Hotels have begun offering direct bookings through Facebook and smartphone apps, and they hope that the convenience and direct contact will lure back travellers who have been turning to online travel agencies.“We want to be there when someone transforms the recommendations of their friends into booking a reservation,” said David Godsman, vice president for global Web services for Starwood Hotels. “If they press the ‘Like’ button, we want to start a conversation.” He said he viewed his company’s Facebook pages as a way to extend Starwood’s relationship with its customers “from the 10 days they stay with us, to all year long.” Starwood has Facebook pages for 1,000 hotel properties across its nine brands.
Hotels need to make sure that their booking engines can be found wherever the customer is, rather than asking the customer to search them out, said Glenn Withiam, a spokesman for Cornell’s School of Hotel Administration, which recently held a hotel industry conference that examined social media.
Offering reservations directly helps to keep the conversation between the hotel and its guests, Withiam said. He added that using social media to communicate took the relationship beyond the booking transaction. The hotel can find out what pillow guests prefer, the drinks they want in the minibar or the type of room they need. Personalised service can keep a guest coming back, he said.
“Hotels need to demonstrate the value of staying with them,” Withiam said, because when the focus is just on the lowest price, the competition leads to fewer amenities, lower service levels and decreased customer satisfaction.
Withiam added that travellers were expecting trip-related services to be available on the new platforms. PhoCusWright, a travel research firm, has found that 13 per cent of social network users shop for travel on those websites and 35 per cent of mobile phone users expect to book travel on their phones in the next year.
Axses Systems Caribbean, a company in Barbados, has helped about 30 small hotels and chains in Barbados and nearby make their reservations available on Facebook since early 2009.
The online agencies — Expedia, Travelocity, Orbitz and Priceline among them — increased their share of total online hotel bookings to 46 per cent last year from 41 per cent in 2008, according to PhoCusWright. Douglas Quinby, senior director at the firm, attributed most of that increase to travellers’ greater price awareness and decreased business travel during the recession.
While those travel agencies can be great assets for hotels — allowing them to sell more rooms and to sell those rooms at a lower price — there are few drawbacks, Withiam said. Hotels make less money for rooms sold through an online travel agency than if customers had booked directly.
Trump Hotel Collection has been offering Facebook reservations for around six months, and Ivanka Trump, executive vice president for development and acquisitions at the Trump Organisation, even has a booking widget on her personal Facebook page. Trump said her company had an advantage in social media because “we are a personality-driven brand.” She added, “When I tweet out a hotel special, a million people see it.” Once guests have made reservations though Facebook, Trump said a hotel “attaché” contacted them to complete a “dossier” of their personal preferences, like the newspapers they wanted delivered or in-room amenities they required.
Hotels are trying different ways to use the new media. Hilton Worldwide estimates that about 615,000 customers have downloaded its mobile apps. Along with the ability to make or modify a reservation, it has offered new services like ready meals when guests arrive.
Using Facebook and smartphone apps, hotels hope to deepen or regain the relationships they had with customers and to raise the quality of their experiences when they check in.
©2011 The New York
Times News Service
