Hotel Chat

Brand Versus Independent - Part2

Fri, 27 Apr 2012 15:22:00 GMT

Online reputation management
Please, do not compare this post with ‘how to manage Trip Advisor reviews’ – there are many of these already out there on that topic, and it is part of, but anything than the whole story.

We will focus on online reputation management, and try to give you some interesting suggestions as to how independent hotels can succeed over their branded counterparts in this area. For brand, read ‘hard brand’ or major hotel brand, or what we refer to as ‘rational brand’. Many independents may be ‘soft branded’ – i.e. branded by emotional factors.

For all hotels, brand or independent, Reputation Management is an integral and essential component of, but not the same thing as;

1 Sales
2 Marketing – especially content marketing and local marketing
3 E-commerce
4 Revenue management
5 Operations

And it needs to be present as a component with-in all these factors to be effective. Additionally these areas need to work together. This is rarely present these days, especially in brands, see below. Reputation management is a process – which integrates all 5 above with each other, and with organisational engagement and communications.

The reputation management process essentially has four parts;

- Building reputation
- Maintaining reputation
- Growing reputation
- Recovery of reputation – e.g. where there has been a complaint

Reputation management is a relatively new phenomenon surprisingly. Travel shoppers rely heavily on peer experience when making buying decisions. Today is the day of the ‘it’s all about me customer – so that your online reputation is shaped by these customers, not by you – yet you have to manage it, and you must – and yes you can evaluate, act. Communicate positively, and shape your on line image using – blogs, posts, tweets, PR, mobile, social media, internet new sites – and many more channels …..

The stronger your on line reputation, the more likely you will grow sales, revenues, and rate/yield. This will also have a viral effect as people are more likely to recommend you – and a displacement effect (people looking for hotel ‘A’ on e.g. Trip Advisor, see you (hotel ‘B’), and switch to you.

Many small businesses think reputation management is only for the larger hotel Chains and Brands, or that they cannot afford it, or that it is too big an inconvenience. We will hopefully dispel these concerns below and give you some instances where independent hotels can more completely compete over the brands when it comes to reputation management – thereby converting it into an excellent commercial opportunity.

So getting started:-

1 You are closer to your organisation than a big brand can possibly be to a unit franchisee or licensee, or managed unit. So you can effectively merge the 5 essential parts of reputation management outlined above. Big brands are corporate monoliths. They are slow to change, they are ruled by corporate governance. We know of brands where reputation management is seen as unimportant, there is no separate department for or manager of it, and it seems to fall into a black hole usually somewhere between operations and marketing. In other words, there is no place for it in the corporate organisational chart with many brands currently – or it is not high on the strategic agenda.

2 This is borne out very convincingly if you look at Trip Advisor. In most of the top UK destinations, brands are behind independents in the popularity/review ranking stakes. This corroborates both brand lack of interest, and the opportunity for the independents to gain an advantage

3 Many years ago when the internet became an established part of daily business, all hotels had a level marketing playing field, we remember it well. Over the last 15 years, the evolution of travel distribution on the web has meant that this playing field has been significantly eroded, with OTA’s paying for preferred placements which only the larger hotels can afford. However one way currently that the independent or small hotels can redress this imbalance, is in the area of reputation management.

Here are some of our tips - -

- The big OTA’s are now huge sources of travel shopper reviews, either their own, or in partnership with e.g. Trip Advisor. Independents are in a unique position to manage these more carefully and aggressively than brands, and OTA’s will tend to place properties with great reviews and competitive rates higher in the pecking order, we know this to be the case in practice.

- The billboard effect means that, whether they meant it or not, OTA’s are used as search engines and the booking is made elsewhere e.g. on the hotel website or over the phone. Another good reason to manage your reviews on third party websites.

- A hot topic in web and social media metrics right now is ‘attribution’ – tracing the channel/s that ultimately leads a traveller to book a room. One commentator, Josiah Mackenzie, http://www.hotelmarketingstrategies.com says that 30% of travellers switch hotels at the last minute after looking at Trip Advisor scores. Need we say more?

- Reputation management is part of the SEO success pyramid. It creates trust, higher traffic, better conversions, better and more proactive feedback. Independent hotels have the flexibility of operation, and don’t have the barrier to change of the large corporate brands where there is often a relationship imbalance between the macro (brand) and at the micro (individual/local hotel) level.

- A brand is a reputation, a unit hotel is a business at the micro level where reputation services are not offered by the brands, nor do they care. They see reputation management as a macro thing on social media (where it has been widely reported that brands are finding Social Media a ‘waste of time’ as an engagement tool) – again this is an opportunity for the independent hotelier.

- With the major brands, there has been a recent obsession with the room as the ‘default’ unit of sale and the core of everything they do, a multi product independent hotel doesn’t need to suffer from this and needs to, and should easily be able to – ensure that its reputation management is spread over all products – rooms, weddings, Spa, packages, meetings etc – brand website are woefully short when it comes to market segmentation. Again here is a big opportunity for the independent – remember if you are a wedding hotel, one wedding booking is worth many room sales.

Additionally integrity and trust are significant components of reputation management. We believe that small businesses in particular, as opposed to brands, live or die by customer referrals. This has 2 implications for independents and reputation management.

1 Remember that if you are running ‘flash sales’ e.g. with Groupon, these may introduce a demographic mix to your business that may be uncomfortable. We find paradoxically that a hotel’s highest paying/yielding customers are often their least ‘complaining’ customer segment. Flash sites have the potential to greatly undermine your value equation and your integrity.

2 Practice market segmentation in reputation management, as you would with channel management and revenue management. To illustrate this point, a guest may be a potential wedding customer, if you do weddings, or SPA treatments if you offer SPA’s. Make sure you have great wedding reviews from guests, and remember to manage all your key channels right across the board from a reputation management point of view. Big brands just don’t do this.

Here at Navarino, we take a serious interest in all critical control points in the ecommerce and conversion process. We do not provide reputation management services, but two of our partners do, Innfinite Hospitality and ReviewPro. You should take the ReviewPro online demonstration, arrange this through Innfinite Hospitality (www.innfinite.co.uk) We believe you will be impressed at the scope and management capability of this Reputation Management tool, also by the amount of reviews you have that you don’t even know about. Your Trip Advisor reviews may be less than 20% of your total on line reviews, yet the current press and obsessions about Trip Advisor would sometimes suggest it is the only review site on the web.

As a point of interest, many of the big hotel brands have joined together to create RoomKey (www.roomkey.com) – this further polarisation of brand from independent will yield opportunities to the independents. Social media sites, especially Facebook, are hot on the heels of brands for ad campaigns, yet many Facebook users have said they don’t want to be served adds on their pages. There are issues for reputation management here.

Finally two further suggestions from us:

1 Ask your webmaster to create an on-line guest survey, so that you can ‘use’ your guests to evaluate you on the key products and services you are most concerned about.

2 If you have a social media page e.g. a Facebook Fan page, get your Trip Advisor links embedded here, this is easy to do, most webmasters can do it for you.

That’s it for now on ‘Reputation Management’, this is an evolving topic, so we will revisit it.

Brand Versus Independent

Thu, 26 Jan 2012 12:48:00 GMT

What are some fundamental key points to consider when deciding on either a Brand or Independent to represent, market and sell your property in the hugely competitive areas of on line visibility and SEO, local, national and global distribution and representation – and now – visibility, distribution, engagement and conversion in the social media and mobile space?

Quality of service, the importance of customer relationships and the development of industry leading technology are crucial elements to making Navarino Services the Independent Service company that we are. An Independent organisation offers the hotelier the chance to be free and stand unique in its market whilst at the same time, receive excellence in service levels ensuring client satisfaction is achieved as a top priority. Unless you can prove a specific requirement for a brand, little value can be added, especially when the cost of both joining a brand, and ongoing brand compliance can be expensive.

In today’s volatile market, for independent hoteliers, maintaining individuality and finding attributes that support your hotels exclusivity is imperative. An Independent Representation company fully supports these goals and concentrates its efforts on service and not branding.

Remember this: when you sign up with a brand – you could be signing away not just operational independence and freedom of action, (in exchange for the ‘protection’ of a brand) – but
• Ability to manage your web presence, especially using the destination to leverage business for the hotel – many brands either don’t allow unit hotel websites, or if they do, they restrict their operation considerably using ‘electronic branding standards’.
• Setting rates, rate parity, revenue management and other revenue generation considerations – you are totally in the hands of the brand booking engine and distribution policy, usually including OTA’s- brands have a preferred list of, and TPI agreements for third party representation approval and criteria to which you are bound.
• Mobile is showing quite phenomenal growth of usage in the travel space, and we are seeing business gains right across the board in mobile. You may or may not be allowed to develop your own mobile website and booking engine integration or link – also the local marketing and information service power of mobile and smartphone devices is something the brands really don’t consider or even care about.

Service is key to any business. Service is about personality, passion, feeling and spirit. There are brands that have been long leaders in market dominance which cannot afford to be displaced by competition from its number one position in their market. These brands make lots of noise within the industry, however perhaps questions can be asked; “What are the strengths and weaknesses of a Brand organisation”, “What is their primary focus and is their primary focus right for you”? When you ask a brand what is their main focus, it is interesting to note how many discuss the attributes and benefits of their product over the importance of their own service levels. As an example, a car will only continue to be road worthy with maintenance and service, providing the aftercare it needs is on-going after the sale.

Interesting Observations:

• If you look at Trip Advisor, independents score far better than brands in just about every UK city, from London to Edinburgh, as of today; 24th January 2012, in Edinburgh there is only 1 branded hotel currently in the top 20 Edinburgh hotels on Trip advisor. This is a critical unique selling opportunity independent hoteliers must exploit. For all the boasting and bragging, brands are actually found lacking and inadequate when compared against independents. Something that is not often reviewed and discussed within the industry.
• Brands are dehumanising the hospitality experience for the guest. Many branded hotels are becoming soulless, impersonal hotel experiences. The hotel GM hides in the back office, the welcome is poor, and the service functional, but impersonal and dull – look again at Trip Advisor – how many critics are raving about the automatic check in.
• Its very important to measure the appropriateness of a brand for your particular business model. If you are a boutique hotel, you are almost certainly better to be independent, the few soft-brands that work in this category are second best to establish global brands and can add less value than perceived. if you’re a 3 star budget hotel in a city centre, then a brand may be more relevant at managing operational procedures. Generally the higher the quality positioning of the hotel, the less value branding will add. YOUR hotel is the brand.

Some will argue that investing in service will not guarantee a high return on investment, however, an Independent service organisation is able to offer the time and care in building client relationships whether corporate or leisure. This increases the hotels knowledge, understanding and awareness of your product strengths. The strengths of delivering an excellence in service will drive revenue in one direction only – upwards.

Service provides a ‘Quality product’, without the service element, guests can only expect to receive ‘a product’ of lower quality. A quality product ensures you have every opportunity to stand out and be successful in becoming an industry leader in your market share.

We do hope this increases your interest in future blogs on this interesting topic: Brand versus Independent.

Navarino welcomes you to Hotel Chat!

Tue, 24 Jan 2012 13:31:00 GMT

At long last, welcome to hotelChat, the new Navarino blog and chat room where we will be regularly posting our take on topics of current interest post to all hoteliers, and also authoritative posts and comments from our business partners. We’ve made a real quantum leap into the B2B social media scene, so

Visit us on Facebook on http://www.facebook.com/pages/Navarino-Services-Ltd/349114521326

Visit us on Twitter https://twitter.com/Navarino_Global

Visit us on Linked In http://www.linkedin.com/company/navarino-services-ltd

A Google + account will follow very soon, we’ll keep you informed.

Navarino is first and foremost a company focused on commercial deliverables, so we are just starting to feel our way on social media, for us the jury is still out on it – something we’ll be commenting on in future blogs as we make the journey and find out what if any mileage we see there being in it for us. We know our business partners struggle to see the ROI benefits too. As we always say, especially in a recession – list all your commercial marketing and ecommerce activities and rank them in order of which you could least do without, and see where social media activity appears in this list.

By nature, we are independent hotel focused as the bulk of Navarino’s clients are independent hotels worldwide, so ecommerce and distribution solutions for independent hotels are our core competence. Our ecommerce parents Sabre look after the big brand accounts. So it was an easy choice for us to make our first blog topic the oft debated subject of ‘brand v independent hotels’.

One thing even technological advance, which takes no prisoners, has taught us is that independent hotels are in many unique positions to give their branded competitors a great run for their money. We are not anti-brand, far from it, but we think we can deliver some great ideas for independent hotels and where they can perhaps steal a march on their branded competitors.

So, to all our readers, partners and clients alike, a very happy Christmas and a prosperous New Year. 2012 will be challenging, and our four January ‘snippets’ will give you some food for thought for meeting the challenges with some hard hitting observations too, here they are - - - - - -

Our January topic – brand v independent hotels – we’ll feature, throughout January

1 Intro and overview

2 and reputation management

3 Web presence and SEO

4 Mobile marketing and m commerce

5 Destination marketing and sell

6 Importance and strength of the GDS

Welcome back soon.

At all times your views and comments are very gratefully appreciated.