A recent post on LinkedIn claimed that word-of-mouth was a potent driver and could overcome hotel’s shortcomings like an abysmal website and poor booking engine experience. The post concluded When a guest wants to stay with you, they will make that booking.
I strongly disagree. Unless we are talking about some super iconic hotel with a long waitlist, I do not believe this statement holds true for any of the remaining 750,000 hotels on this planet.
Let’s assume that your hotel has been strongly recommended by friends and family, colleagues at the office water cooler, social media or influencer word-of-mouth marketing. How does the traveler find your hotel? Most probably online by searching on Google the name of the hotel.
What happens when the traveler googles the name of your hotel? He/she sees
a) a number of Google Ads by the OTAs and their affiliates promoting the best rate for your hotel,
b) Google Hotel Ads (metasearch) again by OTAs and their affiliates, and
c) Organic listings of your hotel page on the OTAs, ranking high due to the OTA’s superior SEO.
With abysmal property website, your hotel website would not be visible enough to be found in any of the scenarios above. So the traveler may find a hotel listing of your hotel in the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages), may even book and come to your hotel, but as an OTA booking, not as a direct booking.
But wait, there is more! Once you click on any of the a), b) or c) listings described above and go to the OTA page of your hotel, what else do you see? A highly visible section You may also consider these hotels
which takes the traveler to the myriad other accommodations in the destination/location, some with much better rates and location. So your hotel may not even get this traveler, in spite of all the glowing recommendations by family/friends or social media and office water cooler word-of-mouth.
The OTAs make a killing by bidding on the branded keywords (official names and their derivatives) of hotels, especially independent hotels. Who searches your hotel by its official name? These are past guests, people referred by friends and family, as a result of word-of-mouth, people who have read positive reviews on social media or PR about the property.
What happens when they search? As described above, they see Google Ads by the OTAs, Google Hotel Ads by the OTAs or organic listings of your hotel OTA pages. Travelers book the hotel, but they book it via the OTAs or their tens of thousand of affiliates. This is called hijacking of a direct client!
Hotels..com became multibillion dollar company before being acquired by Expedia by doing exactly this: bidding on and owning
the official hotel names (branded keywords) of independent hotels. The OTAs continue with this detrimental to the hospitality industry tradition.
As a priority, hoteliers should implement the following action steps.
- Google Ads: Hoteliers should own 100% of the searches of their branded keyword terms – this is 100% SOV (Share of voice) of the impressions.
- Google Hotel Ads: Hoteliers must participate in the free booking links and budget to participate in the paid booking links in need periods.
- Organic Listings: Hoteliers must maintain a robust SEO strategy and own their
slice of the pie
via on-page SEO, backlinks and technical SEO, and content marketing.
I am not even talking here about poor booking engine experience, which is one of the key factors for poor website conversion rates. See my article Increasing website conversion rates – top priority in 2024
on HospitalityNet https://www.hospitalitynet.org/opinion/4122903.html.
The moral of the story? Unless you are the venerable Ritz Paris Hotel (though this hotel rigorously protects its brand name by bidding on Google Ads), relying on word-of-mouth will not solve your occupancy or RevPAR problems. The only solution is hoteliers implementing in a robust direct online channel strategy and maintaining adequate investments in talent, digital marketing and technology.
Max Starkov
NYU
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