Is Your Hotel Booking Engine Destroying Your Profitability?

Almost every other day, I see a headline about the latest trend that is going to have a massive impact on hotels and travel. Some might even be worth exploring. However, the fact remains that if your hotel booking engine is hard to use, none of the trends will have any impact on your net operating income and profits.

Having worked in hotels most of my adult life, and having traveled extensively, I have vast experience booking rooms every way possible: using phones, travel agents (yes, I am that old), OTAs, and directly from apps. The one consistent problem I find on hotel websites is a disregard for the basic usability principles that form the foundation of an online shopping experience.

Let’s review the Top Ten hits when it comes to bad booking experiences.

1. The One-Hit (One-Screen) Wonder

Let me take you all the way back to 2004. Booking engines were still in their infancy. That was the year the one-screen wonder was born. It was introduced to independent hotels as the greatest thing since the Beatles arrived in America. The catch? It was a usability disaster.

In this type of booking engine, guests were expected to review room photos and descriptions, and select dates, room types, and rates, ALL on one screen!

Hotel Booking Engine

I tirelessly campaigned against this technology back then, but the public relations machine worked harder and had a much broader reach. Their message – “Did you know our one-screen technology allows consumers to make a hotel reservation in one click?” – proved irresistible to many hoteliers. They installed this software on hundreds of independent hotel websites worldwide; each install was followed by a press release full of praise.

In 2010, I came face to face with this monster. While stuck at Chicago’s ORD airport, I tried booking a last-minute room. But the one-screen booking process took so long, I did not have time to complete my reservation before boarding the flight. The hotel got my booking from my Expedia account. They paid a commission because they had invested in the wrong technology. You can imagine how many other bookings were abandoned on their website and booked through online travel agent (OTA) websites.

Of course, the one-screen booking engine was eventually discontinued. But not soon enough. The real economic impact can never be accurately measured. Don’t forget: while bad tech was being sold to hotels using gimmicks and press releases, Booking.com and Expedia were making it easier and easier for guests to book a room at your hotel via their own websites.

2. Way Too Many Questions

When a guest finally decides to book a room at your hotel, why delay the purchase by asking so many questions? I am on your booking engine, with my credit card/online wallet ready…so why not take the booking as quickly and easily as possible? Remember…there’s a good chance I’m at an airport, in the back seat of a taxi, on my limited lunch hour, etc.

This is one of the core issues I have with almost all of the mainstream independent hotel booking engines. The number of required fields makes the experience a little too much like an interrogation by a government agency.

As recently as 2014, I encountered one of the biggest hotel booking engine horrors of my life. I analyzed an asset and discovered that their booking engine had 43 questions before checkout! Later the same year, I saw this booking engine provider at a hotel tech conference and found out that 1500+ hotels and inns were using that system! I had to leave the exhibition hall and sit outside for a while to recover from the shock.

Hotel Booking Engine

Generally speaking, you need to severely limit the required fields on your booking checkout page. Require only what you absolutely MUST HAVE from your guest before giving them a reservation confirmation.

“Way too many questions, you must think I trust you.”

– Future (Jumpman)

Next: why use a teeny tiny asterisk for a required field, which then turns into a big red warning when it’s not filled out? Clearly indicate required items at checkout; don’t make guests go back and repeat steps.

Finally: in 2018, do we need a mandatory title field? Do you really need to know if I am a Mr, Mrs, Miss, Dr, HRH, Lord, Earl, Duke, Baron, or Knight? It’s awkward and even offensive. People of every gender, class, and profession pay with the same kind of money.

Wait, one last thing..

I present you with an asterisk to nowhere that cracks me up every time.

3. Land of Confusion

The optimal layout for the checkout process has been mastered by all the major OTAs, like Booking, Expedia and Airbnb. All the hotel technology providers need to do is follow the blueprint. The multi-million dollar investment in UX (user experience design) and usability testing has already been done for us! But instead of following these best practices, many booking engines continue to confuse the guests… resulting in a direct hit to your revenue and profits. Some of these checkout screens remind me of the 1986 Land of Confusion video by Genesis: way too much happening for anyone to understand what it means on their first try.

Check out this disastrous layout with my notes:

Hotel Booking Engine

What is happening here:

  1. Useless hotel rate code jargon is likely to confuse your guests.
  2. Default setting shows more than one room, even when one room is selected in the date/rate calendar.
  3. Odd placement of the “Continue” button in the middle of the layout makes your guest think too hard.
  4. Listing amenities during the checkout process is distracting and gets in the way. This info belongs on the rooms page.
  5. Four-step checkout? No, thank you.

4. Failure to Launch

According to research from Baymard Institute, around 70% of all shopping carts get abandoned. Slow and non-responsive carts are abandoned right away. The general consensus is that if you cannot efficiently collect my payment, you do not respect my time. That’s why slow-loading booking engines can seriously wreck your direct revenue.

The screen shot below is from a boutique hotel brand’s booking engine. This is what a typical user on high-speed internet was seeing when trying to book a room in NYC. Loading, if it happened at all, was taking over a minute (tested from multiple locations and internet providers).

Hotel Booking Engine

Guess what? This group filed for bankruptcy in 2009 due to massive losses in revenue. I am not a detective, but it’s elementary that a non-functioning booking engine might have hastened their demise.

Here is another example from a luxury hotel brand based in Asia, which has some of the highest ADR rooms in Hong Kong. Every non-responsive session is probably costing them a ton. Luckily for them, they are publicly listed and backed by heavy institutional investors. It’s easy to be lazy with other people’s money.

Hotel Booking Engine

What happens when your booking engine does not load quickly enough? Here are some possible outcomes:

a) The same booking comes in via OTA minus a 15-20% commission.

b) The guest books another hotel.

c) The guest decides to give up on their trip and stay at home (voted least likely outcome by revenue and digital experts worldwide).

A and B negatively impact your revenue, and option C is highly unlikely. One other possible outcome is that the guest calls your hotel reservations line…but kids these days don’t talk much on phones. So that outcome becomes less likely all the time.

5. Just Plain Broken

Every now and then I see a hotel asset that is completely failing online. In a time when the majority of bookings are happening online, you have to have a booking engine that works! Here is one that actually showed a System Error right on the checkout screen:

hotel booking engine

This booking engine worked great in some Western US states, but not so much on the East coast or London. It worked in Barcelona, but not Dubai. You get my drift? A shopping cart working part-time is just plain broken. It’s crucial to test, test, test, and repeat when it comes to your booking engine. An error message that literally spells out “system error” in red will decimate your brand, guest loyalty, direct revenue, and online marketing efforts.

6. Back in Black

Black is my favorite color. It’s good for a lot of things, but not as a background for a hotel booking engine. The top retailers of room nights around the globe (Expedia, Booking, and Airbnb) all use a white background for their ecommerce transactions. When it comes to website conversions, usability is the only thing that matters. In a desire to match the “look and feel” of their website, some hotels are using a dark background for their booking engine, making it really hard for everyone to use.

In the example below, selecting dates on a black calendar is really difficult…difficult enough for your guests to give up without completing the transaction. When you highlight dates, nothing happens to show you have done it. There is also a LOT of wasted space, where the booking engine could have displayed useful information. Is this blank space, or is something not showing up against the background? Either way, I’m inclined to run over to Expedia.com and take care of this booking quickly, in a more familiar layout.

Hotel Booking Engine

Solution: Please read this before designing your website and save yourself from design and usability disasters.

7. The Discount Horror

Showing your guests a popup that offers savings of “25% or more” when they are already INSIDE your booking engine and have already SELECTED the room they want is a really bad idea. Stop getting in your own way! This reminds me of a scene in When a Stranger Calls, a1979 American horror classic. When I saw this I exclaimed, “The discount popups are coming from inside the booking engine!!” It’s quiet ironic that this engine markets itself itself as a champion of conversions and direct bookings!

Hotel Booking Engine

8. Blast From the Past

In 2018, there are hotels that still have not integrated a booking engine into their website. If a date search on your website’s home page calendar triggers a pop -up window… please stop doing everything else and get it fixed.

Hotel Booking Engine

9. Too Much Information

Nobody likes folks who overshare. Why would you share your entire year’s business with me when I am just trying to book a room? Are you saving me more searches? Do you want me to change my vacation plan based on your availability? You don’t think I can find another place to stay in your town? Are you starting to see my point? Thank you and stop this.

Hotel Booking Engine

10. Do You Even Mobile?

Everything I have listed above gets compounded 100X when things move to a small screen. I could load up one hundred screenshots here, but the example below truly captures the struggle hotels have when it comes to mobile revenue and conversions. This hotel has done the unimaginable…served me THREE popups (including one survey and one special offer) when ALL I ever wanted to do was give them my money! This, folks, is the bad mobile booking experience to rule them all.

mobile booking engine

In mobile, you have to do testing. You cannot entirely outsource the responsibility to make sure your booking engine works properly on all the major screens your guests are using. You have to dive into your analytics and then follow up in the real world. One way is to go to your local phone store; time yourself and a bunch of your closest friends to see how long it takes to book a room at your hotel for some random dates. Brace yourself for the outcome!

The hotel brand in the example above has over 300 hotels in 40 countries worldwide. You’d think they would have friends to alert them…but guests never do. If you cannot sell them rooms on a mobile device, there are some spectacular mobile booking options available on the Expedia/Booking network that they will end up using.

Bonus Tip:

The single most amazing mobile experience offered in the travel business is the functionality of the HotelTonight app. If you have not tested it yet, please download the app to see mobile ecommerce done right. Anyone who can take the app experience to the mobile web will be the world’s top hotel mobile booking engine.

Oh, and my 2014 article still stands…do not sell $7 rooms on HotelTonight.

Conclusion

Offer protection, kill doubt. In a world of online scams and identity theft, you must make sure that you present guests with a secure and reassuring booking engine. A shady looking booking engine is certain to fail.

Make it easy. Most guests will abandon a booking engine that is hard to use while asking for too much personal information. Please note that booking engines and surveys are two very different things. Nobody should ever feel interrogated on your hotel booking engine.

There are many places where things can go wrong on your website. But none is more important than your booking engine. It is the core of your direct revenue strategy and deserves your undivided attention.

Use Hotel Website Content to Increase Your Revenue

Use website content to generate revenue

Contrary to what you might have heard, people still read. We read quiet a lot actually, but much of our reading has moved over to a screen instead of paper. When we are planning travel, we want to read about where we are going. However, the volume of content on hotel websites is shrinking.

Plenty of attention, and plenty of space, is given to photos and design. Hotel websites have started to look like clones, favoring heavy imagery and very light content; but that is a mistake. Your website is not an Instagram feed with a booking button. If you replace substantive content with photo captions and a parade of adjectives like Luxurious!, you are sending up red flags. Instead of giving a detailed description of your offering, you are just using generic marketing terms, which online consumers are too savvy to believe. And, by providing very little information that guests can use during the travel planning stage, you are sending your potential guests to other hotel websites or OTAs to get the information they need.

It’s your hotel content’s job to build trust, answer questions, and capture your guests’ attention. Good content will not only attract new visitors but also keep them on your website. The longer you can hold a visitor’s attention and answer their questions, the more likely they are to book with you.

You need more than photos to tell your story, and the time you invest in good content is worth it. Here are some of my top content guidelines for your hotel website.

The Need for Speed

Great content will never get consumed if it does not load quickly. Before you go about improving content, you must take a look at your website architecture and hosting. Your website visitors today are just like Tom Cruise in Top Gun: “they have a need…a need for speed.” Google recommends that your web pages load in two seconds. To make this happen, your content delivery process must be highly optimized. This is hard to achieve when you are sharing your hosting environment with hundreds of other websites; and even harder if they also share a clunky agency-backed content management system.

Using the right technology for content distribution will make sure all your hard work is served quickly to the desired audiences worldwide. Here are the two fastest ways for you to speed things up:

  1. Use a content delivery network (CDN). What’s that? Well, it’s system of servers (a network) that delivers web content to people visiting your website based on their geographic location. The main goal of a CDN is to solve latency issues. What’s latency? It’s the delay that occurs between the moment you request a web page until the moment its content appears on your screen. A CDN stores a cached version of your hotel website in multiple geographical locations to reduce latency.
  2. Optimize your photos. How can you make your images (and your whole website) load faster? Here are some steps you can follow.
    • Use CSS Effects (gradients, shadows, etc.). CSS animations produce good resolution-independent assets that look sharp at every resolution and zoom level.
    • Use Web Fonts. Web fonts allow you to use beautiful typefaces while preserving the ability to select, search, and resize text. Never encode content as part of an image. This decision doesn’t just give you speed, but also represents a significant improvement in usability.
    • Compress images. Don’t use higher resolution images than you need; web images can and should be much smaller than images used in print magazines. You should also remove hidden data in your photos (eg, color profiles, geolocation metadata, etc.) Less is more and every byte counts. Also, use vector images vs raster images wherever possible. Vector images are zoom- and resolution-independent, which translates into better speed and usability.

Fast load times will make your website visitors happy and drastically increase your chances of converting them into hotel guests.

The 5 Fundamental Questions

I always bring up these questions during my speaking engagements on digital and revenue optimization best practices.

These are the five questions your hotel website must answer:

  1. Who are you?
  2. Where are you located?
  3. What do you offer?
  4. How are you different?
  5. How can I buy, or contact you?

Looks like a pretty simple list, right? These are some of the easiest questions to answer for any property. However, somewhere along the way, in the quest for “cutting edge” branding and design, these simple questions are not getting answered. Unanswered questions → confused website visitors → loss of confidence → lack of revenue. Hotel websites are all starting to look the same. One massive image, accompanied by a few bold adjectives that mean nothing to your guests. Of course, these adjectives were highly praised during the “branding meeting.” I suspect even a few high fives were involved.

Get to the point! Tell guests who you are, where you are located, what are you offering, and how they can buy that or contact you right away. Superlatives and adjectives do not get people to take action. The best home pages drive people further into the website to read more. Relevant content invites people to click deeper. Answering questions = making connections.

The Tagline Fallacy

From famous shoe companies (Just Do It!) to folks peddling diamonds (A Diamond is Forever)… everyone loves a good tagline. So why not your hotel? Sounds like a pretty good idea… right? Welcome to the dark and mysterious world of hotel website homepage taglines. Cue in Genesis’s Land of Confusion.

It’s not practical to take a hotel experience and condense it into a few words. Different travelers have different needs. Counting on a few words to be memorable and reflect your brand and build trust and put your website visitors at ease? To quote the late Bill Pullman, “Game over man, game over.” Your guests cannot act on something they cannot understand. Remember the core questions I highlighted above? No tagline can do the job of answering them. It’s downright impossible.

Now try telling that to a marketing agency’s “branding guru” and watch the fireworks.

Content Cleanup Strategy

Content is one of the easiest things to access and repair on a hotel website. (This is especially true if your website is powered by one of my fav content management systems.) Time spent on improving content will generate results for you, if you do the following.

Ask yourself one simple question: Would I describe my hotel to a close friend using the words that are currently on my website?

Yes: Success, your content is good.

No: Write down how you would describe your hotel to someone you know and care about. Then add all the extra information you would be giving them if this was their first time visiting your city from somewhere far away. That is the content your website visitors need.

The hardest part for many hotel owners/marketers is realizing that your hotel content should not be about you…it’s about your guests and the location they are visiting. Almost all the website content I see on hotel websites is focused on describing the product or experience, instead of highlighting the hotel’s location and how guests can best enjoy it. Very few hotels are iconic enough to be a destination. Like Biggie said, never get high on your own supply (ie, don’t drink your own Kool-Aid).

Formatting for Success

Readability is your friend when it comes to converting visitors into bookings. When a traveler has over ten website tabs open during the travel research phase, one of the best ways to stand out is to present readable, well-formatted content. Your website visitors are not reading a mid-19th century novel. Remember kids: everybody skims. People only click when something catches their attention or answers a question they are researching. If they don’t find what they are looking for quickly, they just bounce off the website.

Here’s how to keep things readable/scannable:

  1. Fonts. Google wants you to stick with a base font size of 16 pixels. I personally prefer larger. (That’s partly because I refuse to wear corrective glasses for my failing vision). The cute tiny little font size you are using might be directly contributing to your website bounce rate.
  2. Headers and Paragraphs. Don’t let your content headers and subheaders become a parking spot for adjectives. These are tools to help make your content scannable and create a typographical hierarchy. Shorter paragraphs with descriptive headers are going to make your content easier to digest.
  3. Lists and Bullets. If Buzzfeed has taught us anything…lists work. “If you are looking for clicks, then you must make lists” is something I would say to a classroom of content writers today. (I also know they would all hate me for it!) Bullets, numbering, and bold highlighted content can help you break down large blocks of content into readable bits of information. Think of it like bite-size incentives to read the whole website.

The assumption that website visitors will never have time to read anything on your website is a crime. They will make time for your content if you make it easy to read, and convince them bit by bit that your content is worth their time.

Using Design to Boost Revenue

How you lead guests through your website comes down to your design and navigation. Great content that cannot be discovered will just perish in the shadows. Many hotel websites with good content lose their guests by using cutesy navigations, drop-downs, and irrelevant calls to action. Competing calls to action (Book Now, Check Rates, Sign Up for Emails) need to be addressed on a page-by-page basis.

For those who want to read more about this, check out my guide to hotel website design. Don’t design first and then stuff content in there. Design around content and watch your most relevant hotel website metrics point to the sky.

Popup Intervention

Three words: Don’t Use Popups.

Check out this banner I was shown within five seconds of visiting a hotel website:

The fact that you offer better rates than the OTA’s should never be a full-screen popup for someone who is visiting your website for the first time. Instead, let them read your new and improved, content-filled homepage and see what you’re about before accosting them with an urgent message.

Who Has the Best Content?

A question that I get asked all the time is, “So who is doing travel content right?” I really wish I could say the name of one of the big hotel brands. They have been in the travel game for decades and their online content should probably be the best. Unfortunately, that’s not the case. A not so little startup founded in 2008 in San Francisco has the best travel content in the game. I am talking about, of course, Airbnb.

Hotels thrive when people travel. Shouldn’t hotel content be inspiring and encouraging people to travel? Shouldn’t your hotel take the lead in answering questions about your location and neighborhoods?

One of the best examples of travel content is the Airbnb neighborhood guide that was launched in 2012.

Not only do they have excellent content on these pages, but also give the pages extra credibility by adding advice from locals. They feature best-in-class writing with clear-cut titles. And they take the whole thing to a higher level by breaking down the attributes of each neighborhood, and even the moods you are likely to encounter in each location. Check out the killer segmentation matching travelers to their preferences:

You would think the big hotel brands would be all over this because they do have the bandwidth and franchise fee revenue to produce this stuff. Instead, we get office desks taken out of hotel rooms and are told to travel “brilliantly.”

Here’s another tip: people love maps! Adding curated maps with comments about different points of interest makes travel planning a breeze. It’s amazing what you can create with the Google Maps API. It’s in their header, folks: “Build the next generation of location experiences.”

And let’s not forget the quality of the photography being used on Airbnb pages. He is my version of the Friday night lights quote:

“Good content. Great photos. Can’t lose!”
– Vikram Singh

Too many hotels are waiting at the bottom of the funnel for revenue to trickle down. Great content is the perfect opportunity to feed the funnel and create demand. Instead of squeezing the life out of a “book direct and save” campaign, how about participating in the guest’s travel experience at a much earlier stage?

Conclusion

Good content is your competitive edge at a time when buying advertising is getting more and more expensive. With so many hotel and OTA websites competing on the web to attract travelers, content can be your salvation. If you have a content-poor, design-rich website, it is hurting your long-term revenue as well as your immediate conversions. On the other hand, the playing field is wide open for your hotel to start filling the travel-planning void. Inspiring and useful content will not only get you new business, but will also help you stand out in a crowd of mass-produced content-free websites. If you are not using content to capture the attention of people interested in your location, neighborhoods, and attractions…someone else will.

Last Click Attribution Is Killing Your Hotel Marketing Campaigns

Last Click Attribution Is Killing Your Hotel Marketing Campaigns

Marketing success today can be measured using many diverse metrics. Analytics programs let you measure everything from who and where your website visitors come from to what content they are interested in. These engagement and conversion metrics can help you understand what is really working when it comes to your website and marketing efforts.

Some hotels have an in-house digital marketing team, but most outsource their online campaigns to an agency. Either way, these teams are usually tasked with producing an ROI (return on investment) report for every dollar spent on channels like Google AdWords, Facebook, etc. There is an industry-wide obsession with knowing where the last revenue-generating click came from. This metric invariably takes center stage in marketing meetings, ensuring that the conversation never moves beyond the last click and how much revenue was booked. Ignoring overall marketing channel performance might have worked for hotels in the good old days, but not today. A lot of hotels are struggling to understand why they are not seeing massive returns on their advertising dollars anymore. Even brand name traffic and clicks are in decline. So what has eroded your marketing campaign power?

The villain in this story – the one preventing you from moving forward – is this thing called last click attribution. It has derailed countless hotel marketing campaigns for both large and small operators. I’d like to take some time to help you understand attribution models in the hospitality and travel business, and how they affect your marketing efforts.

What Is an Attribution Model?

The good news is that most hotels and inns are spending some amount of money on digital ads. The bad news is that decision-makers have a limited understanding of how online marketing works today, and which strategies they should be crediting for the successes and failures of their campaigns.

Let’s dive right into attribution. An attribution model is a set of rules that that help you determine which touchpoints along the conversion path should be getting the credit for the final sale or conversion. Sounds simple… but it’s not. What makes it tremendously complicated in our sector is the number of touchpoints involved when someone is planning a trip, and subsequently a hotel stay.

A touchpoint is any point of contact that occurs between you and your customer; in our case, we are discussing online touchpoints. Here is a list of some of the touchpoints that might occur between your hotel and a potential guest who is planning a trip to Sydney over a period of weeks or months before visiting:

  • Top-level destination research: airfare searches, Sydney travel blogs, etc.
  • Neighborhood research: staying in Bondi Beach vs Central Business District vs iconic Sydney Harbor
  • Hotel research: Narrowing lodging search by researching independent vs brands; top-ranking hotels for value and price on TripAdvisor; hotel websites, social media profiles, and blogs
  • Things to do: online searches for top things to do in Sydney; lists and blogs about Sydney; seasonal events
  • Dining: restaurants, dietary requirements and cuisine preferences, must-haves, food blogs, review websites

While the above process is happening, your guest might also encounter some of these hotel-specific marketing touchpoints:

  • Hotel display ads: placed on top travel blogs and websites
  • Hotel location and value Google ads: “Luxury Hotels in Sydney,” “Hotels near Sydney Harbor”
  • Hotel brand name Google ads: when they search for your hotel by name
  • Hotel TripAdvisor Page: while they are still researching your price and value
  • Meta/OTA rate shop: your listings, reviews, and rate profile
  • Hotel blog post about seasonal events: useful content on your website
  • Hotel email newsletter: perhaps they sign up to stay in touch before booking or arriving the hotel
  • Hotel local dining guide; return visit for more useful content on your website
  • Hotel Facebook ads: and other social media ads, while scoping out your social profiles

Every single touchpoint is a crucial part of the shopper’s journey. This Expedia study showed that a typical hotel guest will visit over 38 websites before booking the room.

A typical website reservation that you are seeing today is the result of 30+ touchpoints that occurred at different stages of travel planning before the final act of booking a room. All the online channels you use today are more connected than ever; they must work together to support your goal of getting a booking. If you are only looking at where the final click came from when attributing revenue, you are missing the big picture. The very last step in a long decision-making process has not single-handedly earned the booking. It doesn’t make sense to allocate your entire marketing budget based on the last click that occurred before the booking.

So, let’s talk now about proper marketing channel attribution.

Deciphering the Attribution Models in Google

Google has been working on making attribution modeling more mainstream. In 2014, they released the Attribution Modeling Tool in Google AdWords. They actually want you to see how users interact with your ads, so you can run better campaigns. As of May 2016, you can integrate the attribution model of your choice with your conversion data and ad bids. Excellent tool for everyone involved! It’s especially helpful for the very few with “Marketing” in their job title that actually log in and work on their marketing campaigns. Of course, if you are just waiting for agency reports to drop into your inbox, you cannot witness this beauty firsthand…but at least you can make changes to the way you measure success.

Once you have decided to actively assign attribution for your paid and earned marketing efforts, you have to determine which model works best for your business. The following example illustrates how each attribution model would work for a hotel reservation with four touchpoints.

Touchpoints

  • Touchpoint 1: Google PPC Ad. Guest X finds your hotel website for the first time by clicking on one of your Google AdWords campaign ads for “luxury hotels in Sydney.” They browse the website and consume your content and photos. You capture their email address (with their permission, of course).
  • Touchpoint 2: Facebook Ad. Two weeks later, Guest X returns to your website, this time from a Facebook Ad about “Things to do in Sydney.”
  • Touchpoint 3: Email Marketing. Five days later, you send them an email about upcoming events in Sydney and why your hotel is in the best location to enjoy them. You get a click-through.
  • Touch Point 4: Direct Traffic. The next day Guest X books a room directly on your website by typing www.yourhotelname.com into the browser. Mission accomplished!

Your Attribution Options

  • Last Click Attribution. The last click before booking, in this case your website’s direct traffic source, gets 100% credit for the reservation.
  • First Click Attribution. The first touchpoint, your Google AdWords campaign ad for “luxury hotels in Sydney,” gets 100% credit for the reservation.
  • Linear Attribution. Every touchpoint – Google AdWords, Facebook, Email and Direct – gets equal credit for the reservation (25% each).
  • Time Delay Attribution. The touchpoints closest to the reservation dates get the majority of the credit. In this case, Email and Direct get most of the credit; Google AdWords and Facebook get less.
  • Position-Based Attribution. The first and last touch points (Google AdWords and Direct) get 40% credit each, and the remaining 20% credit for the reservation is divided evenly between the middle touchpoints. Facebook and Email get 10% each.
  • Data-Driven Attribution. This model gives credit for conversions based on the steps people have taken to find you and ultimately book a room with you. It uses data from your own account to determine which ads, keywords, and campaigns have the greatest impact on conversions. This is only available to accounts that have accumulated enough data over time. I love this model!

Where can you see all this? Oh, it’s right there in your Google Analytics dashboard! Look under Conversion > Attribution.

I have always loved GA. Here is why I think it’s better than anything fancy out there.

Why Should You Abandon Last Click Attribution?

Everyone would like to see the return on a marketing investment. It helps you justify why you did what you did, right? The cliché line “what gets measured gets done” (used by folks who love management guru books) is very hard to implement in digital marketing. I want to be clear that measurement is not the enemy here. It’s how you draw insights from the data that makes or breaks your marketing campaigns and future revenue.

Marketing budgets are already in very short supply in the hotel business. Imagine what happens when the allocation of these tiny budgets is determined solely by the last click that generated a booking. The result is apparent in hundreds of marketing reports today. It’s just not working anymore. It’s time to let go and move on.

The Booking Journey

The path to booking a hotel room today spans multiple websites and devices: online travel agents, metasearch, review sites, social media, etc. When you are dealing with 38 touchpoints, it’s not enough to look at the bottom of the funnel. Instead, ask yourself what you are doing to help your guest move through their booking journey.

Do you think your typical pay per click brand name ad “Official Website: Book Direct And Save!” helps when someone is still researching your location? No, it doesn’t!

Are you speaking with your guests on social media? Or is your Facebook strategy just serving up a“25% off for Spring Break” display ad?

What about email? Is it all about 35% off your best rates? Is that the only conversation you are having with your guests?

Focusing on the last touchpoint prevents you from helping your guests during the planning process, before they are ready to book. You are so busy moving marketing dollars to campaigns that target the last touchpoint that you never feed and fund top-of-the-funnel activities and channels. Ultimately, the volume is going to decline and you are going to end up playing the price game instead of selling value.

Underutilizing Your Marketing Arsenal and Agency

By giving 100% credit to the last click channel, you shift the focus of your marketing campaign to that one channel. All eyes are on the tool that is converting and showing a healthy return on investment. Hotel marketing agencies get stuck producing “ROI reports” to justify their existence every single month. Fixation on one channel kicks off a vicious cycle in which your revenue numbers start to decline, you fire the agency, hire a new one, repeat. This is particularly harmful if your digital assets are not in your control and you start from the bottom every time just like Sisyphus. Your website, campaigns and data need to consistently grow over time, and not get disrupted or lost when you change vendors.

Content production, photography, social media conversations, and email conversations are all part of your full marketing arsenal. Don’t go to battle with one weapon when you have a wide range of tools that allow you to target every single phase and touchpoint of the booking cycle.

Others Prosper While You Analyze

I have previously written about dinosaur metrics to avoid and super metrics to embrace. With most marketers 100% focused on the last click at the bottom of the funnel, the top-of-the-funnel playing field is wide open in the travel business. Online travel agents have done a great job of focusing on the entire travel journey. Of course, they bring tons of cash to the game and dominate paid channels…but there is a ton of work on the top of the funnel that is funded by conversions. They run, manage and curate thousands of websites that have content relating to the early stages of the travel-booking journey. As  a result, they build trust and solid brand names in the travel business without owning a single bed.

When you leave opportunity on the table, someone will always be there to seize it.

Conclusion

Booking a room at a hotel, bed and breakfast, or Airbnb is a process. First comes the destination, then the location within the destination, then a price and value comparison, and finally the right user experience to complete the booking. Judging your hotel and travel marketing campaigns at the finish line incorrectly assigns all the praise and investment to one single component. In time, your super-performing touchpoint will face a decline and stop producing revenue for you on its own.

New lemons are needed to make more lemonade. Stop squeezing the life out of your campaigns by focusing on the last click.

The Shrinking Value of Hotel Loyalty Programs

Shrinking value of hotel loyalty programs

My work revolves around travel. Every night away from home is spent at a hotel or Airbnb property. I was recently asked about my hotel brand preferences and which loyalty program I use. The answer is that I belong to all of them but never achieve a high status due to the fact that my hotel nights are spread across many independent and brand hotels. If I were to pool all of my annual room nights into one brand, I could easily qualify for top tier status.

Why have I not done that? The reason is simple: I am a location-based business and leisure traveler. That means that I choose to stay at the most convenient location irrespective of brand. I know I am not alone in this thinking, as many people prioritize location over brand. Let me elaborate.

Location, Location, Location

Cliché title aside, location is everything for some folks (like me). I am laser focused on location on business trips, as I like to optimize my time and control my FOBL (fear of being late).

When I am speaking at an event, I do not want to be far away from the conference location. A simple traffic snarl can ruin your reputation. (Digital marketing and revenue management speakers are not accorded the same indulgence as rock stars when they show up fashionably late.) Most of my business meetings are also at hotels, as they are often my clients. I try my best to stay at the meeting hotel for two reasons: a) To experience the asset; and b) To ensure that I am not relying on any transportation other than an elevator to get to my meeting. It’s a peace of mind thing that allows me to remain focused.

Likewise, when it comes to leisure travel, I don’t want to spend extra time commuting to the places I want to see. If Hotel X is located near the activities or attractions I want to see, or is in a neighborhood that I particularly like (eg, Saint-Germain-des-Prés in Paris, Gothic Quarter in Barcelona)… then I am staying at that hotel.

I also have an affinity for independent hotels. I especially like staying at independents when I am traveling internationally. I think it gives me better insight into the local mindset and how people run their hospitality businesses in other parts of the world.

The Incentive Games: May the odds be ever in your favor.

I have been monitoring the loyalty programs of the major hotel brands and have noticed a clear trend over the last several years: the rewards for loyalty are shrinking. Basically, the bar is getting set at a higher level while the benefits are being slashed. These devaluations are due to consolidation in the marketplace, and attempts by brands to increase their profitability.

In my opinion, loyalists have three major reasons to stick with a hotel brand:

  1. Points. Earn free nights that can be spent either at a fancy aspirational hotel or a basic property. In other words: spend on business, vacation for free.
  2. Upgrades. Get a better category of room at check-in because of status.
  3. Amenities. Enjoy a welcome gift, free breakfast, better WiFi, lounge access, dedicated reservation support, late checkout, etc.

While people have been chasing points and status, every major loyalty program has devalued their program by doing one or more of the following:

  • Increasing the number of nights you need to attain status
  • Increasing the number of points you need to book a free room by upgrading the hotel categories
  • Creating a new category of rooms and/or elite status level (which devalues the whole program)

You know who else has done this recently? If you guessed airlines, you are right. It’s “working” for the airlines, right? Passengers may not be happy, but they need to keep flying on the major airlines to get around. It’s not that easy to open up an “independent” alternative airline to meet their needs. But can hotel brands continue to reduce program benefits for their most loyal and point-obsessed guests, and still hope to keep them?

Following is a brief overview of the recent changes I’ve seen in five of the biggest hotel loyalty programs.

Marriott Rewards

In 2015, Ideaworks (a consulting firm) published a study naming Marriott Rewards the most generous hotel loyalty program in terms of earning future room stays, with a return of 9.4%. Translation: For every $100 that you spend at a Marriott, you can expect to earn $9.40 worth of points you can apply towards a future stay at a Marriott branded hotel.

They also calculated the return on three other major brand programs:
[table id=7 /]

These results were based on 1,440 queries conducted globally. The number of points required for a “free” hotel stay was compared to the room rate in dollars. The value of points was translated into dollars based on how much spending was required to accrue them.

That same year (2015), Fortune Magazine also named Marriott as having the best rewards program in the hotel business. So, how has the world’s best loyalty program changed since then?

The latest change happened on March 7, 2017, when 23% of their hotels and resorts were moved to a higher or lower category. Of those that are changing, 60% will move up; US-based hotels are disproportionately affected. This is not a new trend – it’s been happening every year for the last five years. 2013 was the big jumping off point. It was also the year Marriott added the new, super expensive Category 9.

[table id=8 /]

After the Starwood Hotel merger last September, Marriott became the largest hotel chain in the world. Since the merger, Starwood and Marriott accounts can now be linked, points can be moved around, and statuses can be transferred. This is a massive increase in the sheer number of people who belong to the joint program (rumored to be over 100 million!). The fact that status can be transferred = so many elites! It’s a classic supply-and-demand scenario. If you’ve been a Marriott loyalist, now you have lots of elites from Starwood Hotels getting the same benefits as you. When has that ever been a good thing for an elite program?

Favorite Stay:
My best Marriott experience was at the JW Marriott in Bogota, Colombia. Amazing hotel and staff, and the cutest guard dogs at the front doors.

Starwood Preferred Guest

Starwood’s SPG program has always had some serious fan boys and girls. There is a very good reason for that. For a long time, Starwood Preferred Guest has been one of the plushest preferred hotel programs out there. A mere 25 nights a year gives you a guaranteed 4pm checkout at most of their hotels! In comparison, Marriott (aka, the new owner) makes no such guarantee. In Marriott’s case, please insert everyone’s favorite customer service phrase, “subject to availability.”

Likewise, I have heard nothing but amazing things about the Ambassador program from my Starwood-addicted friends. Anyone staying 100 nights a year is assigned a private ambassador who makes reservations, hounds hotels for upgrades, etc. etc. Like I said, pretty plushy!

Industry friends always mention that it’s easy to maintain this level of customer loyalty focus when you have 1300 hotels. (Marriott now has over 4200.) Besides, to quote one of my favorite airline blog writers Gary Leff:

“It’s not hard to just fall out of an airplane into a Marriott. You have to make a choice to be loyal to Starwood.”

I agree with him 100%. You can find a Marriott almost anywhere and at almost every price point.

Marriott Rewards has well over 54 million members, more than double the 21 million members of the Starwood Preferred Guest program (estimated numbers at the time of the merger). Today, as an SPG member, you are competing with a pool of close to 100 million people for everything: late checkout, upgrades, free rooms, lounge access, ambassadors, etc. No wonder so many fan boys and girls were livid about the merger. Some of the comments were a case study in entitlement, and really made me laugh. A classic case of first world problems. But still relevant to our discussion.

The simple fact is that there are many more Marriott members than Starwood members. Marriott folks now have access to some really fancy hotel assets where they can splurge with their points to get free stays. This fact sums up the lack of enthusiasm from SPG loyalists. But, you know what? Time heals everything.

Credit card experts have crowned the Starwood Branded Amex as the best credit card for frequent fliers and hotel guests (if they often stay at Starwood properties). It offers up to five points per $1 spent at participating Starwood Hotels, and two points per $1 spent at Marriott properties. For cardmembers redeeming points for hotel stays, this card gives the most points per dollar. Points can also be transferred to more than 24 airline programs.

Starwood’s last category adjustment was in 2013, when 200 hotels went up in price and fewer than 50 hotels went down in price.

Favorite Stay:
My best Starwood experience was at the St. Regis Princeville, Kauai. Stunning ocean views right from the lobby, and also from everywhere else on the property.

IHG Rewards Club

IHG has long maintained the bragging rights for having the most loyalty members in the world. (Marriott is close on their heels with their Marriott + Ritz + Starwood numbers). IHG’s approach to redemption has been different from the other brands I talk about here. They don’t have a category-based points chart. Every individual hotel has its own points requirements for a free night. The lower end brands (Holiday Inn/ Express) go for 5K to 10K points, and the high-end hotels (like Intercontinental) go for 60K+.

In 2016, IHG made some big changes their redemption policy:

  • 650 hotels changed their redemption point requirements.
  • For 75% of the 650 hotels, the points requirement went up.

As with the other brands, their changes mainly applied to assets located in the United States. Here is the current guide to points required to redeem “free” nights at IHG hotels.

In 2015, IHG had its Marriott/Starwood–style moment (though definitely not at the same scale) when they acquired the iconic Kimpton Hotels brand. It inspired me back then to write about the transformation of the boutique hotel business. The fan favorite rewards program Kimpton Karma continues to operate separately and has not been rolled into the IHG Rewards Club (as of today.)

Favorite Stay:
My best IHG experience was at The Intercontinental Hong Kong. Fantastic food and beverage, with iconic views of the Hong Kong harbor.

Hilton Honors (The Program Previously Known as Hhonors)

This year Hilton dropped the extra “h” In their Hhonors program and renamed it Honors. Now that we have that out of the way, Hilton has been in the running as one of the top hotel loyalty programs for a while. Their massive hotel footprint of 4,000+ hotels in 91 countries ensures that you do not have to struggle to find one of their branded hotels on any trip. All the way up to 2014, Hilton Honors was offering zero blackout dates to their reward program members. They also allow you to earn hotel and airline points during the same stay.

Hilton’s biggest devaluation (that I remember) was in 2013. They really shook things up by:

  • Adding Categories. They went from 7 up to 10 categories! Even with 4K+ hotels in 90+ countries, this was a blow to redemption enthusiasts.
  • Introducing Seasonal Reward Pricing. Redemption points required for free rooms began to fluctuate with seasonality and demand.

They have not implemented any major updates since 2013. Instead, they do a quarterly shakeup of their hotel categories.

Favorite Stay:
My best Hilton experience was at the Hilton Caribe in Puerto Rico. Massive infinity pool, old school hospitality, and a cool talking parrot in the lobby.

World of Hyatt (Previously Gold Passport)

Hyatt just went through a massive overhaul of their entire loyalty program. Hyatt Gold Passport is now called “World of Hyatt.” For a hotel brand with a relatively small footprint, they have some serious followers. Why? Their Diamond members get:

  • Upgrades to the best room available upon arrival (excluding suites)
  • Access to lounges featuring complimentary breakfast and evening hors d’oeuvres
  • Complimentary full breakfast in hotels without a club lounge (including Park Hyatts!)
  • Four suite upgrades every year
  • A special welcome F&B amenity during each stay
  • A dedicated reservations line

Wow! I think answered that question. So it’s no surprise that most of their top elites are not thrilled with the most recent changes. Here are two major updates:

  • New Status Tier. Hyatt Passport used to have two elite tiers, Diamond and Platinum. Now there are three: Discoverist, Explorist, and Globalist (none are typos). The loyalists getting demoted used the  hashtag on Twitter to make their feelings known. The “Stay Thirsty Elites” meme really made me laugh. I’d like to explain adding a whole new elite tier by using the airline example. First Class and Economy Class have now become First Class, Business Class, Premium Economy Class, and Economy Class (and even Basic Economy) – all in the exact same airplane! Mostly, they just moved the rows of seats around, and made minor changes in amenities. A new tier is never a positive upgrade for existing elites to any program.
  • Pay to Play. The old program allowed you to qualify for status based on # of nights or # of stays (stay = one check-in and check-out). You can no longer qualify for elite status based on number of stays. It’s gone. Instead you have to stay X number of nights or spend a minimum $ amount per stay. Wow, a revenue-based model…hmmm, I wonder where I have seen this lately? Oh yes! Here: Delta Airlines. Then here: United Airlines. And now here: American Airlines. I see what you did there, Hyatt.

Hyatt’s top-tier guests who used to get Diamond status just by staying 25 times (one-night stays) at any Hyatt now have to spend 60 nights at Hyatts to reach the same status. This completely changes the elite status earning game. Earning 60 nights with a relatively tiny footprint is not going to happen for a lot of their existing Diamond level members.

Since we are looking back to 2013 for most of the other brands here, in 2013 Hyatt did introduce a new super category for redemption. It’s not as drastic as what the others have done, but then Hyatt has a very limited number of properties (as of now).

Favorite Stay (Someday):
I am a huge fan of Bill Murray. While in Tokyo, I just had to visit the legendary Park Hyatt Tokyo. It’s an iconic property that I aspire to actually stay in one day.

Conclusion

Moving forward, earning elite status with a single hotel brand is going to be more difficult for a lot of people. I know many are still reeling from the Marriott-Starwood merger. However, please note that the M&A activity has not yet peaked in the hotel industry. Hold on tight, because I agree with the experts that there is much more to come. After reviewing five of the major brand loyalty programs above, I realize more than ever that I cannot be the only one with a razor sharp focus on location over brand. If the industry continues to see more devaluations and major changes, maybe the points and loyalty game will finally lose its appeal.

The Ultimate Guide to Email Marketing for Hotels

email marketing for hotels

Hotel email marketing has become more important than ever. The cost of click- and impression-based marketing on search engines and social networks continues to rise, not just for generic terms, but also for the historically cheaper brand name terms. Email marketing remains extremely relevant and cost-effective. It has become the best permission-based outbound tool in your marketing kit, hands down. However, as with every great tool, the responsibility to use it well lies with the user.

Smart hotels and brands have moved away from the mass broadcasting of spammy emails, and are now focusing on personalized, permission-based email delivery; and they are seeing their revenues go up. It’s time for you to do the same. This is my guide to email marketing done right.

No Plan = No Revenue

Email marketing cannot be an afterthought. There is a tendency for marketing departments to devote a ton of time to their paid marketing efforts, to the exclusion of almost everything else. Since money is being spent on buying traffic, everyone is focused on getting the best return on their investment. The fact is that your permission-based database of emails is as important and relevant as any other marketing channel. Just as you plan your paid marketing spend, you should also plan your earned (permission-based email) marketing efforts. Most hotel and travel email marketing campaigns still exist as low-level items on someone’s checklist of things to do. Invariably, the marketers who put the least amount of effort into email marketing will end up using one of my least favorite sentences in hotel marketing: “It does not work for us.”

Segment or Perish

Before any effort has been put into the content and design of your email campaign, you have to do some strategic planning. The most important and very first step is to segment and define your audience. I dislike mega lists (aka, “everyone gets the same email “). So, unless your hotel is changing its name, brand, ownership, or shutting down…you have no acceptable reason to send everyone in your email database the same exact message!

I have pushed the agenda of data segmentation in the hotel industry for years, and email lists are no exception. Here is an example of how a typical hotel email database could be segmented in a full-service hotel offering food and beverage outlets, spa, and meeting space:

  1. Newsletter/Blog Signups
  2. Deals and Specials Signups
  3. Guest Who Booked a Room
  4. Guests Who Cancelled A Room
  5. Guests Who Gave Email at Check- in
  6. Guests Who Gave Email at Check-out
  7. Guest Who Used Food & Beverage Outlets
  8. Guests Who Used Meeting Spaces
  9. Guests Who Used Spa Services
  10. Referrals

You can also segment by the last time someone interacted with you or opened your last email blast. The more you segment, the better the outcome of your email campaign is going to be. Just like in life, you cannot be all things to all people, all the time. Proper segmentation parts the clouds and makes it easier for you to answer the next crucial question: What are you going to say?

Write Email Content That Wins

Boring and uninteresting content will fail, no matter what medium you’re using. In the case of email content, you should start by thinking about the reason(s) that people subscribed to your list. Here are some common reasons people might subscribe to your list:

  1. They want to receive deals and discounts.
  2. They want to learn about seasonal local events.
  3. They have brand affinity.
  4. They are interested in your food and beverage experience.
  5. They like knowing what you are up to.

There are a few ways to figure out what topics most interest your email recipients. You can test different kinds of content, and see which users reply to different types of emails. You can also ask them some questions when they sign up (see below). Once you know their intent, you can match the segmented users to the right content.

I travel a lot for business, and I also travel a lot for fun. As a result, my email address ends up being in a lot of brand and independent hotel databases. So, I get to see plenty of poor email marketing campaigns. For example, Marriott sent me the following email with “deals” for destinations all over the US map.

marriott 3

The problem is that none of these destinations are currently on my radar for travel. You know what’s on my mind right now? Spain! So if you are sending me an email about “Honeymooning in Texas,” I will  just delete the email.

Speaking of Spain, here is an example of an effective email, leading to poor content on subsequent landing pages. The email has nice photos, catchy content, and… guess what? One of the destinations on the list (Spain) is on my mind! Everything is good, and I give the section on Spain a click. I give them 100% conversion on their call to action!

Global1

Landing Page 1: Things start to crumble. Check out the skimpy content they have provided on this landing page. I get a whopping 54-word summary of Spain for my trouble!

Global2

I lower my expectations way down. I guess they are not going to provide any useful information. It’s an inauspicious start, but maybe they have something else for me. Maybe their goal is to showcase their awesome hotel portfolio in Spain! Being the quintessential optimist that I am (ha), I give it another click (View Hotels) hoping for a spread of hotels in Spain.

Landing Page 2: Oh man, I get this. One hotel shows up!

global3

My reward for clicking on your email: Kempinski Bahia in Estepona on the east coast of Spain for EUR 413 a night. I close the window hard… probably setting a world record!

Remember, it’s not just the click that matters. Once you manage to get someone to click through, make sure you give them a reason to stay. Poorly executed content and context will tank your campaign every single time.

A golden rule for writing email marketing content: If you have nothing useful to say, then don’t  say anything at all. Every campaign needs to be created with the user in mind. It has to be your #1 priority to reward the people who signed up. They cared enough about what you do to share their email address with you. But this can change with one click at the bottom of your next email.

Treat Your Users Like Royalty

This is something I strongly believe in and act on every day. Anyone who signs up for my newsletter joins what I call my “Super Friends” list. We are no longer just friends… we are now Super Friends. This  means that every article I write makes it to their inbox before any news outlet gets their hands on it. Any speaking engagement I get, any personal or professional update worth sharing, goes straight to their inboxes first. I ask them for feedback and get many people writing back with questions, answers and ideas on how to make things better. I answer every single email.

Email marketing is not about standing on a pulpit and filling inboxes with marketing fluff. You have to earn the privilege of having access to people’s inboxes. You can never send bad content that does not benefit your guests in some way (as in my Hotels in Spain adventure above).

What’s is in for them? Why should they open your email, let alone click through to take whatever action you are recommending? Segmentation and intent can help you learn what your subscribers want. Make sure every email from your hotel is about them, and not just about you. What are you doing to bring delight to your readers?

Please Don’t Become Your Own Groupon!

For those who are not familiar with Groupon…they used to be kings of building and monetizing an email database. Then they got into hotels and travel in a big way, and even partnered with Expedia. That partnership eventually fell apart, and finally everything crashed and burned.

Make sure that you do not become Groupon with your email marketing efforts. Don’t get me wrong, Groupon was/is amazing at doing emails. They are always offering a discount because it’s their core business model. But that’s not the right approach for a hotel. “Specials and Discounts” cannot be the only reason you send an email to your hotel database.

Example: A hotel in Miami has emailed me eight times in the past eight months. Every single email has been about a seasonal deal or discount in the range of 25% to 40% off the current rates. That’s absurd! I have been a full rate customer who booked direct with them when I stayed at their property. Why do they insist on bringing me back there at a discount? What if I don’t want or need a discount? Furthermore, I start wondering if there is something wrong with the hotel. Is their experience and quality in decline? If not, then why hasn’t any other hotel in the market sent me eight emails offering a discount?

Look, if the only thing you have to say to your guest list is that you have a “great deal” for them, then your hotel starts to brand itself as a hotel that is on a fire sale all year round. In addition, it looks like the only incentive to return there is a discounted rate. Do not break my cardinal rule of Rate over Value. It’s not going to reflect well in your long-term profit and loss statement.

What’s the Frequency?

It’s not just a great REM song but also a critical question in email marketing. How often do you send an email? Great question! There is no perfect answer for this. A hotel is not a news publication, and nobody wants or is expecting a daily or weekly tap on the shoulder from you. A monthly or bi-monthly schedule is optimal, unless you have something exciting to share. (Note: The excitement is not a 35% off mid-week special rate). Never skip more than one month, as some people may forget that they signed up for your newsletter. People have a pretty short attention span these days, so don’t give them a reason to unsubscribe.

Best in Class Tools

It’s not practical or advisable to send out emails from your own server. There are too many checks and balances in place that will prevent you from getting your emails delivered properly. Instead, go with tools that let you send emails the right way, give you excellent analytics, and help you grow your list effectively. My two favorites are:

Both of these services are highly effective and low in cost. They allow you to quickly send your email messages one at a time to everyone on your list. Both offer a nice dashboard, filters, automation and analytics. To prevent your email from getting trapped in firewalls, they use lots of different IP addresses to send your campaign.

Each has a user-friendly interface that helps you design slick and simple HTML email campaigns, so that your recipient’s email client does not wreck your image and text files. We all have received emails every now and then that do not display properly in the inbox. The culprit: email delivery services that are not using the multipart-alternative MIME format. This format ensures that, if for any reason your guest is not able to view your HTML email, a plain-text version will be displayed in their inboxes.

Neither of these providers will let you SPAM. Get a permission-based email list or go home.

Never Bother the Feds

Never spam. Here is what spam means according to Wikipedia: “Email spam, also known as junk email, is a type of electronic spam where unsolicited messages are sent by email.” In the US, the CAN-SPAM Act 2003 puts the penalty at $11,000 for every offense. That means $11,000 for every email sent out without permission. So yeah, please read this and then hard pass on buying lists, no matter how tempting it is.

Top Metrics of Email Success

Measurement is crucial for all marketing success. Emails provide both marketing and product departments a chance to interact with your guests and other people who are interested in you. It’s important not to get caught up in the “last-click attribution” trap. Instead, focus on these crucial metrics when it comes to measuring your email campaign’s success:

1. Open Rate

Open rate refers to how many people opened your email (as a percentage of the total number of emails sent). Please note that this metric can get corrupted by email clients that auto-open emails. Also note that open rates are tracked using an impression pixel (a 1×1 pixel image); if images do not download onto the recipient’s device, it will not be counted as an opened email. So, instead of chasing the data accuracy unicorn, focus on comparisons with your historical campaigns. Open rates are a report card on your messaging, your content headline and appeal. Here is my quick take on open rates:

Under 20% = Get back to the drawing board.
20% to 35% = Keep going. Be sure you continue to refine and test.
Over 35% = Congratulations! Keep winning.

2. Click-Through Rate

This metric gets counted when a recipient clicks on any link you have provided in your email message. Reflected as a percentage, it shows how many people followed your call to action. Definitely a deeper metric than open rate, it validates your relationship with your subscribers. I think 10% is a good starting point for most campaigns. Over time, you should aim for 20% or higher as you fine-tune your message. Chronic low click-through rates almost always point to poor responsive design and a disconnect with your target audience.

3. Unsubscribe Rate

I like to call this the annoyance rate. How badly are you annoying your recipients? You should work hard to minimize this bleed. Keeping it under 0.2% at all times is an industry best practice. Sound the alert when this rate inches upwards, as it indicates you have moved beyond losing touch with your audience. You are now annoying them.

4. Bounces

There are two bounces in email land: hard bounce and soft bounce.

Hard bounce happens when you send an email to an email address that no longer exists. Gmail monitors hard bounces very closely. You must remove your hard bounce emails ASAP before you forget to do so and send another campaign to the same non-existent email addresses.

Soft bounces happen when you send an email to an address that exists, but is either full or not taking your emails. Your emails might eventually make it into their inbox if they open up the space. This not as serious as hard bounce, but should be limited to 2% at all times to keep a squeaky clean list.

5. Revenue

If you have your hotel marketing house in order, you should be able to track revenue from every single email you have ever sent to your guests. This is more relevant for campaigns where your click-through target is getting a booking/reservation. This metric is not relevant for your educational and brand building campaigns.

6. Social Share

This is a fantastic metric. It measures how often your recipients open, read, and then like your email messages enough to share them on social media. It’s a true testament to the awesomeness of your email content and messaging. Sharing is the ultimate compliment you can get, because you are now reaching beyond your permission-based circle without breaking the law!

7. Churn Rate

In life and in email marketing, you cannot make everyone happy all the time. People will unsubscribe. Some will complain and break your heart. Hard bounces over time will add up. A lot of email marketers fail to keep an eye on the churn rate. An average email list will have a churn rate of 20% to 25%. This means that, despite your best efforts, you must always keep your new sign-ups hustle going!

Right People, Right Time Zone

Just like your digital marketing, email marketing must be geo-targeted. Your guests travel from all over the country or even the world. Modern email marketing tools help you avoid the costly mistake of prioritizing your time zone over your guests’. Never opt for a single send time based on email analytics (opens and click-through). Sending emails in the user’s time zone is the best solution. Example: NYC hotels sending email campaigns at 9am their time should know that it’s 6am in San Francisco and 3am in Hawaii. I should know. As a resident of Hawaii I get a lot of 3am emails!

Segment Early, Segment Often

Like voting in Chicago, segmenting early and often is the best practice when it comes to building a great email list. The most successful email list builders in the business use every ounce of data to personalize their emails. Be direct and ask clear, easy-to-answer questions at signup. Visual icons or buttons are better than checkboxes. Do not give the user a multiple choice exam requiring more than a minute of their time. Ask simple, visual questions and continue segmentation as you go. A great example of this is Airbnb’s business travel program:

Airbnb

Autoresponders – Don’t Put Them on Autopilot

Autoresponder is a program that automatically generates a set response, or series of responses, to a particular email address. A wonderful gift to email marketers, right? Well, like anything powerful, it can backfire if not used properly. Here is an example of how autoresponder campaigns can become irrelevant if not set up properly.

In this autoresponder schedule, the recipient receives the following messages, regardless of any behavior or action taken by the recipient. Day 1 starts when the user signs up for your email list.

Day 1: Welcome to our hotel email program!

Day 2: Here are some amazing things about booking direct.

Day 3: Here is a 15% off best available rate deal + exclusive rates for signing up.

Day 4: Apply for our co-branded credit card.

Now if a user/guest signs up and also books a hotel room on Day 1, the rest of the campaign becomes moot. So is there an answer? Of course there is! One word: Filters. An email filter removes people from the Autoresponder schedule based on their actions. Filters are your friends. Autoresponders without filters in place are like cars without seat belts. Any non-linear action by your target user can crash your entire campaign.

Avoid These Top 10 Mistakes

Here is a quick round-up of the most common mistakes. They are easy to fix, but can be detrimental to your hotel email marketing campaign if not addressed.

  1. Not using a permission-based list
  2. Using a list you haven’t used in a while (6-12 months)
  3. Confusing transactional email addresses with newsletter signups
  4. Not segmenting lists (by intent, location, purchasing behavior)
  5. Pumping discounts, not value
  6. Sending massively broad campaign emails
  7. Not including call to action or education
  8. Focusing on photos and ignoring typography
  9. Going beyond 600 pixels in width
  10. Not testing on multiple mobile devices and email clients

Keep Getting Better at It

There is an unwritten rule for successful email marketing. Every email should be better than the last. Nobody in the travel business understands this better than TripAdvisor and Kayak. Give Kayak your home airport and watch how targeted their emails become. You’ll start hearing about deals on places they know you are interested in based on your search history. It’s not creepy, since they clearly asked your permission when you signed up.

TripAdvisor’s emails also get smarter over time based on what cities and what categories of hotels you have been looking at. This kind of approach is much better than that “lost booking capture” tool your marketing agency is touting. Chasing someone who did not complete a booking is 2005. Anticipating where they are going next is where smart email marketing is going. Knowing where I’m traveling from is a good start, but it’s the destination that matters. TripAdvisor will be happy to show me where to stay and how to get there if they can figure out where I’m headed. As they collect data from on-site behavior and email clicks, the emails get smarter with price and location updates.

Conclusion

Email marketing is about two things: targeted segmentation and a high standard for content. Nobody wants to see mass advertising in their inbox. Successful email campaigns are not billboards for your marketing department. They are targeted taps on the shoulder of someone who actually wants to hear from you. Don’t let this wonderful opportunity for interaction go to waste. Use email to learn more about your guests, your product, and your message. Reward your participants with meaningful interaction. Be helpful and prosper.

 

My Top 6 Articles of 2016

2016 was a very interesting year and will surely be a memorable one. I have had the opportunity to grow and flourish personally and professionally thanks to support from many people.

First, I have to thank my readers for making this a banner year for my site. Social sharing this year was phenomenal, allowing my content to reach the far corners of the globe. I was especially thrilled to see Cook Islands on the list. Since my home base is in Hawaii, it’s nice to see my neighbors in Polynesia stopping by.

It was a great year of professional growth as well, thanks to my new role at The Rainmaker Group. I have been working with some amazing people on the art and science of integrating revenue management and digital marketing. More exciting updates on that role will be coming your way soon.

I loved having the opportunity to speak at many industry conferences and events, from Toronto to New Orleans, Las Vegas to Nashville. One major change I noticed this past year is that someone approached me at every single event to tell me that they subscribe to my blog! I am not famous yet, but it’s starting to feel like Almost Famous. When I started writing in 2013, I never thought I would get to meet the people who read my articles!

In 2017, I will keep writing content that you can use to grow professionally without getting bored to death. I’m still rooting for you to make more revenue and more profits. I am counting on you guys to continue spreading the word. As for 2016, the tribe has spoken. Here are my top posts based on traffic, engagement and social sharing:

  1. Hotel Website Design and Usability: Top 10 Mistakes
  2. BookingSuite: A Lesson in Direct Revenue Strategy
  3. Let’s Keep It Real: The Truth About Hotel Meta Search
  4. Super Metrics for Hotel Marketing & Online Revenue Optimization
  5. Dinosaur Metrics Are Taking a Bite Out of Your Hotel Marketing Performance
  6. Do You Really Need a Separate Brand for Millennials?

BookingSuite: A Lesson in Direct Revenue Strategy

direct revenue strategy

Throughout my career in revenue optimization for the hospitality and travel industry, I have always stressed the importance of owning your digital assets. This means having control of your domain, your marketing campaign’s analytics and history, and especially your website. As a strong supporter of open source technology, I have stepped in every time a marketing vendor (“expert”) started trashing new and innovative options for hotels. Of course, vendors will always favor their outdated proprietary systems over new technology. They have made a huge investment and have to keep selling. But being tied to old technology is never going to give your hotel an edge in the online marketplace.

WordPress is a perfect example. As a flexible, secure, and user-friendly website platform, it has been displacing proprietary content management systems worldwide. Threatened, some hotel marketing agencies starting publishing propaganda about WordPress; they said it was “unsafe” and did not include essential “marketing features.” In response, I have steadfastly encouraged hotels to embrace open source and steer clear of fear-mongering by agencies trying to push their agendas. Of course the agencies want you hooked on their website platforms. It provides them with the security of you not leaving them. Know that when you do leave, you will be left with nothing but a zip file containing the remains of your most profitable channel and a “we are sad to see you leave” email. Good luck!

Case in Point: BookingSuite

In 2014, I wrote a detailed article on Priceline’s Acquisition of Buuteeq, in which I again outlined the importance of owning your digital assets. Buuteeq was run by smart people who tapped into the reluctance of hotels to invest in their own direct revenue strategy. They offered to relieve hotels of the headache of owning and maintaining their digital assets, starting at just $99/month! They did a great job of marketing themselves and were able to successfully scale their own business by offering websites and marketing packages to hotels for a low monthly fee. At a crucial time when direct marketing investment was already a massive challenge for hotels, this approach was not doing the hotel industry any favors.

After the Priceline acquisition, I tried to make the strongest possible case for not renting your website and your marketing strategy from the largest online travel agency in the world. Priceline Inc. has its own agenda for growth. If you were to look at their stock performance and revenue breakdown, you would see that they do not make money building websites or running your marketing campaigns. They make money when people use their suite of OTA websites to book a room. Surprise! They prioritize their own direct revenue channel over yours.

Unfortunately, the illusory free lunch is too tempting for a lot of industry folks. BookingSuite (Buuteeq’s new identity under Booking.com) did more than just retain Buuteeq’s hundreds of hotel and B&B clients. They heavily leveraged the reluctance of hotels to spend time and money on marketing and signed up more hotels than ever. This seems to be a fatal flaw for hotels. They have made a habit of outsourcing 100% of their marketing to the vendor with the lowest bid. Then they get to check the box labeled “direct revenue strategy.” Death by checklist? Check.

Folks, We Have a Hard Stop

Earlier this week, BookingSuite announced that it will no longer be offering Search Engine Marketing services to hotels using their website platform. Below is the official email that was sent out to hotels using their system:

bookingsuite

They could not have summarized it better:

“SEM is an important component of your digital marketing strategy.”

You know what else is an important component of your digital marketing strategy? Your website. The thing that so many hotels are currently renting from BookingSuite. If they can drop SEM …how much sleep they would lose over the few dollars you pay them every month to rent a website? That $99 to $999/month website does not sound like such a hot deal now, does it?

Here is some Shakespeare for added effect:

“As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods. They kill us for their sport.”

― William Shakespeare, King Lear

Your website, booking engine, digital marketing efforts, and revenue management strategy are the pillars of your direct revenue. Viewing them as cost centers instead of investments in your future is the root problem underlying disadvantageous marketing decisions for hotels of all sizes. This cost vs investment approach (looking at departmental budgets instead of overall growth and revenue) is causing hotels to act against their own self-interest; it makes you pick the wrong vendors for wrong reasons.

Not to get all Nostradamus on you, but I would like to quote myself from all the way back in 2014:

“Ownership of your digital assets is more important than ever before in the history of the lodging business. Who provides your technology and in what format really matters. In this case, if your hotel is using a website made by Buuteeq, your site is now essentially a subsidiary of one of the biggest OTAs in the world.”

This Is the Checklist You Need

The fact remains that the majority of hotels and inns worldwide are renting their digital assets; and this is hurting their long-term direct revenue potential. When you make all your marketing decisions on the basis of lowest possible cost, your long-term profitability will suffer.

If you’re ready to take control, here’s a five-step checklist to get you back on track.

  1. Website. Pick any designer/website vendor in the world… but build and power your website using WordPress as your CMS. It is always the right time to start running and managing your most profitable digital channel using open source technology.
  2. Search Engine Optimization. Google is all about website speed, health, usability, and useful content. There are no secret algorithms that any agency has in place to tackle this. You can read in detail here how search engine optimization has changed for the hotel and travel industry over the years. Staying with a vendor because they are good at SEO and “keyword rankings” is like investing in the stock market using a psychic as your portfolio advisor.
  3. Pay Per Click. Here is some detail on why PPC is one of your most powerful marketing tools. Pick any vendor you like as long as you use your own credit card to pay Google directly and own your AdWords account. Yes, you should own your AdWords campaign so that you maintain control of your history and retain the quality score built over years of spending and testing. That way, when your vendor wants to peace out on you (example: what BookingSuite is doing now), it won’t be a big deal. You will have to find a new vendor; but you will not have to start from scratch again.
  4. Social Media. Make sure the ownership of all of your social media accounts stays with you. Use your email address, and not a vendor’s. This includes Facebook and all other social media marketing campaigns that you are currently running.
  5. Analytics. Stick with Google Analytics. Here is a detailed article on staying away from expensive solutions designed with agencies in mind. When working with Google Analytics, always set it up with a Gmail address that you own. You might have several vendors working on your account with access to the same data. But they shouldn’t control the account. Avoid the headache hotels experience every day when the vendor who owns their analytics account decides to walk away, taking years of website data with them.

Here is a detailed guide on managing all your digital assets. Successful hotel and travel marketing departments own and continually build on their marketing and digital assets. Just like you would not build a hotel on land that you do not own (or lease for a long time), your online assets should not be built in someone else’s proprietary digital environment. Of course, you will always need someone to help you maintain your hotel/home. But you don’t have to give someone the deed to the house in exchange for making sure the plumbing is working. *mic drop*

Conclusion

People I have worked with over the years know that I do not believe in declaring “wars”; I believe in making revenue. The hyperbole in the marketplace around the “war on OTAs” is impractical and annoying. Using this article to launch a tirade against BookingSuite is a complete waste of time. You cannot blame others for your poor decisions. Also, please remember that Priceline Inc. and Expedia Inc. are not going anywhere anytime soon. So, buck up, Champ.

My goal here is to highlight that now is (still) the perfect time to invest in owning and maintaining your digital assets and marketing campaigns. Marketing agencies and vendors will eventually get acquired or lose interest. Nobody can control or predict when that will happen to your marketing agency. I could not have predicted the exact date when Buuteeq (the helpful agency who wanted to take all your work and worries away at a super low price) would sell out to the world’s largest OTA…. or the date when they would later shut down the SEM services that were not making them enough money. What I can do and always will do is to recommend that you own and invest in your own digital assets and marketing. Remember: your profitability needs to outlast your current marketing agency. Stay woke.

Hotel Website Design and Usability: Top 10 Mistakes

Hotel website design, like any kind of design, is subjective. Nothing is more painful than a website design “discussion” where stakeholders talk for hours about colors, content and photos. For every extra person added to these meetings, more useless things get added and useful things get taken out. By the end of it, you have a website that is not usable for potential guests, which hurts your conversion rate and, more important, your revenue.

So in this post, let’s worry less about design and more about usability. To that end, here is a list of mistakes that can hurt your hotel website revenue, no matter how much you love your design.

1. Missing Address & Phone Number

You need to give website visitors your address and phone number right at the top of your home page. This is more important than your homepage slider, and even that oh so trendy moving video on loop that you recently added. Assuming that your phone number and location only matter on mobile is flawed thinking.

Sometimes people want to call you. When they are calling you, there’s a good chance they’re going to book with you. Before they book, they are very likely to search for information about your location. Travel research is still happening on larger screens. You have to make it easy for them to discover your exact location, and even easier to contact you.

Don’t bury this information in your footer. Would you wear your name tag on your shoe? Mike drop. Next.

2. Fluffy Homepage Taglines

Hotel websites are notorious for fluffy descriptive taglines. I am not sure where this trend started, but it really has to stop. Home page is prime real estate for you to talk about who you are, what you do, and where are you located. Marketing is not stuffing adjectives like “Extraordinaire, Award Winning, Blissful Abode, etc.” on your home page. Providing the right information up front will lead your visitors deeper into your website for discovery, and not on an expedition to try to find simple answers about who you are, where you are, and what you offer. You have a few seconds to keep a new visitor on your website. Let’s not use that time to bombard them with fluff.

3. Music (Can you not?)

This is a public service announcement: Please don’t put music on your website.

Anything (music, videos) that autoplays on a website is a conversion death trap. The majority of bookings happen Monday through Friday, 9am-5pm. People are at work…and nothing is more disastrous than suddenly having your office laptop broadcast the sounds of singing whales, crashing waves, or romantic piano music while you are trying to book your vacation. Especially while your boss is waiting on that TPS report.

4. Cannibalizing Your Own Traffic

I have written a massive article on this topic that you can read here. Obviously, not enough people have read it. Social media traffic is useful only when it’s pointing people inwards, into your website! I am always surprised to see social media exit signs all over hotel websites. Do you think anyone leaving your website to go to YouTube is ever coming back? I refer to it as the black hole of the Internet universe. All that effort you spent to get people to come to your website is wasted when you then lead them right out.

5. Poorly Embedded Videos

Videos can do wonders for your website engagement. I am always thrilled when a hotel website utilizes videos. YouTube is a great place to host videos that you can embed into your website. But beware one small setting that can wreak havoc: Suggested Videos. This totally defeats the purpose of having video embedded on your website, as people are now getting sucked directly from your site back into the Internet black hole of cat videos! What’s even worse than that? When your competitors’ hotel videos start showing up! Now that is really embarrassing.

So, when you are embedding YouTube videos on your website, make sure you follow these easy steps:

  1. Copy your video embed code.
  2. Select the “show more” option.
  3. Uncheck the “show suggested videos when the video finishes” box.
  4. Copy and paste the new code into your website.

6. Bad Photography

Photos make or break a hotel website. Still, a lot of hotels do not invest in photography at the level they should. I have seen some amazing website design themes ruined by bad photos. The importance of unique, high-quality photos is not limited to your website. They need to be used on every OTA that you work with. Instead of getting photos updated once in 5 or 10 years, organize a seasonal photo shoot to cover the full spectrum of your location and seasonality.

Sadly, there are countless hotel websites where I can instantly make out who made it thanks to the ubiquitousness of the marketing agency’s stock photos. From San Francisco to San Antonio, the same couple is having a great romantic dinner, day after day, year after year. Another couple is enjoying the generic beach in San Diego, and Miami, and South Carolina. You get the drift.

7. Press Releases

Some find it hard to believe, and even find this notion offensive, but I’ll say it anyway: a press release is not real content. Let me elaborate. A press release does not fall into any real content category people are using these days. Current news can be found on Twitter or an actual news website. Topical discussions and viewpoints are offered in blogs and podcasts. Having a press release page on your website does not help educate your audience. You need to convert that information into useful content potential visitors can use. A beautiful press kit available for download will run circles around any effort and money spent on press releases. News about renovations, re-branding, new food and beverage outlets, etc., needs to be broadcast live on your hotel blog.

8. The Dreaded Restaurant & Spa Menu PDF

Larger resort websites are top offenders when it comes to this. PDFs are awful when it comes to usability. First there is the download time and resolution issues that occur on mobile devices, combined with the need to “select” the right app to open them. PDFs are just a bad idea. I just want to see if I can get a salad! It shouldn’t require so much effort, and then become a permanent file on my phone.

HTML it instead! Let people view information without fixed borders. They are great for printing, but who is even printing anything these days? You can always offer a “printable” option for laptop users, but it cannot and should not be the only way to access information on your website.

9. One Call to Action

With the heavy emphasis on booking direct, it seems like every website has become a big “BOOK NOW AND SAVE” destination. You website needs to be a part of the larger travel booking conversation. If the only thing you are yelling is “BOOK NOW!” you are not distinguishing yourself from the hundreds of other websites that are doing the exact same thing. You have to do better.

Diversify your calls to action. Ask visitors to interact with you in other ways. Maybe your guest is still researching their options, trying to understand your location and value proposition. Make it easy for them to contact you by requiring very limited information in your contact form. “Give us your name and email, and we’ll get right back to you.” Help with the journey first, and the odds of them booking with you go up tremendously.

Pro Tip: The number of questions asked in a contact form is inversely proportional to the number of people who will fill out that form and convert.

10. Bad Booking Engines

Booking engines deserve their own very special usability article, which I will get to in the near future. For now, know this: For your guest, the booking engine is a part of your website. They do not know or care that you are renting this cart from a provider that has been making booking engines since 1989, or from a guy in his garage in Seattle. When you confuse your visitors with a bad booking experience, you are doing two things:

  1. Tanking all the marketing budget you spent to drive this person to your website
  2. Training them not to waste time with you, and instead use an Online Travel Agent that lets them book a room more efficiently

Your website is your storefront. There is NO point to having all the great photography, content, ambience, and offerings…and then a broken cash register at the end of the experience.

Conclusion

Yes, make a beautiful website! It should be modern, aesthetically pleasing, inviting, and show off your property. But also remember to avoid the pitfalls I have highlighted above. Start making your website perform better. It’s hard to remember that these small things can matter more than the expensive design things, but do not give in to marketing peer pressure. Usability beats trends. Make sure your most profitable revenue channel is more than just a pretty face. Stay Woke.

Super Metrics for Hotel Marketing & Online Revenue Optimization

Analytics metrics have evolved over the past few years. In my last article, I discussed the dinosaur metrics that have fallen in value since the last mass extinction event. Since online marketing and digital advertising are rapidly changing, looking at outdated metrics can allow you to be completely blindsided in regards to your online revenue and profitability.

In this article, I cover the five super metrics that now dominate the analytics and marketing world. These metrics have been around forever but are more relevant today than ever. These metrics have always been are near and dear to my heart – this is not just an infatuation. They have helped me evaluate and transform hotel assets worth over $1B. So grab your cape. Let’s dive into the future.

#1: Bounce Rate

Bounce rate has been one of my personal favorites since 1999. This metric will tell you explicitly whether your design, content, navigation and marketing are working for you. It’s my ultimate reality check metric.

According to Wikipedia, bounce rate “represents the percentage of visitors who enter the site and then leave (“bounce”) rather than continuing on to view other pages within the same site.”

My personal definition for bounce rate is the failure to get your website visitor to perform any action on your website. In the case of hotel/travel websites, that action is not necessarily limited to booking. You can expect a visitor to do a number of things, including: sign up for your newsletter, check dates and rates, read blog posts, browse your photo gallery, watch a video tour, etc.

As with all super metrics, you must segment and dig deeper to get the best outcome and insights. You can segment your bounce rate by Source, such as:

  • Google AdWords
  • Google Display
  • Facebook
  • Direct Traffic

“Bulk data generates reports. Segmentation generates insights.”

– Vikram Singh

What’s a good bounce rate? Great question. For hotel and travel websites, anything over 40% deserves scrutiny. One exception is a blog, where most people will read your landing page and be done. But, dig deeper. How many of the bounced visitors are already subscribed to your list? Did you have a call to action on your blog post? Context is king, y’all.

Here are some of the key culprits behind a high bounce rate:

  • Bad website/landing page design. High bounce should help you look beyond the high fives your team gave each other when your new website launched. Design conversation needs to move beyond colors, rainbows and unicorns on your home page. Your content and layout need to lead visitors to take action.
  • Bad navigation. Bad navigation is one of the leading causes of visitor confusion. Somewhere along the way we had an unfortunate invasion by the hamburger button. Today, many hotel websites are using it for vanity; it looks cute and doesn’t interfere with their mood-setting photography. However, if visitors cannot navigate to the content they are looking for, they will be bouncing off your cute website. You know the thing about making your website visitors feel stupid… they start to feel the same way about you.
  • Slow load times. Not since Tom Cruise mentioned it in Top Gun have your website visitors have had such a strong need… a need for speed! Load time for your website cannot be over four seconds on the very high end of the spectrum. Slow load time is one of the top reasons for high bounce rates. There is a whole section in Google Analytics where you can monitor this and stay on top. Log in and start exploring.

*Pro tip: Don’t test load times from the work laptop, desktop, or mobile device where you regularly view your website. Test from a random device to avoid the cookie monster.

#2: Average Order Value/Lifetime Value

This is a critical super metric that gives you good insight into how much your website is producing for you per visitor.

Average Order Value = Total Revenue / Number of Reservations

This metric is extremely helpful when you are trying to figure out ways to reduce visitor churn. It also helps you identify and reach out to better-performing segments with your inbound marketing efforts. Even better, you can start to figure out the average lifetime value of your guests, who may book with you several times over the course of a year.

Running specials in your low demand period? Adding a new restaurant? Renovations? Service upgrades? Knowing the average order value and average lifetime value of your guests will help you reach out to your most valuable guest segments first. TripAdvisor cannot be the only source for news and information about your hotel. Identify your most loyal guests and talk to them regularly.

#3: Custom Goals

Nothing is more painful for an analytics fan like me than hearing people say that the only website metric they care about is tracked ROI. Nothing else matters. (You know, the Gordon Gekko types.)

In fact, tracked revenue is a small part of what you need to be looking at when deciding on your marketing budgets. Last click attribution models will show quick gains, but won’t account for changes in the market (sometimes big ones). Examples include a new hotel opening, airline pattern changes, a drop in your user review score, etc.

The smartest people in marketing and analytics are looking at the bigger picture. Instead of staring hard at the bottom of the funnel, pay attention to the other actions visitors take on your website, such as:

  • Contact form submissions. What were the top questions visitors asked about the hotel? Were they interested in weddings? Food & Beverage? Meetings?
  • Video watching. What videos were played on the website, and at what point were they paused/abandoned? (Yes, Google Analytics tracks videos /events.)
  • Newsletter/blog/email signups. These are the guys who are interested, and likely to do business with you more than once in their lifetime.

Set custom goals for each micro action you want your visitors to take, and watch what happens. You’ll quickly find out what’s working, what’s not, and which visitors are the ones you want to attract and keep.

#4: Website Conversion Rate

This is a powerful metric that tells you what percentage of your website visitors actually put money in your pocket. Simple, right? No. Because most marketing managers quote their booking engine conversion rate as their website conversion rate, and that is a problem.

Important: In order to get this metric right, your booking engine must be connected to your website analytics software. No connection = No conversion data.

True story:
Once during a pitch meeting with a hotel group in Santa Barbara, my partner (who is a marketing Jedi) asked the hotel’s ecommerce manager their website conversion rate. He did not know what that meant. Let’s just say we did not win that contract. Or as kids these days say…Awkward!

Not knowing the conversion rate is one thing. Telling people that your website is converting at 14% is much more dangerous. When I hear super high numbers like that, I know that someone is quoting:

a) Booking engine conversion rate = how many visitors got into the booking engine versus how many checked out

And not the …

b) Website conversion rate = how many people visited your website and then clicked into the booking engine and then checked out

Quoting someone a 14% overall conversion rate means you are breaking all the rules of Internet Physics! High fives may occur… but do not expect a call from MIT or CalTech.

Conversion rate is a Boss Metric. Basically, if you can move this number up by a few percentage points, you’ll see a massive change in your overall revenue. By converting more of your total visitors on the website, you are  multiplying all of your marketing and advertising investments!

#5: Booking Engine & Website Abandonment

We have just covered some rock star metrics. …but booking engine/website abandonment is like a shot of adrenalin administered straight to your bank account. All you Pulp Fiction fans know what I am talking about. That scene with John Travolta and Uma Thurman flashes in front of my eyes every time I think of the power of Abandonment Rate. Let me elaborate, starting with the definition.

Abandonment Rate = Abandoned Bookings* / Total Bookings Initiated

(*Abandoned Bookings = Bookings Initiated − Bookings Completed)

So, why is this such a powerful metric? There are two specific reasons:

  1. No other metric can have a faster and more positive direct impact on your revenue.
  2. It involves fixing just a few steps in your final checkout process. It does not require an elaborate audit and a corporate committee to figure out what to do.

Now there is a scary reason why this is not talked about more in the hospitality business: the majority of hotels are running one of many conversion-poor booking engines. To make matters worse, these engines are deployed across thousands of hotels. Any customization to help you reduce your abandonment rate is going to be deeply frowned upon.

You can always take your abandonment rate optimization game to a new level. Here are some ideas on segmenting your abandonment rate. Try segmenting by source:

  • AdWords
  • Google Display
  • Facebook Ads
  • Direct Traffic

And by product:

  • Room Type
  • Package Type
  • Rate Type

This segmentation will help you get insights into which visitors (from what sources) abandon the booking process. This allows you to check any messaging and rate issues that are causing them to leave. As you analyze, please know that there are always rate shoppers hitting your website to find the best rate, and they might leave the booking engine to just to confirm elsewhere out of habit. You are looking for the details, not bulk numbers.

The solution is not to sign up for a software to send automatic emails to people who left the booking engine after leaving their contact info. Maybe their boss walked in asking about the missing cover sheet on the TPS report. The real reason for doing this analysis is to find out where the revenue bleed exists.

Conclusion

Analytics is rapidly evolving; the metrics that mattered just a few years ago are obsolete. Google and Facebook are brawling for online marketing dollars, and those are things you cannot control. What you can do is reject the ridiculous post mortem style monthly report that is filled with data but no insights. Instead, start getting your hands dirty by digging into your own open source website and analytics program. Embrace Google Analytics and start looking for information and insights that will bring you more revenue. Armed with these powerful Super Metrics, you can become a hero by increasing your hotel’s profitability and revenue.

Dinosaur Metrics Are Taking a Bite Out of Your Hotel Marketing Performance

Marketing is evolving as I am typing this sentence. I’m here to make sure you are not wasting your time, energy and marketing budgets by focusing on outdated metrics. Many of the metrics you’re using have become irrelevant because of the seismic change in how people are researching and booking travel today. If you are still measuring what does not matter, you will end up getting blindsided. Don’t let a false sense of security, or an unwillingness to change, cost you market share and revenue.

Outdated Online Marketing Metrics

Traffic

Measuring straight up year-over-year traffic is a quick way to lead yourself into the land of confusion. Because of the way Google has personalized the heck out of their search engine, those massive droves of online visitors that used to reach your website are now:

  1. Finding the information they need in the Google universe (Google Hotel Finder, Google Flights, etc)
  2. Seeing their own version of Google based on their browsing history, their click-thru history, and the retargeting associated with their Gmail accounts. Basically, they are not seeing universal results, which used to result in massive traffic numbers.

Over the past several years, I have seen a decline in website traffic across the board in hotels and travel. The way people are moving across devices throughout the day, coupled with their growing concerns about privacy, means it’s getting harder to track them. Don’t worry: those wanting to sell you ads are working hard on a solution. But conversion and engagement metrics, not traffic, need to be center stage.

Childish Gambino sums it up: “Yeah, you got some silverware, but really are you eating though?”

Keyword Ranking

The personalization of search engines that I highlighted above directly affects another popular favorite from the days of old timey marketing: the beloved Keyword Ranking report. Back in the day, you know pre-2005, you could really hang your hat on this one. Rankings meant traffic, and traffic converted. Ah, the good old days! Today you are paying someone to dominate a list of keywords as part of SEO. You might as well burn cash to stay warm. Read these articles instead to learn how SEO has evolved, and why ‘pay to play’ is the new (old) king.

Meaningful content and website expansion have replaced keyword rankings. Looking at the Top 10 Keywords report in 2016 is like looking at a newspaper from 2005 to predict the weather today.

Email Open Rate

Bragging about the size of your email database is so last decade. The more relevant question is: how many segments or groups do you have within your database? Male vs. Female? USA vs. International? City vs. State? Sending massive email blasts without any segmentation is a sure shot way to get ignored/unsubscribed. Your content is key and needs to be segmented to succeed. Here’s an example of an email campaign that is WAY too broad, and therefore destined to fail.

137_Travel_Deals
You can beat your competition by embracing the power of segmentation. Like search engines, email systems also are not doing what they used to do back in the day: the good ol’ pixel-based tracking. One of the biggest email clients (Gmail) does not open image emails by default, which singlehandedly derails the “opened” metric. Anyway, sending emails like the one above does not help, even if they register as opened. I may have opened the email, but I will not sift through 100+ deals to find what I need, thanks. I have Google/Expedia for that!

Social Likes, Shares, Followers

Still counting Likes? Followers? Well, you can stop doing that. Neither of these things is anything more than a suggestion that someone might pay attention to you. For hotels and travel, this is where discussion is a better KPI (Key Performance Indicator) than the number of likes, retweets, and shares. A discussion can be an online interaction on social media, a phone call, or an email exchange. These interactions can take place during the trip planning phase, at the property during the stay/event, or post stay. All of those activities mean more than clicking on a Like button.

Social media is not the place to be broadcasting a message and expecting to get revenue. I fondly remember the days when agencies could make money by adding a “BOOK NOW” link on Facebook! But that didn’t last long. Today you need to look at the level of discussion you are having online. So, have you engaged your customers? What content have you produced that they should care about? These are the real questions to ask.

Pro Tip: Look at Insights section of your Facebook page. Go here to see your Twitter situation: http://analytics.twitter.com.

Conclusion

Travel is one of the most competitive segments online. You have to up your analytics game if you want to stay relevant. Pats on the back and high fives for outdated metrics are bad for your profitability (and your street cred). It’s always a great time to update your online marketing metrics to stay competitive. In my next post, I will cover the exciting metrics that actually drive your profitability. Stay tuned, stay woke!