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Accor employee on leave after TripAdvisor activity
Questions are again being raised about the credibility of reviews on online travel sites following revelations that Accor's PR manager had posted more than 105 reviews on TripAdvisor under a pseudonym, according to Travel Weekly Australia.
Accor's GM of communications Peter Hook remains on a leave of absence while Accor investigates the situation. Accor's COO of the Asia/Pacific region, Simon McGrath, said the hotel group was working with TripAdvisor to investigate the matter.
McGrath said "it appeared" that Hook had posted 105 reviews on TripAdvisor over four years of which 70% were restaurants, bars and destinations not related to hotels.
"Unfortunately in general social media activity the employee made comments about hotels, both under the Accor brand and competitors," he said. "We acknowledge this is a breach of the Accor social media policy. Accor shares on its intranet with all its employees a social media charter that clearly stipulates that Accor employees 'must ensure complete transparency with regards to their own identity and their relationship to the Accor Group' when stating their views on social media."
Booking.com, IHG show mobile boosts
Recent comments from travel companies including Booking.com and InterContinental Hotels Group bear witness to the phenomenal growth that is taking place in mobile bookings, according to recent PhoCusWright analysis.
Booking.com reported its mobile bookings more than tripled in the past year, jumping from $1 million in 2011 to $3 million in 2012. Speaking at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, IHG VP of Web and interactive marketing Michael Menis revealed that the company’s mobile booking revenue increased from $2 million for the full year in 2009 to roughly $40 million in January 2013 alone. His verdict: over the next two to three years, IHG’s mobile revenue will overtake Web revenue.
Paid search spend down
Paid search spend in the travel category on U.S. AdWords is down in 2013, according to Adgooroo.com. At $238 million for the months of January through April, it's down 19% from 2012’s $295 million during the same period, which was down 17% from 2011.
Have travel marketers en masse decided to pull back on their paid search spend? Not according to Adgooroo.com data. For instance, Adgooroo.com found 217 advertisers in the travel category on U.S. AdWords in first quarter 2012 and 228 in first quarter 2013.
One explanation is that Google has been cannibalizing its advertisers’ clickthroughs and spend with their own travel marketing efforts. After all, the decline in pay-per-click spend began in 2011, a year in which Google Flight Search and Google Hotel Finder launched.
TripAdvisor revenue continues climb
TripAdvisor revenue for the first quarter of 2013 increased to $229.9 million, up 36% quarter over quarter and up 25% year over year, according to the company’s first-quarter earnings release.
TripAdvisor’s travel community averaged more than 200 million monthly unique visitors for the quarter. The review giant’s user-generated content continued to grow at a rate of more than 60 contributions per minute and reached the 100 million review and opinion milestone. TripAdvisor averaged more than 33 million monthly Facebook visitors to its website and Facebook app during the quarter.
IDeaS on pricing challenges
While pricing is recognized as one of the key success factors, it is one of the most difficult things to get correct said Klaus Kohlmayr, senior director of consulting with IDeaS, during a Q-and-A with Hospitality Sales and marketing Association International.
Kohlmayr said pricing is a very emotional process. “It’s like marketing—everyone is an expert,” he said. “In a hotel, this means that from the owners to the general manager, the finance director, the sales department to the reservation agent all have an opinion on how a hotel should be priced. Reality is, you can never really get it right–and you can never get everyone to agree on what the right price should be.”
He said the best approach is to take the emotions out of the equation and to have a structured, measured and scientific approach to pricing, which is often counterintuitive with the service.
“The most forward-looking hotel companies realize that a) pricing is very hard b) it has to be done on an ongoing basis c) it has to be part of the culture,” Kohlmayr said. “Gone are the days when you established your pricing structure once during budget season and then let it run its course. Competitive pressures are higher and technology is giving guests more pricing power than ever. So these companies have really worked over the last few years on putting their pricing in order.”
Aloft sees success with self check-in
Aloft Hotels has reached 10,000 users of its Smart Check-In Program, which allows guests to bypass the front desk and head directly to their rooms, according to a news release.
The program is now available at Aloft hotels in Lexington, Massachusetts; Harlem, New York; Dallas; Brooklyn, New York; and Cupertino, California.
Through the program, Starwood Preferred Guest members who opt in to this offer receive an enhanced SPG/Aloft-branded keycard that carries radio frequency identification technology. On the day of a planned stay, a text message is sent to the guest's mobile device with their room number. Once at the hotel, guests can skip the check-in line and go straight to their assigned room, where their enhanced keycard will unlock the door.
Choice, buuteeq ink deal
Choice Hotels International has entered into a relationship with buuteeq, a cloud-based digital marketing provider for operators. The agreement gives Choice franchisees in the United States access to buuteeq's products and services that provide the capability to create and manage their own property-level websites with direct booking capabilities.
The new platform, called the Digital Direct Program, features a direct integration between the Choice Hotels central reservation system and the buuteeq cloud digital marketing system. Franchisees who take advantage of the program will be able to deploy and manage their own search engine optimization-optimized websites seamlessly across Web, mobile and social channels.
Room 77 hires CEO
Hotel search engine Room 77 recently hired Drew Patterson, co-founder and former CEO of Jetsetter, to lead the company as its first CEO.
Room 77 is a metasearch that pulls rates from hotels and all of the top online travel sites like Expedia, Priceline and Orbitz so travelers can shop and compare rates in one search. The site has raised $43.3 million to date, and its latest round included a strategic investment from Expedia.
Compiled by Jason Q. Freed.