LAS VEGAS—In a marketplace dominated by individualistic consumers, taking risks in the online space can be crucial to meet evolving consumer demands.
As with any gamble, it may not always work the first time around. However, using measurement tools to gauge what went wrong can lead to success the second time, according to panelists who spoke last week at EyeforTravel’s Travel Distribution Summit North America.
The world around consumer media has completely changed over the last five years, said Trevor Croop, senior manager of analytics, insight and global e-commerce at Wyndham Hotel Group.
In the past, AAA and J.D. Power and Associates would tell you the quality of a product on a global scale. Brands also jumped into that ring, trying to establish a certain quality to their products, Croop said.
“That world has completely changed. It’s gone, and it’s not going to come back,” he said.
Now, quality is designated individually by consumers, and it is shared on a collective scale on online platforms.
Consumers are reading 33 reviews on average before making booking decisions, Croop said.
Wyndham took note that there are many companies out there asking consumers to write reviews about their products. However, in the hotel industry, those companies were not the actual suppliers of products. For example, 68% of all user reviews about hotels exist on online travel agencies websites, 28% are housed on TripAdvisor, while the remaining 4% are on miscellaneous sites such as Google and Yelp, he said.
“Consumers that are reading reviews before or while they’re browsing are more likely to convert,” Croop said of Wyndham customers. That’s why the company took the risk of displaying TripAdvisor reviews on their own pages.
When consumers go to book a hotel on Wyndham’s website, they will find that particular property’s average TripAdvisor rating, detailed scoring review, individual TripAdvisor reviews and a management response to the review, if any.
Not every property has a page full of positive reviews, Croop said. There are some with negative comments, but that serves as a driving force for management to fix any common issues guests are unhappy with and respond.
“It took a lot of studied focus on what our actual goal was, and our actual goal was to drive more bookings,” he said.
And it worked: “We put these reviews on our loyalty websites and bookings went up 30% instantly,” he said.
What Wyndham does now is similar to what OTAs do. If a guest stays at a Wyndham hotel, he or she is asked to fill out a TripAdvisor review.
“Through this program, we are basically underscoring that transparency is an asset,” Croop said.
Measuring and optimizing
A particular campaign intended to increase bookings on Hotels.com did not go over as well.
“In our U.K. office, we embarked on a share and save campaign—the more times (consumers) share an offer, the deeper the discount,” said Taylor Cole, director of public relations and social media at Hotels.com. “Turns out this was one of our worst campaigns.”
Consumers did not take advantage of the deals, Cole said.
But the company’s motto—“public and engage, convert and monetize, acquire and amplify, manage content, listen and moderate, measure and optimize”—allowed the Hotels.com team to turn that unsuccessful campaign into a positive one.
Cole said the team learned that “driving those deals through an app within Facebook was going to make a difference in terms of getting that conversion,” he said.
By understanding where the online traffic is coming from and the certain booking behaviors those consumers have, the company launched a more successful campaign earlier this month, she said.
Noticing that most travelers stop hitting the road after Labor Day, the company launched an “Extend Your Summer Vacation” promotion on its mobile platform, which had a response 10 times better than its U.K. campaign.
“When you optimize, whether you create images that are compelling, you get a much better return,” Cole said.
Taking risks, allowing users to add videos and making the mobile channel compelling can have a huge impact on someone going to property websites and making the decision to book, she said.