It’s Time to Burst the Hotel SEO Bubble: What Hotels Really Need to Know

Hotel search engine optimization (SEO) is one of the most debated online marketing techniques in our industry. That’s because its efficacy is hard to prove, and techniques have to constantly change to outmaneuver Google’s updates. Google maintains strict control and secrecy about how they manage and update their search engine results pages. Of course, there are guidelines posted on their Webmaster Central product, and a few utterances here and there. This leaves the floor open for some serious speculation… Cue in the SEO “experts.” I am not an SEO expert, nor have I played one on TV. But I am definitely a trained SEO observer who has been in the industry for a decade, and a huge fan of web analytics and data-driven decision making.

It’s sad to see articles like this circulated in the hotel industry: “Google and SEO: what you should do, should not do, penguin, panic, panda, algorithm,” followed by “please hire us, we have the answer.”  These articles are usually written by the SEO Manager of a big WalMart-style hotel marketing agency. Agencies also circulate baseless, misleading and ridiculous statistics, like:  “56% of hotel revenue is from SEO.”

On the other side, there is a counter-culture saying that SEO is dead and has been dead for a while. Both camps are wrong. Extreme views and made-up statistics like these are harmful to the hotel industry.

So, when did it all get out of hand? What should hotels and travel websites really be doing to improve their Google organic (SEO) revenue? Let’s start by taking a look back …way back.

The Golden Age of Hotel SEO/Remember the Titans?

There was a Golden Age of Hotel SEO? You better believe it! It was 2000-2010. I vividly remember it. A hotel could not only get placement right on the very  top left of the screen for hyper-competitive terms like “hotels in NYC” or “hotels in London,” but could also get  hundreds of thousands of visits and millions of dollars in revenue. There were no maps, no carousels, and no hotel finders.

Now guess who really capitalized on SEO during this Golden Age. If you guessed hotel brands, you are wrong. OTAs like Expedia.com and Hotels.com ruled in the US; Booking.com in Europe made millions. (Their success continues to this day.) Brands like Hilton, Marriott, Starwood and IHG, to name a few, were actually busy shutting down their property-level websites. Hotel marketing types refused to believe in online marketing; they were so caught up in their own hype that they missed the boat to the greatest hotel revenue party on the planet. It was a blunder that is painful for me to bring up, but for the sake of history I must.

Fast forward to today. OTAs still rule Google and rank for some heavy-hitting terms. However, Google any “hotel + city name” term and you will no longer see an independent hotel, or a brand site,  show up on the top half of your screen. Google has taken a machete to the traditional organic results page to push the products that make them money. Now it’s all about the Benjamins (Google Map Ads, Google Hotel Finder Ads, and good old PPC).

2013 might not be the Golden Age of Hotel SEO, but there is much you can do. “Optimize everything” is my philosophy. Here are some things  you need to consider if you are serious about improving your hotel’s website’s organic rankings and online revenue.

1. Open Source or Bust

Owning your brand is bigger then SEO, always has been and always will be. There is one real estate market that is booming in marketing land: it’s called making and owning your brand. Renting your hotel website — your most profitable direct revenue channel — needs to be dropped like a bad habit (or hot potato, you choose). Don’t give away the keys to your online home by building it on a closed proprietary CMS (content management system) that you can’t control, remove or optimize at will.

Instead, get a cool design and then pick any open source CMS (WordPress, Joomla, Drupal) to build it on. An army of developers backs these programs when it comes to Google SEO compatibility. There are also some amazing SEO plugins that will help you get back control of your SEO destiny. A lot of them tie into Google Webmaster Central and help your website maintain up-to-date Google compliance. Bonus feature: You will always own your content, photos, website and reputation. How cool is that! Double bonus: You do not lose your entire online footprint with Google every time you redesign or switch website design vendors. #winning

2. Content Is King in the Google Galaxy

There has never been a better time to invest in quality content. Hotel and travel websites looking for organic traffic need to move away from the trend of image-rich and content-poor websites.

In case you’re wondering why so many hotel websites look so similar (and perform so poorly), here’s the formula:

agency’s website template + agency’s regional sales goals + proprietary CMS + sweatshop content writers

= 1000’s of zombie clone websites

Quality images are crucial for hotel sites, but you also have to give people and search engines something nice to read. Hotel websites stuffed with keywords and faux packages have been dropping fast since the 2011 Panda update. Updates are continuing to target websites with low-quality content. Don’t let your website be average, boring and stuffed with meaningless adjectives. Participate in content generation, and say things about your hotel that really matter to your guests.

3. Aim Smaller and More Specific

You have to move beyond city name + hotel keywords like “hotels in London.” Even if you rank for those keywords (good luck!), the referral traffic is diminishing rapidly.

It’s time to pay attention to Latent Semantic Indexing, which simply means that people are going to search for the same thing in different ways. Target terms travelers use to describe your hotel. Why are people traveling to your location? What are they looking to do? What do they like about your property? Look into your website analytics to find out what search terms are bringing visitors to your website and your blog. Data is available to you through Google Analytics, Google Webmaster Tools and Google AdWords Keyword Tool. Please use it!

To put it another way, always try to solve a problem or answer a question for your guests. Focus on answering the questions they want answered, and you will no longer be a slave to keywords with high volume, diminishing traffic and poor conversion.

4. Google+ Is Not Just an Option, It’s the Law

For a while I was convinced that Google+ was Google’s sour grapes product, because they had failed to be a social network. Of course, Google is way too smart to worry about any grapes. Finally, after seeing how they rolled maps, local and reviews into G+, I get it. Millions of business owners worldwide now have to go and get a G+ account, not to mention read ridiculous and boring articles about why your hotel, blah blah, must use Google+, blah blah, we can help.”

A name and a face to go with content is being required. That’s the game. Google Authorship isn’t a suggestion, it’s a necessity. It identifies that a real person is creating the copy. Every Google account subscriber is asked to sign up for Google+. The search engine weighed up social shares last year and downgraded back links; that’s not a coincidence.

Keyword-laden domains no longer have an advantage. The EMD update might not have affected a ton of sites, but it closed the loophole from the day it went into action.

5. SEO & Analytics: Tame the ROI Monster

Log into any hotel’s analytics profile; the SEO traffic numbers with the tag “not provided” are consistently rising. On October 18, 2011, Google announced that they would no longer pass keyword query data through its referrer string for logged in users. That means that instead of showing organic keyword data for these visitors, Google Analytics will offer you the useful description of “not provided.” Keywords that result in a click on your PPC ad are not included in SEO traffic numbers either. This lack of data is making year-on-year comparisons pretty useless, and making it harder than ever to assign ROI numbers to SEO. Chasing your agency to give you a comprehensive ROI report is just a waste of time.

ROI expectations must be tamed to reflect the change in how SEO data is populating in analytics. Hotels that don’t want to invest in SEO because it is hard to show ROI have a wonderful excuse to dwell in their misguided marketing utopia where you never have to do any SEO. However, smart hotels are still pursuing an active SEO strategy by investing in content, local citations, videos, etc. — despite the analytics and reporting challenges.

Conclusion

Search engine optimization has been drastically transformed over the last decade. The Golden Age is over, and it will surely be missed by the hotels who once made tons of revenue through higher rankings. But it’s time to come to terms with current realities.

Reevaluate your SEO strategy. Are you paying for outdated services? If you’re working with a larger agency, consider that they may be focused on continuing to extract profit from their well-established yet outdated SEO department. Every hotel in the agency system has a big decision to make: continue paying for outdated strategies and promises by hiring “safe” and familiar vendors; or rework your search engine marketing strategy to make the most of current and future search trends.

But keep this in mind. While you sit in meetings deciding whether you want to make revenue with or without ROI reporting, Google is  hustling big-time. Check out their stock price, and their online revenue from click advertising. All arrows are pointing to the sky. They want a better search page for their customers, and more ways to make money through PPC advertising and their other search products.

It’s easy to get confused or caught in the middle when SEO is changing so rapidly. But no matter how much things change, it is always a good idea to do is move away from industrial SEO  strategy and start (or continue) doing the right things: maintain control of your website, keep adding good content, blog about issues that interest your guests, build and optimize your site based on the latest techniques and technology.

Your hotel managers and owners need to get very comfortable with the idea that they will have to continually spend money on expanding website content and buying traffic (PPC). Search changes fast, and there are no guarantees. But that doesn’t mean you should feel paralyzed and stop trying to make the most of your online revenue opportunities.

 

Hey, Airline Industry! It’s Time to Care Again.

I recently completed another round-the-world trip and got to experience a few different airlines and their cultures. It always amazes me how different things are when you switch carriers, even when you are paying the exact same fare. After logging a million miles in the air over the past few years, I think it’s time to give some feedback.

Airlines are the wings (literally) on which the global travel industry relies to deliver the tourist demand. There is only so far you can drive, and intercontinental travel gets even trickier. Hotels, restaurants, and tour operators rely on a network of airplanes to make global tourism a reality. Yet, air travel is the sector consistently on the brink.

For quite some time now, air travel has started to really suck. The steady gradual decline is impossible to ignore. Several external factors have been credited for the downfall of service: taxes, fuel costs, government regulations, etc. These are all valid reasons that are beyond the control of the airlines.

These are the times and conditions that have been handed over to the airline industry. They (like Frodo) may wish that none of these things had happened. But to quote Gandalf: “So do all who live to see such times, but that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to us.”

So let’s talk about the things that can be changed and controlled by airlines. I have been flying all over the globe for business and personal trips for the past several years. All those miles in the air have given me a front row seat to how airlines operate both in First/Business class as well as steerage (Economy) class.

Here are some things I think could improve internally.

Clean it up!

“Living” on a  flight in a dirty seat is no better than sleeping in a dirty hotel room. Nobody likes that. Dirty airplanes are just not welcoming. I have stepped into a lot of planes that some would only describe as “gnarly.” Crumbs and food stains = instant frown on a passenger’s face, no matter how optimistic he is. United and American seem to be competing on flying the dirtiest planes. Regional jets are especially dirty, which seems odd, as cleaning a smaller plane should be quicker and easier.

The nose knows.

First impressions matter, and lingering ones do too! Imagine stepping into a foul cloud at the beginning of a 2-, 3-, 4-, or 9-hour journey! You are already miserable and the doors have not even been shut yet. United and American (again) smell notoriously bad on both shorter and international long haul flights. Asian airlines like Japan Airlines, Singapore Air and others obviously have an aromatherapist that they consult. I know it’s not cheap, but it’s definitely cheaper than refurbishing the entire aircraft.

Offer caffeination salvation.

Ordering a cup of tea on an airplane is always tragic. Like Hamlet in a cup. Even the best brand of tea (which, by the way, is never available on board) can’t mask the taste of the water they’re using. And coffee? Expect it to be “extra-strong” = burnt + boiled coffee; it can scar your palate and stick to your clothes as well.

Some European carriers (SwissAir and Lufthansa) and several based in Asia do a great job of providing hot caffeinated beverages that cheer up the dullest flights. Example: freshly made hot green tea on Japan Airlines and ANA (All Nippon) is a lifesaver on 12-hour Chicago-Tokyo flights. A particular Food and Beverage instructor in my hotel school always repeated this annoying phrase, which I truly appreciate now: “Coffee Boiled is Coffee Spoiled.” Just as I write this, Singapore Airlines is planning to serve Illy coffee on board.  The happiest fliers on earth are the ones with an Illy coffee cup in their hands at 30,000 feet!

Smile, please!

A warm smile is the universal language of kindness. This language seems extinct when travelling on some of the leading US-based carriers. From the check-in counter to the airplane. No smiles for you!

Flight attendants work really hard. Add the general negativity surrounding airline and labor relations, outdated rules and restrictions, horribly designed airports… what we have here is a complete failure to smile.

Asian-based airlines have somehow made this a part of their standard operating procedure. Ask for anything from anyone in uniform, and you will get a smile. (JAL even draws them on children’s drink lids.) This has got to be the least expensive way to upgrade your fleet.

WiFi or die.

Airlines can learn from hotels and global coffee retailers. Want to minimize complaints and have a plane full of people not bothering you? Easy…give them free WiFi! The Internet always has something for everyone. No airline “In Flight Entertainment” or IFE (as it’s known in the biz) can compete with the latest news, stock prices or celebrity updates getting streamed to their passengers’ beloved devices. Charging $10 to $19/hour and excluding streaming = passengers looking to be unhappy. The first airline to offer this is going to supercharge their customer base and marketing.

Power to the people.

It’s almost 2014…not sure why every single seat does not have a charger. I believe that an idle passenger’s mind is the devil’s workshop. Here is a crucial fact that cannot be ignored by any business: we are all hopelessly attached/addicted to our electronic devices. Why not let people stay charged up, and not run out of juice mid-flight? Losing battery charge has got to be one of the top fears in today’s traveller’s mind. Business Class already has this option. But guess what? They also have leg space, better meals…did I mention leg space? Now look back at the masses in steerage. Don’t those poor souls at least deserve to charge their phones?

Give service, not lectures.

Over the recent years, flight attendants for US-based carriers have almost been forced to be Federal Marshals on the plane. This is not helping the flying experience and is making everyone uncomfortable. Making everyone hyper-nervous by continuously announcing what you “CANNOT” do… is pretty lame.

Conclusion

First, let me say that all US-based airlines are not the same. I have not flown Virgin America, which I hear is awesome. Why haven’t I tried it? Because it will make my future American flights extra painful! (Disclosure: I am an AA elite flier.) And there are plenty of non-American airlines that are equally bad or worse. I endured some of the worse service ever on a recent KLM flight. So it’s not really a cultural thing. It’s a business thing, and it’s about making service a priority again. The way it used to be when air travel started.

I hear that people used to look forward to flying. It was itself a destination. They wore dressy clothes to commemorate the experience, and they felt pampered (despite the cigarette smoke circling their heads). Now we dread the actual “travel” part of travelling, and just want to get where we’re going as quickly and painlessly as possible.

Airlines that continue to make flying an experience to remember are the ones that offer hope for the future of  travel. To quote  Dr. Rumack from my all time favorite airline movie (Airplane) “Good luck, we are all counting on you!”

RoomKey.com: Hotel Brands’ Misguided Attempt to Become an OTA

1coyote
How many times have I heard the hotel brands say they are going to “fight and win” the Internet battle against the big bad OTA wolves? It’s easy to see why the hotel brands are angry/embarrassed: those OTAs have done a massively superior job of marketing hotel rooms online.

So what have the brands decided to do? Unite and conquer. It almost sounds like a joke! “Hilton, Hyatt, InterContinental, Marriott, Wyndham and Choice Hotels walk into a bar…” The punchline is a website called RoomKey.com. It’s the hotel brands’ very own “OTA” response. Now at this point, I know a lot of you in the hotel industry already know about Room Key. But guess what? Everyday travellers have no idea what Room Key is. There are a few good reasons for that.

Here is why I think RoomKey.com has been set for failure from the very start.

Using Pop-Ups Is Not a Marketing Plan

I am shocked that Room Key’s core marketing plan got approved. I guess the brands had a few million dollars burning a hole in their pockets. The point is that the approach was discussed, approved and “built” (they acquired hotelicopter.com) and has been actively marketed.

You should know that you are setting yourself up for failure when your core marketing strategy revolves around pop-ups. Now this might have passed for an effective marketing play in… let’s say 1999. Today, pop-ups are so dead it’s not even funny. Really. Pop-ups really suck. The only reason we are still seeing any kind of pop-ups when we exit a site is that Internet browsers have failed to develop at the pace of the Internet (looking at you, Internet Explorer!). RoomKey.com gets the majority of its traffic from a “pop-under” that annoyingly appears when you close any participating brand website.OMG. I know, I am shocked, too! How did this get approved and then funded by the big hotel brands? Hypnosis, maybe? If spam (yes, “pop ups” are spam) is your big idea for traffic generation, imminent slowdown/backlash lies ahead.

Pop-ups for Life!

I had a wonderful opportunity to be on a panel with Room Key’s CEO, John F. Davis III. We met at the 2012 Lodging Conference in Arizona. I remember that I was pretty stoked to meet the founder of Pegasus! I am geeky like that. But what he told Tnooz in an interview that appeared in October 2012 is something that baffled me. John said, “Room Key’s business model was built on the concept of exit traffic, and for a business that is still quite new, only having removed the beta tag from our site 3 months ago, the scale of this exposure exceeds our initial expectations.” It’s pretty obvious to me that Room Key’s business and traffic model revolves around, well, pop-ups. Sadly, they think it’s something new and innovative. There is a reason why nobody has built a brand online using pop-ups. They are SPAM (we just covered this).

Farm to Table to Pop-Ups?

Room Key’s CEO also shared that “the easiest way to express Room Key’s unique position in the industry is to look outside online travel to another relevant consumer trend – in food.  We see real parallels with the farm-to-table movement.” Not sure the farm-to-table example is even close to what Room Key is doing. What real value is being provided to someone coming to your website by serving them a pop-up? There is nothing organic about that. What’s truly organic is traffic that you earn through providing valuable content. What’s organic is coming up with a strategy to provide value, build your brand, and attract repeat customers. What’s not organic is grabbing a one-time booking from someone stumbling onto your website via spam. Spam is not an organic food.

Okay, I think you get the parallel between the long-preserved nature of both pop-up technology and mystery meat. Let’s talk numbers.

Traffic Number Exaggerations + Compset Confusion

John Davis claimed to have “14 million visitors a month” in the same October 2012 interview. Compete.com shows their visits averaging 3.7 to 4.8 million; in other words, 10 million visits short of what they stated.

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But hey, Compete.com is just an online tool. It can be off by a few million… right?

John also said that only 5% were direct visits (people who typed Roomkey.com into their browser window). Analytics 101 tells us that with 5% direct visits, the Roomkey.com brand is not actively building itself online. No conversion or revenue statistics have ever been shared. To quote John, “our conversion rates are very much in line with the objectives we set for the business and are meeting shareholder expectations, bringing millions of visitors per month into the Roomkey.com experience.” I really wish my shareholders were this naïve, happy and satisfied.

Another interesting example of cluelessness is this quote from their standard presentation: “Roomkey.com is receiving 7 times more visits than other recent start-up hotel websites like Hipmunk.com and Room77.com.” Comparing a pop-up catcher to awesome and innovative startups like Hipmunk and Room77  just highlights how clueless the brands still are.

Forgetting Something?

There is another fundamental problem with the site. The “beta” launch did not include any independent hotels. You can’t be a travel engine/online agent if you exclude an entire segment of the hotel industry. Launching with only the brands that paid for Room Key is going to come back to bite them, as they are now actively seeking to add independent hotels. Why won’t the independents want to join? Simple answer. Suspicion. How do independent hotels know that Marriott, Hilton and Wyndam hotels will not always be Room Key darlings? How can they expect to get fair representation? Not a smart move for an “innovative hotel search engine.”

Any Chance of Success?

Yes, there is always a way out of the darkness. A massive shift in policy needs to be implemented. The big brand shareholders need to come up with a better strategy. I would start here:

1. A better source of traffic than pop-up spamming .
2. Aggressive recruitment of independent hotels and resorts, especially in the international market.
3. Learning from successful OTA’s like Booking.com, Expedia.com, and also super-cool disrupters like Airbnb.com.

In today’s world of online travel, clinging to what’s comfortable is going to get you nowhere. It’s nice to see the brands trying to join the internet age, albeit a little late. But they’re still holding on to the edge of the pool. Understand why the market leaders are successful and build on that, or take it in a new direction. But you’ll never succeed using last year’s (last decade’s) online strategies.

What the Hotel Industry Can Learn From “Heads in Beds” by Jacob Tomsky

Heads in Beds

I recently finished reading Heads in Beds by Jacob Tomsky. To be clear: I am not writing a standard book review. A book is going to have a different impact on every reader. I’d rather tell you what what the book meant to me, and to the hotel industry.

First, let me say that I thoroughly enjoyed this hilarious and very readable book.

Now down to business. I think the hospitality industry is in dire need of books that put into perspective how hard people in the hotel business work. To make it appeal to a general audience, Tomsky has included all sorts of tips and tricks for getting upgrades, and a better deal on everything that you can imagine at a hotel. That is a great way to sell more books to the everyday reader/traveler. But as a hotel industry person, you have to look beyond the tips and tricks. There are some amazing insights here, particularly for folks who inhabit or are about to enter the world of hotel operations.

If you have ever worked in hotel operations in your lifetime, as I have, it’s almost impossible to dislike this book. The man (Jacob) lays it down the way it is, no matter what people tell themselves in order to sleep at night. I like that sort of brutal honesty in my reading.

Here are the top highlights of the book — beyond all the hustle, profanity, tips and tricks — that I think hotel owners and managers should pay attention to.

Don’t curb the enthusiasm!

There are a lot of people who start out in hotels (such as myself) with much, some might say, “unbridled enthusiasm.” A lot of times it’s our first job! The book opens with a very young Mr. Thomas who is working really hard (like there is any other entry kind of level job!).  But he is not just working for his paycheck.

Every hotel Human Resources professional and every department head should try their best to protect their enthusiastic, fresh, new employees from the jaded members of their workforce. Hospitality is about people. If your hotel staff comprises jaded and bitter senior-level staff, they will crush the young spirits. I have seen it and experienced it myself. Don’t let the Debbie Downers be in charge of training the youth. A few bitter dinosaurs can crush the passion that new hires bring with them.

The book also highlights something that has adorned the pages of so many business magazines: Employees don’t just leave their jobs for the money and better hours…It’s mostly the lack of appreciation that does it for them. Nasty “bosses” will always drive up the attrition rate for your organization. Hotels that have recently made money during the economic collapse of 2008 have awesome employees on board who dispensed much-needed encouragement to their teams.

Housekeeping is king.

It’s spectacular how the most important department in hotels is almost always an afterthought. Endless hours are spent discussing marketing, revenue, reputation, and even ridiculous things like… the revenue potential of social media for hotels. The answer to solving a ton of issues actually lies in improving and cultivating the housekeeping department. It was amazing how Jacob highlighted in his book the massive task that is cleaning a hotel and keeping it running. Nothing is more important to a guest checking into a hotel than a clean room. Why can’t that be the core focus for hotels? (That, and free high-speed Wi-Fi!) Paying your housekeeping staff well and treating them well can transform how your hotel guests write about you on review sites like TripAdvisor, what they tell their friends and family, etc. You solve a lot of your social, reputation, branding and revenue issues in one sweep (literally and figuratively).

Respect the front desk.

Jacob correctly pointed out that the front desk is the nerve center of the hotel. Getting the right team in place at your front desk will transform how your hotel operates. I have always been baffled by the fact that so many hotel operators refuse to look for the right information in their biggest human database of guest information — their front desk. Marketing companies will sell you an “e-CRM” for whatever money you’d like to spend on it. Nothing replaces the depth and accuracy of the experienced front desk operations staff.  They can tell you a lot about your hotel, its guests, what’s important to them, and what would transform the guest experience. A huge focus on marketing, without doing the right research at the operational level, is why so many marketing plans fail/backfire. I have often said, “The front desk is where the best laid hotel marketing plans go to die.”

Don’t burn people for profits.

There are hotel owners and there are hotel operators. This is the first book I have read that highlights the dark side of some of the private equity groups in the hotel industry. There are some wonderful groups out there that have a hospitality focus.  Jacob’s book highlights some funds that would be as happy running a public storage facility as they are running a hotel. People simply don’t matter to them.

The truth is that the ‘slash and burn’ approach of massive cutbacks reaps excellent returns in the short term. These owners optimize and flip assets like nobody’s business.

In the long term, losing good staff is never good. It was great to see the author’s example of the additional revenue a smart front desk agent can deliver versus a low-wage dud. Sadly, short-term gains are the mantra of a lot of private equity firms. The author’s hotel fell victim to such a takeover, and it’s stunning to read about the lives this ruthless ‘trimming of the proverbial fat’ impacts. Having smart people and paying them a worthy wage is always more profitable than replacing good employees with below-average, low-cost hires.

Another really amusing thing for me was the whole idea of turning a classic hotel “boutique.” Apparently, turning the hotel lobby into a shady nightclub makes it boutique. How many hotels in how many cities (especially Manhattan) have fallen to these “boutiquification” (maybe I should trademark this word) misadventures?

The Fallout

A lot of hotel folks I know were pretty upset about the portrayal of the industry in this book. I heard a lot of “how dare he say that” and “OMG, that’s not how we operate.” These people obviously work in some dimension of the industry that is not accessible to common folks like us. Maybe they exclusively worked in sales and marketing — conveniently removed from the realities of actually running a hotel. Jacob does not put the hotel industry down like many have said. He is not a bitter guy, just a normal guy who went on a hospitality adventure and was bold enough to write about what he experienced.

I think he almost romanticizes the popular notion in the industry that “you can check out anytime you like, but you can never leave.” (For you kids reading this, it’s a band called The Eagles.) Once you get into hotels, it’s hard to ever check out!

Biggest Myths About WordPress Perpetrated by Hotel Marketing Agencies

The hotel industry has always been a target for misinformation about new, emerging, and especially open-source technology. It feels like the industry is stuck in a time warp, which I blame on negative propaganda unleashed by ubiquitous “marketing experts.” But remember what the best philosophers say? Always question the source. Agencies want to make money. They want to make it efficiently, without having to revamp their processes, and without being asked any questions. This simple truth forms the basis of every outdated piece of technology being used today by hotels.

I have long been wanting to share my list of the “reasons” hotel marketing agencies have given to prevent clients from choosing WordPress over their own proprietary platforms. It’s pretty sad for the industry that they have decided to spread these lies about a great new resource in order to make a few extra dollars. So there you are: the reason why we have hotel websites’ clunky, abysmal, and outdated “custom” content management systems littering the Internet.*

*Excessive use of quotation marks intentional.

 

1. “WordPress is just for blogs. It’s not a CMS for hotels.”

If I had a dollar for every time someone used this outdated piece of “information,” I would be on the Forbes annual Richest People list. Apparently nobody told these experts that WordPress is a superb CMS. It did start out as a blogging platform on May 27, 2003. Seems like since then, these agency experts stopped reading tech news.

Here is a chart from Google Trends illustrating the rising popularity and influence of WordPress as an open-source content management system. (Click on image to see it full-size.)

Google Trends - Web Search Interest_ joomla, wordpress, drupal - Worldwide, 2004 - present

The WordPress CMS  today serves over 371 million people with 4.1 billion pages each month. How do you like them apples? Here are some colossal websites powered by WordPress today:

  • The New York Times
  • eBay
  • CNN
  • VolksWagen
  • United Parcel Service
  • Reuters
  • Mashable
  • Boing Boing
  • Jay Z

Take a moment to soak this in. The websites listed above are massive content and ecommerce operations. If WordPress can deliver such massive amounts of content and billions in revenue, please don’t have any fear about your 10/20/30/50-page hotel website.

2. “WordPress does not handle e-commerce.”

Now let’s discuss the “e-commerce incapability” myth. Heard of a little company called eBay? eBay made$3.4 billion in revenue in 2012. I have another one for you: UPS (United Parcel Service). They made…wait for it…$54 billion in 2012. Total approximate online revenue in 2012 for ALL hotels in the US = $19.38 billion (source: Comscore).

Saying that WordPress is not good for hotel e-commerce is a fundamentally flawed statement anyway. All ecommerce transactions happen inside your hotel’s booking engine. Not on your website. And, e-commerce carts are a whole different thing (à la eBay) that cannot be lumped into the capabilities of a website’s CMS.

So what have we learned today? WordPress can very easily handle your hotel’s e-commerce and content management needs. In fact, it can power every single hotel website in the US without breaking a sweat. So relax, sit back, and take the refreshing plunge into the world of open-source technology.*†

*Still not convinced? Nobody knows more about making stacks on stacks on stacks than Jay Z. Even he selected WordPress to power his empire!

†Still not convinced?? Katy Perry powers her site with WordPress. I rest my case. 

3. “WordPress is not safe.”

Here is something I strongly believe in: Creating doubt is much easier than being creative. So, the first thing agency expert types do is start spreading rumors about the dangers of an open-source platform in comparison to their familiar yet obsolete “custom solution.”

Repeat after me. Nobody is 100% safe on the Internet. If someone wants to hack you badly enough, they will.  A hotel marketing agency CMS is no  safer than a site powered by WordPress.

Let’s take a look at a few of the companies that have been hacked in recent years.

  • Zappos.com (2012)
  • Sony PlayStation(2011)
  • Lockheed Martin (2011)  (US’s largest weapons manufacturer)
  • Google (2009, 2011, 2012)
  • CitiGroup (2011)

These companies have entire divisions of people whose one and only job is to monitor for hackers. Yet, it happened. Hotel marketing agencies who are touting their clunky outdated CMS system as being “safer” than WordPress should be vigilant – and avoid invoking the ire of the hacker community. It happens… call it unbreakable and it breaks into a thousand pieces in public fiasco (you don’t want to be The Unsinkable Ship).

A recent article by a hotel marketing agency took fear-mongering to a whole new level by pinning global DDoS (Denial of Service) attacks on all WordPress powered sites!

Still feeling anxious? Here are some facts. You download and install WordPress for free. From that moment on, it’s your job to host it in the right environment. If your hosting company has basic security features and you maintain your passwords, you will be fine. On the one in a million chance that you get “hacked”? It will take you at the most a few hours to come back online. Just look at the list of companies above that survived. You will too.

These arrogant and baseless claims of agency-designed CMS systems being safer than WordPress can be shattered by a determined teenage hacker in less than 1 minute, and a professional one in about 15 seconds. You can quote me on that. (And no, I’m not encouraging them to do so!)

By the way, technology should be used to make things better, not as a tool for fear-mongering among those of us who don’t read/write code. Posting a screen shot of some code from one WordPress powered website template that was hacked is LAME. A website powered by a CMS powering millions of websites got temporarily hacked. So did Sony, Google and Citibank… so are you now going to quit using Google because it is not “safe”? Please.

4. “Wordpress can’t distribute content socially.”

Seriously? A CMS that was just called good enough only for blogs cannot distribute your hotel website content online? Mashable is probably the top social news and trends website on the planet. A WordPress CMS powers it. I hereby rest my case on content distribution on the social web. (Vikram drops mike on the floor and walks offstage.)

5. “WordPress is expensive.”

WordPress is a lot of things to a lot of people. One thing it is not is expensive. It’s free, folks… like the air we breathe. One of the agency “experts” chalked out this weird list of expenses attached with owning a WordPress-powered website:

  • Dedicated Hosting – $200/month. You should not be hosting one website on a $200/month service, whether it’s powered by WordPress or not. There are wonderful, safe, fast and efficient hosting services on that work very well with WordPress. BlueHost, WestHost, WP Engine and the RackSpace Cloud all offer excellent security and high-speed services starting under $35/month. If your site is slow on a $35/month service, you had WordPress installed or customized improperly. You can fix it.
  • Domain Name – $12/year. You absolutely need to own your domain. It’s Internet 101. Not sure what this has to do with using WordPress. (I warned you it’s a ridiculous list.) 
  • Themes – $90. Oh, themes and frameworks! How you have made beautiful website design so affordable for the whole world! There are some stellar themes available starting at less than $35/month. Imagine a fully functional beautiful website that you own (not your agency), all for a flat fee of $35 bucks. Buy it once, make as many sites on it as you want! That’s a lot of nice-looking websites for the price of 7 fancy lattes, or 1 stiff drink in a posh Manhattan hotel. And make no mistake – it also costs a lot less than a dedicated agency design department.
  • Premium Plugins – $300. A lot of the best plugins in life are free. Is this misinformation is being spread based on some random obscure example? Maybe he ordered a gold-plated plugin? (If so, maybe we can locate it on Jay Z’s site.)
  • Time costs. Apparently it takes some folks a ton of time to manage their WordPress website. I recommend that they go to a WordPress camp and learn to use it better. (Or just hire a WordPress guy to help you. You can find them in every town and city worldwide.) The agency “expert” who claims that maintaining your WordPress site will take ALL your extra time after work, he needs serious WordPress 101 help. I will be glad to connect him to the right people for training and development. Nothing is easier to keep updated. One click updates, people. It’s easy like Sunday mornings.

6. “WordPress plugins are hard to use.”

This global statement is just not true. The top plugins are not only free, but also easy to install and maintain. A global team of passionate WordPress fanboys constantly improves them. The goal is to make them available and usable to a wide audience – of people who don’t know how to code!

7. “WordPress is not mobile optimized.”

Please, let’s not go there. WordPress was mobile-friendly when agency CMS systems were still living in a cave (think Flintstones).  New  WordPress mobile themes and ecosystems are just amazing, and push billion of pageviews on hundreds of devices worldwide. Modern WordPress themes and frameworks are doing a phenomenal job of pushing the usability envelope in an increasingly mobile world.

8. “WordPress is not SEO-friendly.”

This is just plain blasphemous. Not a single agency CMS on the planet can come even close to how easy WordPress has made it for you to optimize your website for search engines.

  • First, as a default, it does not let you do anything that annoys Google.
  • SEO plugins are free, fast, easy, and extremely sophisticated. They are powered by some of the smartest people in the world of search engine optimization.

Calling WordPress “SEO-unfriendly” and complicated is just plain ludicrous (I don’t mean the rapper…he is pretty cool). If you can click and type, you can optimize your website effectively.

9. “WordPress limits a hotel website’s flexibility and functionality.”

In response to a bogus chart I recently saw highlighting how a hotel marketing agency CMS is a better product than open source WordPress, here is my own factual chart showing how much awesome WordPress really is:

[table id=2 /]

In conclusion…

Hotels cannot continue to 100% rent their entire online marketing efforts. It’s time to own your single most profitable channel in the universe – your website. You don’t have to be a developer to embrace open-source technology. All you have to do when picking a website design vendor is make a simple request: “Please make my website using an open-source platform such as WordPress.”

Also, one day when that agency relationship comes to an end (all things good and bad shall end), you will retain your entire site +CMS+ SEO+ URL’s intact. Often, when you leave a custom CMS website vendor, there is a big surprise in store for you:

  • Your entire website is stripped of this so-called awesome  and proprietary CMS. 
  • Your leftover assets (content, photos etc.) are zipped into a file and emailed.
  • You will have a hard time decoding this file and launching your website again.
  • SEO optimization is almost always removed, images  mislabeled, URL’s  broken… the horror list goes on.

I have seen this in the agency world too many times. It’s the ultimate kiss (of death) goodbye. It’s so bad that I actually saw an email from an agency CEO to his project manager (inadvertently forwarded to a hotel manager) with the subject line “please remove SEO optimization.” Three years of work the hotel paid for – deleted.

Don’t let this happen to you. WordPress is a superb choice for your hotel  Take the plunge and take control. Don’t give it a second thought. Some of the biggest names and industries have already jumped in. And they will all tell you, the water’s fine!

Airbnb: More Than a Threat, It’s a Great Disruptor To The Hotel & Travel Sector

I recently read an article on Airbnb on Euromonitor that declared: “Airbnb.com Poses Only a Small Threat to Hotel Industry.”

The truth is, Airbnb is not only a threat, but is actually a great disruptor for the hotel and travel sector. The article I cited makes three critical errors in reaching its erroneous conclusion. Let’s break them down.

Mistake #1: Airbnb is a “vacation rental” business.

Characterizing Airbnb as a vacation rental market play is simply not right. The article uses Wyndham Worldwide as an example of a hotel group that  “owns one of the oldest vacation rental brands—the British Hoseasons est. 1940” (who knew!). Well, congratulations to Wyndham Worldwide for keeping this a secret from the online world for 70 years! Maybe it was classified as a secret project from the WWII era?

To put Airbnb’s reach in perspective, I polled 15 of my best-heeled traveler buddies. Many of them are currently working in the hotel industry. Everyone had used AirBnb or referred a family member to Airbnb at least once. (In case you were wondering, the number of them who contributed any revenue to “British Hoseasons” was ZERO.)

Folks, Airbnb goes way beyond vacay (I used vacay!) rental people. People book Airbnb for EVERYTHING – vacation, business, events, family get-togethers, elopements, comic conventions, etc.  What they are putting in the limelight is how quickly the online travel market is changing and growing.

Mistake #2: Its effects are limited to leisure travel.

Here is one of the headers from the article: “Hotels need to keep an eye on leisure travellers.” Well, hotels need to keep an eye on ALL travelers and the massive changes that are happening in the way people are booking travel. Hotels need to learn to provide better value. Airbnb is not just for a family on vacation that is looking for a kitchen to make breakfast in. Neither it is just hipsters looking for a hotel alternative because hotels are too mainstream. C’mon! It’s much broader. I used Airbnb three times in 2012 for some serious business travel. Meetings, conference speaking, etc. You know… the trips where you have to work a lot? Think a lot of business thoughts?

Even the geographical outreach of Airbnb is spectacular. I had rooms booked in San Francisco, Phoenix and Singapore. Every single experience was excellent. Pretty ironic when I was staying in a Phoenix penthouse that belonged to the General Manager of a local designer hotel! The town was pretty sold out for the days I was there. I made the choice not to pay $465 for an Embassy Suite, and so did many other business travelers that week.

Mistake #3: Counting on the government to shut it down.

Euromonitor article interestingly stated that “Local governments may be an ally.”  to the hotel industry in controlling  Airbnb. Wow. Counting on the government to shut down innovation and disruption-based business models is really sad. Hotels need to know that any government that is going to shut down innovators is going use the same logic to hurt you when you innovate. Unless you have sworn off innovation as a hotel brand, beware what you wish for. Anyway, let’s get real. Building code violations in NYC are not going to be stopping Airbnb. Wishing for that to happen is a fool’s dream.

In conclusion

Airbnb is way beyond a threat to hotels. It’s a new way of conducting the business of travel. It is adding new entrepreneurs to the hotel business, as anyone with an additional room to rent can now be a hotelier. Not only that, Airbnb is adding a supply of rentable rooms to cities across the globe. The words “the city is sold out tonight” have a brand new meaning thanks to Airbnb.

Hotel Online Marketing Budget Disconnect: A Perpetual Case of Bringing a Knife to a Gunfight.

“Nice try kid, but it looks like you brought a knife to a gunfight.” This line from Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull pretty much sums up the hotel industry’s current state of perpetual online defeat.

It’s 2013. Pretty much everyone — even folks living under rocks — have had some sort of exposure to online marketing. Enter hotels, still wildly under-spending on what is going to bring them the best outcome.

Here is a typical hotel marketing budget:

  • Branding: $5,000
  • Print: “Could we please spend a several thousand dollars on print…I know you saw the video on YouTube about paper. OMG, it was so awesome!”
  • Time wasted on branding “discussions”: $50,000
  • Website: $5,000
  • Time wasted on website “discussions”: $100,000
  • “Social Media”: $1,000
  • Online Marketing: $500/month

trexTo really put it into perspective for you, here is an amazing fact. In a recent conversation with a “Brand” looking to break into the European market, they assigned $800 (not a typo), yes 800 US Dollars as their online marketing budget! Which is like a 100 pounds! (Ok…I might be exaggerating just a bit about the exchange rate… but not the other part.)

Think about how short your arms are going to be when you have a pathetic monthly online marketing investment and then start competing for online market share in high-volume traffic cities like London and Paris, NYC and Miami, Hong Kong and Singapore, etc.

When you venture for market share online, you have to do more than buy your own brand name terms. You are also competing with these guys:

  1. OTA’s (AKA, we put our marketing dollars where revenue is.)
  2. Competitor hotels – Other hotels in your  location(s)
  3. Online Review Websites – Tripadvisor, etc., who are not diversifying their  advertising revenues and also actively selling rooms.

Every evil can be traced down to its root cause. In my industry experience, working for hotels and managing a marketing agency, I have located the hotel’s source of conflict, misery and defeat. It is the budget.

What’s the right budget then? It differs from city to city. Here is a top-level guideline.

Minimum Media Buy and Online Marketing Budgets

  1. Major Metropolitan Cities (NYC, London, Singapore): 18K/month
  2. Secondary Cities (Austin, Edinburg, Nice): 10K/month
  3. If your hotel is located in a smaller town. that brings the budget into the 1-5K range, because you are mostly focusing on brand name searches and low-volume, location-based keywords.

Hotels must reevaluate their budgeting philosophies. Bringing a low-budget knife to a high-tech online marketing gunfight is going to severely hurt your revenue.

Another Day (Not) Another Blog

This is not my first blog/dance/party/luau. It’s the fourth blog that I’ve launched since 2006. The other three blogs were focused on topics ranging from Online Marketing to Surfing Products and Big Wave Surfing. (What can I say…I have range.)

Why is this blog different from all other blogs? Simple. It bears my name. These are just my thoughts: no guest posts, no agency talk, nothing but me talking about what I know best.

I am Vikram Singh, and these are my words.

Interesting fact: The one thing all of my blogs have in common is that they were all launched in Oahu, Hawaii. The Island Kingdom simply inspires me.

Ok, now what is this blog going to be about? It’s about making a change. Stopping the business as usual that has the hospitality industry so trapped. I want to point out a better way of doing things: a better way to use analytics, a better way to use technology, a better way to use your staff… etc, etc.

After dedicating over 15 years to the hotel and online marketing industries, I am ready to share my stories, perspectives, thoughts and ideas.  

Don’t worry. This is not a “dear diary.” I don’t do diaries. You won’t have to read about what I had for breakfast. This is more like a serialized book on hotel industry best and worst practices, all based on real-life experiences with employers, vendors, clients and colleagues. Some chapters will sting while others will soothe. But I hope all of them will inspire you to think about what you’re doing and to aim higher.

Please bring an open mind and a saltshaker filled with grains of salt. I’ll try to keep it interesting.