In HNN’s digital mobile roundtable, we asked experts in the field to reflect on the biggest wins from the year that was and to flag some of the hurdles for the year ahead.
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1. Describe one winning mobile strategy employed in 2014.
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Woodbine’s Fernandez: “In 2014, the Woodbine Hospitality Group moved the websites for the Genesee Grande Hotel, Hotel Skyler, and Parkview Hotel from a desktop and mobile platform to a fully responsive site build. In doing so, we have driven more traffic to all of our hotel sites and have increased revenue while also pulling share from our (online-travel-agency) sites.
“Looking at the Genesee Grande Hotel as an example, we have actualized more revenue through our websites’ booking engine in October of 2014 than all of 2013 combined. The average daily rate is $16 higher, and our conversion rate is at almost 6%, versus a past high of 4%. After moving to a responsive site we have more than doubled reservations coming from a mobile device, with mobile booking accounting for 10% of all booked rooms through the hotel websites.”
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RockCheetah’s Cole: “The mobile strategy I’ve seen recently is using mobile technologies to empower front-line hotel staff to provide highly personalized experiences for their customers. It starts with the assumption that both the guest and the hotel staff are mobile-based, using their own devices. The first challenge is how to unify the stream of multichannel guest touch-point data and make it actionable by the staff member. The second is how to handle the real-time engagement between staff to efficiently accomplish ad-hoc tasks. Suddenly the need to stop by a desk or seek out a particular staff member to accomplish something disappears. Hotel-guest interaction suddenly changes from processes solely designed to help the hotel to processes that are solely focused on enhancing the guest experience.”
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Oliver Wyman’s Hornick: “(Our win was employing) strategies that enhance and differentiate the on-property experience. This has taken many forms in recent months with announcements by (Hilton Worldwide Holdings) and (Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide) that they will allow guests to use their phones not only to check in, but to select their rooms, to make special requests, to check out, and eventually to use phones as room keys. The last part of this will take time to fully roll out because properties have to be retrofitted with the new door lock technology.”
2. What is the single greatest challenge facing mobile in 2015? What are you doing to overcome it?
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Fernandez: “Apps such as HotelTonight are making potential guests more comfortable in booking travel from a mobile platform, but at the same time, high-percentage OTA fees are still present. And OTA share shift is not only a desktop problem. We are seeing more and more travelers utilizing search engine-based hotel scouting rather than native applications, so it is becoming increasingly necessary for hotels to fulfill guests’ needs on all devices. The ‘pinch and scroll’ techniques needed to navigate many sites will soon deter travelers from feeling comfortable in booking directly with the hotel if the correct mobile based technology is not available.”
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Cole: “As hotel mobile sites get better using responsive design, it simply isn’t acceptable to kill the conversion rate by using a booking engine that starts introducing obstacles for the user.
“Once that gets tackled, the next step will be to provide an integrated user experience. A number of digital agencies are doing good jobs with creating compelling landing pages that draw the user down the sales funnel, but once the handoff to the booking engine takes place, the experience becomes completely generic. If one could hide the hotel name or logo, many site visitors would be hard pressed to match the website with the booking engine from a content, navigation and usability perspective. The teams responsible for developing the booking engines need to step up their games.”
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MGM’s Dearborn: “My biggest problem is … converting (these mobile apps) from what I call a digital brochure to a transactional device. Right now, there’s just a ton of information on them. … I’ve got 40,000 hotel rooms. But I’ve also got 350 restaurants, over 400 retail outlets, 3 million square feet of convention space, two arenas and building a third one, 11 or 12 showrooms.”
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Oliver Wyman’s Kowalewski: “The single greatest challenge facing hotel companies as they pursue their mobile strategy is getting the core legacy systems to fulfil commercial strategy through mobile. Mobile is a great channel for small adjustments and ancillary purchases along the travel ribbon. But the back-end solutions do not support this type of separate independent ancillary inventory management and pricing.”
3. What is one thing hoteliers aren’t paying attention to that needs to be addressed during 2015?
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Fernandez: “Just as the market is being saturated with applications dedicated to online travel booking, many hotels are creating property-specific applications that lack the right content to impact the user/guest to engage properly with the software. Many of these hotel apps are throwaways that do not offer any viable user experience after the stay has occurred. … As hoteliers we will need to continue to adapt as technology becomes available, but also be weary as to not invest in mobile based projects that will not show return on investment.”
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Cole: “I am a huge proponent of responsive Web design. Some don’t like it because it takes a bit more thought and planning, but with the right development shop, the site can be terrific—and the hotelier only needs to keep track of one design and set of content.”
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Kowalewski: “Hoteliers have traditionally thought that once a customer is on property, they are relatively safe from the threat of online travel agents. However, OTAs are developing strategies to directly compete with hotel companies for a share of their on-property customer experience and revenue. … Priceline’s acquisition of Open Table and TripAdvisor’s acquisition of Viator are perfect examples of moves to gain share deeper in the travel ribbon. …
“Mobile technology affords hotel companies a way to steer channel selection and transform the on-property guest experience. Allowing customers to unlock a door with their phones or use their phones to purchase ancillary products and services on property using loyalty points should be privileges reserved for customers booking direct. Understanding what really drives a differentiated experience and using it to steer customers to your direct channels must become a critical part of every hotel company’s mobile strategy.”
