking engines. This means they will be viable options for most hotels and groups. And because products like this tend to be laser-focused on doing a few things really well, they are therefore more likely to have developed and incorporated best practices. If your current solution includes some of these capabilities, you can use this material to help evaluate its feature set.

Senior executives from several innovative companies were instrumental to my research for this article. I want to thank those from Cartstack, Hotel Res Bot, Hotelverse, and 123compare.me.

I also got some great material from P3, which does not offer any tools independently of their own booking engine, but which was the lone customer I could find of some interesting technology previously offered by Arvoia that is no longer available on the market. The lessons were still very useful; P3’s conversion and upselling success using even just the earliest capabilities of Arvoia’s technology has left them wanting more (and unable to find it). The technology worked even if the company did not. Perhaps someone will fill that gap?

All but one of the companies included this week are based in Europe. The more fragmented booking landscape in Europe creates more opportunities for innovative products than many other markets, and especially North America. Europe’s proliferation of independent hotels has encouraged vendors to try new approaches that may be rejected as too costly or disruptive by major brands that would need to shoehorn them into legacy systems. That is a barrier to the commercial success of products targeting the brand-dominated North American market.

For easier reading, I have divided the tools into categories based on the specific issues they address, but there is overlap and any such division is going to be imperfect. I have mentioned vendors who showed me or discussed specific capabilities, but that does not mean that other products (whether mentioned here or not) do not offer similar capabilities.

Reengagement and Cart Recovery

Tools in this category come into play when users of a website and/or web booking engine leave without completing a booking.  This may occur before starting a booking (referred to as browse abandonment) or after starting one but before completing it (booking abandonment). In the latter case, details such as dates, the size and makeup of the party (e.g. adults and children), and certain user characteristics (such as country, browser type, or device type) are typically available. Depending how far the user got in the booking process, they may have also provided other information such as name, email address, or phone number.

For browse abandonment, the techniques are somewhat limited. If the user leaves your site by opening a new tab (perhaps to look at another hotel or booking channel, or maybe because they got distracted by another task), tools like Cartstack can provide reminders as long as the user does not close the tab for your site. They can, for example, change the icon or name on the tab itself, and/or sound a chime. And if a user closes the tab without booking, they can pop up a window asking if the user wants to continue later (and collect their email address if they do). Then they can send an email with a link that can effectively re-establish their session where they left off.

Alternatively, popup windows can be generated when a user tries to exit, potentially offering a better deal to stimulate conversions; both Cartstack and 123compare.me supported this. The offer may be targeted at specific time periods, products, or customer profiles, or they may offer services that reduce the perceived price or risk (such as buy-now-pay-later, weather guarantees for a resort, or trip insurance).

Exit popups may also provide information such as parity rates or review summaries from several online sites, to help nudge the user to complete the booking rather than doing further research on other sites. Images and text may be personalized; for example, a family visiting a beach resort might see visuals of childrens’ activities, while a weekend couple gets the pictures of the romantic restaurant.

Attempts to recover booking abandonment can be more aggressive than for browser abandonment, and several of the companies I spoke with used similar techniques. Integration with the web booking engine (often quite simple) will enable them to capture whatever information the user has entered, even before the first form has been completed and submitted. I was told that once a user starts a booking, there is a roughly even chance that they will enter an email address prior to abandonment (and the probability can be maximized if the email is one of the first fields requested). Hotel Res Bot did not support this for web booking engines, but did offer a similar capability for chatbot conversations that did not result in bookings.

Even if the user does not get far enough to enter an email address, contact information may be available if they are logged in, or if they have provided it on a prior visit to the site and have not cleared cookies since.

For abandoned bookings, the tools will typically gather information entered on the booking engine related to the stay, such as the specific hotel, the dates, the size and composition of the party, the number of rooms, the room type, and the rate. The tools will then send an email to the user, which will minimally provide a link back to a prepopulated page in the booking engine where they can complete the booking. Some tools allow the hotel to sweeten the offer, based on demand, on characteristics of the booking party, or other factors. The follow-up email is triggered when the tool detects that a user started a booking but never reached the final confirmation page.

Vendors report high conversion rates on these efforts, although it is difficult to determine how many bookers would have returned to the site anyway, so not all of those conversions may be incremental. But common sense suggests that some will be.

Site Stickiness

The tools offered different capabilities to keep guests engaged on the site; the longer a guest spends on a site, the better the conversion (and also the better the site will be positioned by major search engines).

For resorts and other complex hotels, immersive digital experiences were key. Hotelverse, for example, produces digital twins that enable users to fly over the entire property, look at specific buildings or even rooms, and drill down to images and videos of key features such as pools or restaurants. You can see an example here; scroll down to the “Guarantee yourself the perfect room” section, enter some dates, activate the image, and click wherever you see an icon or a price.  If a user reaches the web booking engine first, then they see a dropdown option labeled “Reserve the room you want!”

Such approaches can be truly immersive, but they do require a lot of original content that either the vendor or the hotel will need to collect, and this can increase the cost. But for the right type of property (particularly large, sprawling resorts), properly implemented, conversion has reportedly improved by 30-60%, and time spent on site visits roughly doubles. That kind of result can easily justify the cost of collecting the content.

Stickiness is also increased by offering capabilities that users would otherwise have to leave the site to find. Three key widgets that do this are:

  • Showing comparable rates from third-party booking sites to provide assurance that the user is getting the best rate. These should preferably be shopped in real time rather than by caching periodic updates. Some hotels may also want to adjust their own quoted rate if it is above any of the third-party quotes (123compare.me can do this).
  • Showing a summary for ratings (or an AI-generated summary of actual reviews) from common review sites such as Google, Booking.com, and Tripadvisor. 123compare.me’s tool can filter and personalize ratings based on attributes of the user (for example, showing reviews for couples when the booking is for two adults over a weekend). Ideally the widget also supports drill-down to see individual reviews.
  • Maps. We all know that the three most important factors in selecting a hotel are location, location, and location. Yet how many sites force the user to exit to Google Maps to find out what the hotel is near. Unlike a custom map shown from the hotel site, Google Maps will also show other hotels that might be more conveniently located, increasing the likelihood of abandonment.

Personalization and Segmentation

Some booking engines, as well as third-party add-ons like 123compare.me, offer the ability to generate popups on the website or booking engine that can be used for targeted marketing campaigns. The hotel selects a template, modifies photos, fonts, text, size, and positioning, identifies a target audience (which may be based on the booking profile, need dates, or both), specifies when they should be displayed (for example, 20 seconds after the user lands on a page, or as they exit), and provides a call to action. As before, what a family on a week’s summer holiday sees might be totally different than a lone traveler on a weeknight in midwinter.

While this requires deeper booking engine integration, personalization and segmentation can also be applied to customize the selection and order of presentation of room types and rate plans. Expert opinions differ, but most agree that a small number (typically 5-10) of relevant choices is much better than dozens of irrelevant ones (if you really need more, you can include a “see more options” link at the bottom of the page).

The order matters as well; while it may be critical to have a parity offer matching OTA rates on the first screen, AI testing I have seen in various tools suggests that for most audiences, the first rate should be moderately higher than the parity, as that puts the user in a psychological state where higher rates are associated with higher value, not just higher cost.

Tools like Hotelverse take personalization to a new level by enabling the user to tour the hotel visually from the outside, pick the building that best meets their needs, see the rooms (and rates) for the different views based on side of the building or floor, view specific photos of rooms, and ultimately select the exact room that best meets their needs and preferences.

Arvoia is no longer around today, but was doing some very interesting things in this arena, with AI used to test various segmentation approaches and extensive A/B testing to optimize ordering. P3 told me that by putting a higher “anchor” rate first and the parity rate second or third, they increased the average booking value by 6%.

Hotel Res Bot uses a similar approach when creating a booking link to send in response to an email, web form, or chatbot booking request, filtering the offer based on both explicit and implicit requests by the guest as well as the hotel’s availability and selling strategy. They allow agents to review and approve the choice, but in most cases the agents accept the bot’s proposal.

Finally, personalization can be supported by attribute-based selling, by letting the customer select the specific room features they want. I covered that topic in detail about a year ago in a two-part series here and here, so I will not address that in detail today.

Operational Tools

Several tools help to automate or speed up repetitive manual tasks in reservations offices. These can both reduce the agent workload, help them convert more bookings, and free up agents to focus on higher value sales opportunities.

In some parts of the world (especially Europe, where small hotels dominate), manual reservation requests are still common. According to an exhaustive recent study authored by Prof. Roland Schegg, email accounts for 17% of European hotel bookings, web booking engines 11%, and contact-us forms on websites 6%. Tools like Hotel Res Bot can draft responses for emails and contact-us form requests and (depending on the specific situation) send them automatically if the hotel so wishes, or present them to an agent to approve or modify first.

Where bots can be trained to respond automatically for some use cases, they provide an additional conversion benefit in that they operate 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and can respond in a matter of seconds. Email and web requests that are not answered within a short period of time often lead to the guest booking a different hotel, or the same hotel but via a third-party channel. Speed matters.

At the same time, the bots are not experts; good agents are much better. Hotel Res Bot confirmed that in their experience (similar to hotels’ experience with chatbots), the best way to implement them is to make them a tool for the agents first, and then let them decide over time what the bots should be allowed to respond to autonomously. And if the bot’s response generates a nontrivial rejoinder from the user (like anything other than “thanks”), that response should almost always be routed to a person, as at least some portion of the time it will mean that the bot did not correctly understand or action the request.

Hotel Res Bot is also about to launch an automation tool for bill-to-company rates, which in Europe are very common and typically handled by an email request followed by a complex paper/scan/fax process today that can require a lot of tedious work (and paper files) at both the corporate travel department and the hotel reservation office. The product automates the response by sending a link that allows an authorized person at the company to approve the booking electronically.

When a tool creates a draft response for human review, integration with the tools that manage communications (such as Outlook, a Customer Relationship Management system, or a help-desk ticketing system) are important. Ideally the agent should be able to modify key fields (such as room type), with related fields (such as the associated rates or restrictions) automatically refreshed in the background. With the right integration, this can reduce the average response time from 2-3 minutes (or more) to a few seconds on many transactions.

Tools like this tend to be custom designed for hospitality rather than generic. Text requests for bookings (whether by email, contact-us form, or web chat) may have challenging combinations of key fields; for example, if a message contains four dates, do they represent two different stays for the same guest, different arrival and departure dates for guests who will have separate rooms, alternative dates in case one pair cannot be accommodated, or four different one-night stays where only the arrival dates were provided?

Additionally, such requests contain personally identifiable information, meaning that they cannot simply be fed into commercial AI tools such as ChatGPT without violating privacy regulations in many jurisdictions.

Conclusion

Hotels are most profitable when they can convert the most business, through the lowest-cost channels, with the least time and effort on the part of human agents. This week’s article has explored tools that support some or all of these objectives. If your hotel hasn’t looked at the category in the past few years, you should be asking yourself why not. They continue to get more powerful, and when applied properly to the right types of hotels, they can become cash machines.

CORPORATE NEWS

Energage Names M3 a Winner of the 2024 Top Workplaces USA
M3 has announced it has earned the 2024 Top Workplaces USA award, issued by Energage, a purpose-driven organization that develops solutions to build and brand Top Workplaces.
www.m3as.com

Jonas Hospitality at the Forefront: Unifying Our Trusted Brands
The individual companies within Jonas Hospitality are known for their customer-centric technology and innovative approach to hotelier’s needs. We’re making the connection between our brands more visible to ensure that when you see the Jonas name, you know it’s a brand you can trust.
jonashospitality.com
 
Hotel Internet Services Achieves Best Place to Work Recognition for 2024 by Business Intelligence Group
Accomplishment demonstrates HIS' commitment to fostering a positive environment that boosts collaboration and service quality while driving increased innovation.
www.hotelwifi.com

GUEST MANAGEMENT SYSTEMS

Longhorn Hotel & Casino Elevates Staff and Guest Experiences, Integrates Hotel and Casino Operations and Improves Reporting Insights Using Agilysys Hospitality Software
Longhorn Hotel and Casino executives sought to replace the property’s outdated software technology with modern, state-of-the-art solutions that would help them capture a greater revenue share while also operating as a cost-effective “right fit” for their comparatively small property.
www.agilysys.com

RESERVATIONS & DISTRIBUTION

Château Élan Resort and Winery Partners with Travel Outlook, The Premier Hotel Call Center to Use AI to Increase Bookings and Enhance Customer Satisfaction
Travel Outlook converts up to 70% of the qualified reservation calls  it receives to revenue for the hotel.
traveloutlook.com
 
Remington Hospitality Expands Partnership with Amadeus to Include Demand360+
In addition to its current use of Amadeus solutions such as Delphi®, HotSOS®, Agency360+®, and Travel Seller Media, the hotel management company has now signed on for Demand360+®.
www.amadeus-hospitality.com

REVENUE MANAGEMENT & ANALYTICS

Amadeus and Duetto Expand Collaboration
The evolution will provide Duetto customers with seamless access to data from Amadeus' Demand360+® and RevenueStrategy360+® solutions directly within the Duetto platform, enabling hoteliers to make smarter, data-driven decisions to optimize their business.
www.amadeus-hospitality.com

GUEST FACING TECHNOLOGY

IRIS Mobile Ordering Selected by Kimpton Overland Hotel Atlanta Airport to Revolutionize the Room Service Experience
The luxury hotel, part of IHG, deploys  IRIS' mobile ordering  to enhance the guest experience, boost F&B revenue and streamline processes.
www.iris.net

SALES & CATERING, GROUPS & MEETINGS

Newport Hospitality Group Successfully Transitions 22 Properties to STS Cloud Sales and Catering Solution
Upgrade to a cloud-based solution brings operational efficiency and optimizes group sales across a diverse portfolio of hotels for award-winning hotel management company
speed group sales
 
SalesAndCatering.com Launches New Data Intelligence Suite for STS Cloud
Single and multi-property operators speed group sales, drive revenue with actionable intelligence and insightful visualizations to address performance, trends, pipeline gaps and hit forecasts.
speed group sales

BACK OFFICE

Otelier Launches Rec: The Automated Financial Reconciliation Tool to Drive Profits
Otelier Rec, a software tool that can automate reconciliation workflows to save hotels thousands of dollars per month, is the newest addition to Otelier's unified performance optimization platform.
otelier.io

SECURITY

VENZA Releases New Explore Security Testing Program
VENZA, a leading provider of data protection and regulatory compliance solutions for the hospitality industry, today announced the release of its new program for comprehensive security testing—Explore. Offering both on-property, in-person assessments and an expanded range of remote evaluations, Explore provides a uniquely comprehensive set of tools for hoteliers to address complex, multifaceted threats and establish an unparalleled defense.
www.venzagroup.co

HOSPITALITY EVENTS & ASSOCIATION NEWS

HSMAI Announces New Commercial Strategy Conference
Commercial Strategy Conference — the evolution of HSMAI’s Marketing Strategy Conference and HSMAI ROC — take place in Charlotte, North Carolina from June 25-26, 2024 at the Charlotte Convention Center.
global.hsmai.org
 
UrVenue Showcases Latest Venue Management Technology at the 2024 Bar & Restaurant Expo
The company’s full-stack hospitality technology platform was purpose-built for individual lifestyle venues, including bars, lounges, nightclubs, dayclubs and mixed-use, eatertainment venues with multiple experiences.
www.urvenue.com
 
Industry-Leading Finance Technology to Be on Display at ‘Hunter Hotel Investment Conference’
As a Silver Sponsor, Aptech will showcase the latest in enterprise accounting, business intelligence, and budgeting/forecasting automation in Booth #812.
www.aptech-inc.com  


Registration Is Now Open for The Hospitality Show October 28 – 30, 2024
The Hospitality Show, produced by Questex and The American Hotel & Lodging Association (AHLA), announces today that registration is open for the second annual event, which will be held October 28-30, 2024 at The Henry B. González Convention Center in San Antonio, TX.
www.thehospitalityshow.com
 
SpaSoft to Showcase New Enhancements at ISPA Phoenix
The SpaSoft team is heading to Phoenix April 23-25, 2024, for the ISPA Conference. SpaSoft has been a leader in innovation in the spa, wellness, and hospitality industries for over 20 years, and 2024 is no exception.
jonashospitality.com

MARKET REPORTS

US Solar Eclipse Hotel Occupancy Increases by Another 10 Percent
Over the past few months, Amadeus has been tracking the impact of the eclipse on hotel booking patterns across America using forward-looking business intelligence data from Demand360+®.
www.amadeus-hospitality.com
 
Knowland Reports Tampa-St. Petersburg Florida Market Sees 20 Percent Year-Over-Year Growth in February
National associations and technology groups lead in four out of five markets.
www.knowland.com

In the last edition of Siegel Sez, I wrote about my experience at ITB in Berlin. What a great event, though walking a million miles on a replaced knee was not my smartest move. It was well worth the effort for such an amazing experience, but I have been paying the price.

Yes, there are so many events to choose from today to attend. Of course, HITEC is at the top of the list and now that The Hospitality Show will take place in October, it will be easier to attend both of these important industry events - Hospitality Upgrade will be at both! Geneva and Kim from our team just attended the Hunter Hotel Investment Conference in Atlanta this week, and we will be at The Lodging Conference in Phoenix too, along with many other shows.

Because of my background as a hotelier and then working for a PMS company, my favorite events to attend will always be Users Groups. I just love interacting with those who use the technologies we write about. I thank Agilysys for inviting me to their Users Group called Inspire24 this week in Las Vegas. They had more than 500 attendees, fun social events and a great general session that truly amazed me. Of course reconnecting with people also happens and the photo is my catching up with Barbara Jablons, who I met many years ago when she was with Hyatt. The real purpose of a Users Group is learning about the products and interacting with fellow users to learn from each other. I loved when I worked for a PMS company and organized User Groups, bringing people together has always been my favorite thing to do. Again, I thank Agilysys for inviting me. Next month I will attend both the Oracle and Maestro User Groups in Orlando and Toronto respectively. Can’t wait!

Doug Rice in his Definitely Doug column that follows does a great job enlightening us to something that drives hoteliers crazy. Hoteliers want potential guests to book direct, but so many start there and then move to a third-party site like OTAs, never finishing the booking they started, costing the hotel money. Can this be avoided? There are now technological solutions to help with this, and they are pretty amazing. Take a few minutes to read Definitely Doug and learn what can be done to keep those who start on your site from going somewhere else. A very interesting read and we thank Doug for a great column again this week!

Wish us luck next week in Denver at our 19th annual Executive Vendor Summit. We will be hosting a great crowd, and we threw quite a bit of creativity into the mix this year. We have some great sessions scheduled, including a cyber security session with the FBI that will be amazing. If you’d like to check out the 2024 EVS program you can find it here or follow us next week on LinkedIn.

We have a panel of money people sharing insight on why they do (and more importantly why they don’t) invest in technology for the hotel industry. If what I’ve learned from them in the past month is any indication, this will be an eye-opening experience.  We thank all of the many CEOs, Presidents and other executives from the vendor community for joining us this year along with quite a few tech leaders from the hotel side of the fence. There will be no snow in Denver next week, what else could one ask for!

Here now is Definitely Doug along with the latest industry technology news. I will see you at the end with this week’s attempt at you-know-what. In case you are curious, the University of Illinois is going to win March Madness this year. You heard it here first!

Rich

rich@hospitalityupgrade.com

Siegel Sez 3/22/24

In the last edition of Siegel Sez, I wrote about my experience at ITB in Berlin. What a great event, though walking a million miles on a replaced knee was not my smartest move. It was well worth the effort for such an amazing experience, but I have been paying the price.

Yes, there are so many events to choose from today to attend. Of course, HITEC is at the top of the list and now that The Hospitality Show will take place in October, it will be easier to attend both of these important industry events - Hospitality Upgrade will be at both! Geneva and Kim from our team just attended the Hunter Hotel Investment Conference in Atlanta this week, and we will be at The Lodging Conference in Phoenix too, along with many other shows.

Because of my background as a hotelier and then working for a PMS company, my favorite events to attend will always be Users Groups. I just love interacting with those who use the technologies we write about. I thank Agilysys for inviting me to their Users Group called Inspire24 this week in Las Vegas. They had more than 500 attendees, fun social events and a great general session that truly amazed me. Of course reconnecting with people also happens and the photo is my catching up with Barbara Jablons, who I met many years ago when she was with Hyatt. The real purpose of a Users Group is learning about the products and interacting with fellow users to learn from each other. I loved when I worked for a PMS company and organized User Groups, bringing people together has always been my favorite thing to do. Again, I thank Agilysys for inviting me. Next month I will attend both the Oracle and Maestro User Groups in Orlando and Toronto respectively. Can’t wait!

Doug Rice in his Definitely Doug column that follows does a great job enlightening us to something that drives hoteliers crazy. Hoteliers want potential guests to book direct, but so many start there and then move to a third-party site like OTAs, never finishing the booking they started, costing the hotel money. Can this be avoided? There are now technological solutions to help with this, and they are pretty amazing. Take a few minutes to read Definitely Doug and learn what can be done to keep those who start on your site from going somewhere else. A very interesting read and we thank Doug for a great column again this week!

Wish us luck next week in Denver at our 19th annual Executive Vendor Summit. We will be hosting a great crowd, and we threw quite a bit of creativity into the mix this year. We have some great sessions scheduled, including a cyber security session with the FBI that will be amazing. If you’d like to check out the 2024 EVS program you can find it here or follow us next week on LinkedIn.

We have a panel of money people sharing insight on why they do (and more importantly why they don’t) invest in technology for the hotel industry. If what I’ve learned from them in the past month is any indication, this will be an eye-opening experience.  We thank all of the many CEOs, Presidents and other executives from the vendor community for joining us this year along with quite a few tech leaders from the hotel side of the fence. There will be no snow in Denver next week, what else could one ask for!

Here now is Definitely Doug along with the latest industry technology news. I will see you at the end with this week’s attempt at you-know-what. In case you are curious, the University of Illinois is going to win March Madness this year. You heard it here first!

Rich

rich@hospitalityupgrade.com

Definitely Doug 3/22/24: More Sales, Less Cost. What’s Not to Like?

Most hoteliers want guests to book through direct channels rather than through third-parties such as Online Travel Agencies (OTAs). Loyalty programs, member-only rates, and search-engine advertising have commanded increasing shares of the marketing budget of many hotels trying to achieve this objective.

But surprisingly few hotels have focused on the blocking and tackling of guest engagement with direct channels, and that will be my topic this week. I refer to techniques that:

  • Increase the conversion rate by keeping visitors on your website or in your booking engine rather than looking elsewhere
  • Tailor product offerings to better appeal to each visitor
  • Focus visitors on higher-value offerings as opposed to lowest price, and
  • Bring them back to your website after they leave.

I will also include some tools that enable hotel reservations offices to automate routine operations so that agents can spend more time on sale opportunities where they can make a difference. Some of these can also improve conversion rate by enabling agents to respond to written requests much faster.

Much has been written elsewhere about website chatbots, and my last blog addressed opportunities with artificial-intelligence (AI) powered contact center technologies. However, this week I will focus on several other solutions that hotels and resorts are using successfully, but that are not yet mainstream. Some of these are simple and relatively inexpensive, while others are powerful and may make financial sense mostly for certain types of properties. Most of the capabilities can be incorporated into existing booking engines and (in some cases) other reservations software such as chatbots or back-office reservations operations.

Conversion rate and the direct-booking ratio are tightly intertwined. When your website or mobile app has the chance to make a sale but fails to do so, then the customer either chose a different hotel, or booked your hotel but on a different site.  You may or may not have had any real chance to convert the customer who ended up choosing a different hotel (that depends on the reason they chose it), but abandonment of the hotel booking site for a third-party channel is often preventable.

There are hundreds of hotel booking engines in the market, a few of which provide some of the capabilities I will cover here. But most do not, or offer only limited subsets. I have therefore focused on companies whose capabilities can be plugged into any of the common booking engines. This means they will be viable options for most hotels and groups. And because products like this tend to be laser-focused on doing a few things really well, they are therefore more likely to have developed and incorporated best practices. If your current solution includes some of these capabilities, you can use this material to help evaluate its feature set.

CORPORATE NEWS

Energage Names M3 a Winner of the 2024 Top Workplaces USA
M3 has announced it has earned the 2024 Top Workplaces USA award, issued by Energage, a purpose-driven organization that develops solutions to build and brand Top Workplaces.
www.m3as.com

Jonas Hospitality at the Forefront: Unifying Our Trusted Brands
The individual companies within Jonas Hospitality are known for their customer-centric technology and innovative approach to hotelier’s needs. We’re making the connection between our brands more visible to ensure that when you see the Jonas name, you know it’s a brand you can trust.
jonashospitality.com
 
Hotel Internet Services Achieves Best Place to Work Recognition for 2024 by Business Intelligence Group
Accomplishment demonstrates HIS' commitment to fostering a positive environment that boosts collaboration and service quality while driving increased innovation.
www.hotelwifi.com

GUEST MANAGEMENT SYSTEMS

Longhorn Hotel & Casino Elevates Staff and Guest Experiences, Integrates Hotel and Casino Operations and Improves Reporting Insights Using Agilysys Hospitality Software
Longhorn Hotel and Casino executives sought to replace the property’s outdated software technology with modern, state-of-the-art solutions that would help them capture a greater revenue share while also operating as a cost-effective “right fit” for their comparatively small property.
www.agilysys.com

RESERVATIONS & DISTRIBUTION

Château Élan Resort and Winery Partners with Travel Outlook, The Premier Hotel Call Center to Use AI to Increase Bookings and Enhance Customer Satisfaction
Travel Outlook converts up to 70% of the qualified reservation calls  it receives to revenue for the hotel.
traveloutlook.com
 
Remington Hospitality Expands Partnership with Amadeus to Include Demand360+
In addition to its current use of Amadeus solutions such as Delphi®, HotSOS®, Agency360+®, and Travel Seller Media, the hotel management company has now signed on for Demand360+®.
www.amadeus-hospitality.com

REVENUE MANAGEMENT & ANALYTICS

Amadeus and Duetto Expand Collaboration
The evolution will provide Duetto customers with seamless access to data from Amadeus' Demand360+® and RevenueStrategy360+® solutions directly within the Duetto platform, enabling hoteliers to make smarter, data-driven decisions to optimize their business.
www.amadeus-hospitality.com

GUEST FACING TECHNOLOGY

IRIS Mobile Ordering Selected by Kimpton Overland Hotel Atlanta Airport to Revolutionize the Room Service Experience
The luxury hotel, part of IHG, deploys  IRIS' mobile ordering  to enhance the guest experience, boost F&B revenue and streamline processes.
www.iris.net

SALES & CATERING, GROUPS & MEETINGS

Newport Hospitality Group Successfully Transitions 22 Properties to STS Cloud Sales and Catering Solution
Upgrade to a cloud-based solution brings operational efficiency and optimizes group sales across a diverse portfolio of hotels for award-winning hotel management company
speed group sales
 
SalesAndCatering.com Launches New Data Intelligence Suite for STS Cloud
Single and multi-property operators speed group sales, drive revenue with actionable intelligence and insightful visualizations to address performance, trends, pipeline gaps and hit forecasts.
speed group sales

BACK OFFICE

Otelier Launches Rec: The Automated Financial Reconciliation Tool to Drive Profits
Otelier Rec, a software tool that can automate reconciliation workflows to save hotels thousands of dollars per month, is the newest addition to Otelier's unified performance optimization platform.
otelier.io

SECURITY

VENZA Releases New Explore Security Testing Program
VENZA, a leading provider of data protection and regulatory compliance solutions for the hospitality industry, today announced the release of its new program for comprehensive security testing—Explore. Offering both on-property, in-person assessments and an expanded range of remote evaluations, Explore provides a uniquely comprehensive set of tools for hoteliers to address complex, multifaceted threats and establish an unparalleled defense.
www.venzagroup.co

HOSPITALITY EVENTS & ASSOCIATION NEWS

HSMAI Announces New Commercial Strategy Conference
Commercial Strategy Conference — the evolution of HSMAI’s Marketing Strategy Conference and HSMAI ROC — take place in Charlotte, North Carolina from June 25-26, 2024 at the Charlotte Convention Center.
global.hsmai.org
 
UrVenue Showcases Latest Venue Management Technology at the 2024 Bar & Restaurant Expo
The company’s full-stack hospitality technology platform was purpose-built for individual lifestyle venues, including bars, lounges, nightclubs, dayclubs and mixed-use, eatertainment venues with multiple experiences.
www.urvenue.com
 
Industry-Leading Finance Technology to Be on Display at ‘Hunter Hotel Investment Conference’
As a Silver Sponsor, Aptech will showcase the latest in enterprise accounting, business intelligence, and budgeting/forecasting automation in Booth #812.
www.aptech-inc.com  


Registration Is Now Open for The Hospitality Show October 28 – 30, 2024
The Hospitality Show, produced by Questex and The American Hotel & Lodging Association (AHLA), announces today that registration is open for the second annual event, which will be held October 28-30, 2024 at The Henry B. González Convention Center in San Antonio, TX.
www.thehospitalityshow.com
 
SpaSoft to Showcase New Enhancements at ISPA Phoenix
The SpaSoft team is heading to Phoenix April 23-25, 2024, for the ISPA Conference. SpaSoft has been a leader in innovation in the spa, wellness, and hospitality industries for over 20 years, and 2024 is no exception.
jonashospitality.com

MARKET REPORTS

US Solar Eclipse Hotel Occupancy Increases by Another 10 Percent
Over the past few months, Amadeus has been tracking the impact of the eclipse on hotel booking patterns across America using forward-looking business intelligence data from Demand360+®.
www.amadeus-hospitality.com
 
Knowland Reports Tampa-St. Petersburg Florida Market Sees 20 Percent Year-Over-Year Growth in February
National associations and technology groups lead in four out of five markets.
www.knowland.com

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Three ecosystems — Hospitality & Leisure, Food & Beverage, and Inventory & Procurement — operate independently and together depending on your needs.

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Let's Get Digital

7 Questions to Ask Before You Invest in a Hotel Mobile App

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