Insights On Online Hotel Marketing From America’s Largest Conference
Posted by Patrick Murphy on Tue, Dec 06, 2011
EyeForTravel is a premier conference in the hotel industry. Every year, the best and the brightest in hotel marketing gather together to review the year and predict where things are going. It’s a great time to gather new tips, ideas, and strengthen a hotel online marketing strategy. This year, we noticed that some of the practiced we’ve mentioned before are still coming up. Great customer service through the site, creativity, and content creation through the marketing campaign are major themes.
One great anecdote? A guest to a major hotel had seen images of chocolate strawberries on the hotel’s website, but was disappointed to learn on arrival that they were out of stock. She sent out a tweet expressing her disappointment, and the hotel’s manager caught it. He immediately send up a plate of chocolate strawberries to the guest’s room, winning the customer’s loyalty back and winning some great free publicity from her as a result. The lesson? Monitor the web for your own presence and respond quickly to all comments.
Pointers from the conference
- Location based services will rise in popularity next year. They are increasingly adaptable to allow content to be pushed in the most relevant content. Time to get your team learning about location based services!
- Apps are fun at first but if they don’t have character they will be deleted within 30 days. Be sure you have the resources to create a great app or it will be a waste of time.
- Stay focused on the plan… 2 or 3 good marketing ideas implemented well will be better than 6 done badly.
- Get your Facebook coders working on learning more about the Facebook API. Integrating it could be beneficial. The travel site Trip advisor found that users plugged into the network were twice as engaged on their website.
- Travellers and vacation planners are increasingly turning to Facebook and Twitter for their advice on where to go and what to do, so you should be in this space. Monitoring the Twitter platform for your keywords is a great start.
Interested in some more hotel marketing tips? Contact SiliconCloud today.
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