Weekly Roundup: Travel, Tech and Social Media
Happy Friday and welcome back to our usual weekly roundup of travel, tech and social media news and trends! Today's list includes some pretty interesting information about how to best decipher and make use of review data, tips on how your hotel can leverage digital technologies to pull market share away from the competition, news on the latest social tools hotels can use to connect to their customers and a lot more.
Happy reading and don't forget to check back next week for more!
Industry News
SiteMinder Partners with Priceline.com
SiteMinder has partnered with priceline.com, a leader in online and mobile travel, to offer hotels an advanced way of distributing their inventory online. The partnership integrates priceline.com into SiteMinder’s Channel Manager, providing hotels a new way to reach travellers making their hotel reservations through priceline.com’s apps or mobile web.
How Hotels.com Uses Email to Keep Me as a Loyal Customer
Hotels.com does a lot right when it comes to email subject lines. They’re short, snappy and tempting. They’re often in the form of questions, or directly mention a huge discount or holiday destination.
TripAdvisor Community Awards Honor the World's Top Reviewers
TripAdvisor announced the winners of its first annual TripAdvisor Community Awards - dubbed “The Ollies” after the TripAdvisor mascot Ollie the Owl - given to top contributors from community of more than 90 million TripAdvisor members.
Trends and Insights
Big Data Is Worthless. How to Transform Reviews from Big Data into Something Useful
Big data—in its current form, at least—is dead to me. I know this is a strong statement in a world seemingly powered by the concept, but companies simply are not using big data properly, rendering it useless for driving change and increasing revenue.
4 Charts Showing State of Travel Brands' Targeted Advertising
"Spending on targeted advertising in travel will keep building throughout 2016 and in the process brands need to help travelers better understand how they’re being targeted and why that’s a good thing." says Dan Peltier, of Skift.
The Rise of Independent Hotels
Being able to adapt to the quickly changing customer demands has become the biggest advantage of individual hotels and small hotel chains. If accepted and adapted to it, these hotels will start seeing a shift of travelers moving from large brands to their unique type of hotels.
What Are The Three Types of Strong Online Presence that Your Hotel Needs in 2016?
With increasingly connected and mobile guests, hotels are finding it important to adapt in order to maintain and grow their market share. Traditional marketing channels, though still available and relevant, are no longer the place where hotels are finding the majority of their customers. Instead, guests are relying on digital technology more than ever to find and book hotels, and the most successful hotels, and those pulling market share away from their competitors are the businesses effectively leveraging these digital technologies.
Travelers Rank Their Smartphones as More Important than Pretty Much Everything
What is the one thing you can't travel without? If you're like a majority of travelers, you might be reading this story on it. A study from Expedia found travelers worldwide consider their smartphone more vital to carry than basics like a toothbrush or even a driver's license.
Special Report: Does a Vocal Minority Hold Sway over Online Reviews?
More than half of consumers planning to purchase a holiday this year will check online reviews before booking and more than one in 10 won’t book a hotel, resort or travel brand if they see it negatively reviewed. Yet two-thirds of UK holidaymakers seldom or never post a review, according to research for Travel Weekly, and only one in 10 do so regularly – suggesting a minority have a disproportionate influence online.
Using Facebook Messenger to Increase Guest Satisfaction and RevPar Performance
Over the past couple of years, we have started to see major companies like Tesco, Audi and more recently El Corte Ingles in Spain beginning to use Facebook Messenger as a new tool to connect with their customers. More recently, Hyatt was the first hotel chain to announce that they were testing a new guest service channel using Facebook’s new “Businesses on Messenger”, currently only available in the US.
