Weekly Roundup #13: Travel, Tech, and Social Media
Week 13/2017
Greetings, fellow readers!
Another Friday means another Weekly Roundup, so welcome back to our blog! As usual, you can find here this week’s most important and interesting news from the hospitality industry and also, stories and post about trends and technology. Take a look at our recap and enjoy!
Have a wonderful weekend and don’t forget to stay tuned for the next Weekly Roundup!
Industry News
AccorHotels to purchase Potel & Chatbot:
It was announced this week that AccorHotels, the management of Potel & Chatbot and Edmond de Rothschild Investment Partners have entered into exclusive negotiations to acquire the Group's entire share capital. Edmond de Rothschild Investment Partners and AccorHotels will respectively hold 51% and 40% of the share capital. The proposed transaction is currently under specific review by the competition authority.
Turkey blocks access to Dutch-based Booking.com:
This Wednesday, it was reported that an Istanbul court blocked the access to the online hotel booking platform, Booking.com. It seems that the Istanbul 5th Commercial Court of First Instancet ruled for the “preventive ban” on the activities of the Dutch-based platform in Turkey due to “unfair competition”. The decision was taken after the Turkish Association of Travel Agents (TÜRSAB) filed a complaint against Booking.com website, claiming that the it is engaged in unfair competition against Turkish-based hotel and flight booking platforms.
Most travel categories seeing search growth, says Google:
According to the leading search engine’s statistics, most categories of travel are seeing good volume growth in search queries on Google. This goes despite the packages from that area, that are suffering. Also, even though many in the travel trade reporting are having good January peaks, its data sees the category down 4.8% in search volumes. On average travel categories were up 1.6%.
Facebook’s new battle for the attention of travelers in a destination:
Facebook’s new travel-related content, City Guides, chases its purpose of creating painless ways of planning trips. City Guides is known to be a response to Google Trips. Rather than actively ask your network where you should see or where you should go, Facebook compiles relevant data into individualized City Guides.
Trends and insights
How to reply to negative reviews:
We have recently collaborated with Xotels.com and came up with a simple guide on how to reply to negative reviews from guests. Since a hotel’s guest review score has a significant impact on the RevPAR performance of a hotel, reputation management is a highly important focus point. There are a few specific steps that you have to take when dealing with negative feedback and here you can learn how to implement them.
Brits won’t be deterred from booking 2017 summer holidays:
Even though 2017 is not a great year for UK, considering Brexit, terrorism and the falling pound, brits are still planning summer vacations. Simply Holiday Deals recently conducted a member survey, which revealed that nearly 90% of respondents intend to take a summer holiday this year. Also, Over 30% of Simply Holiday Deals members have allocated between £301 and £500 per person for a trip to popular destinations.
How the European Union invented modern travel and tourism:
A few days ago, Skift released an extended series on Resetting Transatlantic Travel. The first installment of the series looks at how the freedom of movement brought about by the EU radically changed how we think about borders, money, and transportation, and has defined how the current generation of travelers thinks about the essential building blocks of travel.
Technology
TravelClick Launches Media Intelligence Platform to Drive Direct Booking Revenue for Hotels:
TravelClick, a global provider of innovative, cloud-based and data-driven solutions for hotels to maximize revenue, announced this week the launch of the hospitality industry’s only Media Intelligence Platform. This unique new platform enables TravelClick’s media campaign managers to more effectively drive direct booking revenue for their hotel clients.
Concur explores virtual reality for the corporate travel market:
Concur Labs, the innovation arm of the travel and expense management tech company, has been exploring virtual reality in regards of the travel sector. Their newest prototype strives to help hotel managers deal with traveler security incidents. The demo puts travel and security managers in a life-life situation such as an earthquake and uses virtual reality to help them find and communicate with employees affected by the incident.
The Oracle MICROS Tablet, designed for the hospitality industry:
Oracle Hospitality announced the launch of their newest innovation, which was specifically designed to serve the hospitality sector’s unique set of challenges. The Oracle MICROS 720 Tablet can be used for: management reporting, increasing customer engagement, ordering and stock taking, and RFID reading or bar code scanning and it has an extended battery life.
