Richard Turen
Our friends in the hotel sector have been buzzing about a report by Sabre Corp. that talks about the future of hotel bookings, subtitled "A Guide to Hotel Retailing."
It covers recent technology innovations that can be applied to the hotel industry, and it offers specific recommendations that it considers ready for implementation.
This is all very interesting because the hotel sector mirrors the issues facing travel sellers. What is new, I think, is a broad-based assumption that today's travel buyer can be reached successfully only by embracing a wide range of sales channels. There are not only more ingredients involved in making this sales soup; there is also the issue of how to distribute these ingredients in the pot and how to time them for maximum effectiveness.
Here's my take on the study's key conclusions and how some of what the hotel industry faces might apply to the rest of us:
• Reduce friction -- Translation: Reduce the steps in the booking process. Reduce clickage. Use auto-fill technology. In short, the seller of rooms, cruises or donkey rides up to the top of Santorini needs to sharply reduce the time between discovery and purchase. Online bookings have to be something they are not at the moment: smooth. Smoothness is not a topic we hear discussed very often but Sabre found that this ease of use is crucial across all booking platforms.
• Treat visitors like "old friends" -- Every interaction a future guest has had with the brand must be instantly produced in a way that makes visitors feel they're getting a warm "Welcome home." The technology is there. Done. But it is being severely underutilized.
When I check into my favorite Park Hyatt in Chicago, they know that I really like the rooms that end in 06, all of which overlook the original Watertower, Michigan Avenue, with clear views of Lake Michigan in the distance. The first few times this all happened seamlessly, I was entirely impressed. But few agencies can recall specific room numbers their clients loved or what it was about the room that mattered to them.
Translating "Welcome, old friend" across a range of tech, media and retail platforms is a real problem. But travel agents would be naive to think that hoteliers are not making giant strides in this area.
The exceptional Montage hotel group encourages its managers to spend time near the main elevators, a place where virtually all guests will pass, enabling personal interaction. Management needs to be poised to welcome newly arrived guests. The pre-printed note card just no longer cuts it.
Hotels have the technology to know their returning guests' preferred bedtimes, drinks and television-viewing habits. They have minibar profiles, and they can know how much time guests are away from their rooms and what they are doing while they are away.
At one hotel I know well, the doormen are highly trained and great conversationalists. They can quickly find out how a guest leaving the hotel will spend their morning, information that goes on the guest's permanent record.
I've mentioned before that studies show that 40% of the luxury guests in five-star hotels move their furniture around a bit. The maids in really top-ranked hotels worldwide snap a photograph of the room before it is made up. That, too, is added to the guest's permanent record, and the furniture is arranged to their specifications the next time they check in.
There are all sorts of ways to welcome guests to property and to demonstrate that you really know them. But doing that digitally during the search-and-book process is where we will see the greatest strides. Sabre refers to "touchpoints," tiny bits of personal recognition that persuade the searcher that she is in a safe place where she is recognized and appreciated. Retail agencies need to up their game, as should OTAs if they really think they will be able to compete in this arena.
• Guests have to imagine the trip during the booking process -- Hotels know that they have just seconds, perhaps a minute, to engage the potential guest in an interactive experience. With advances in live streaming and virtual reality, they can now walk the guests into their restaurants and rooms and offer a brief stroll around the immediate neighborhood. This technology is in its infancy, but it is coming, and it won't just be the sights the guest will see online. I would argue that every hotel property has a sense of place and sounds associated with it, which also will become part of online booking experiences.
Given advances in online display technologies, hotels will begin to seriously incorporate destination information that goes beyond the interior of their building. They will attempt to project a presence as the property best connected to the events happening within the destination.
Instead of merely highlighting their own, often overpriced, dining options, hotels will excite the visitor with connections to the destination's most authentic dining experiences. Instead of pretending, as they have for years, that the only two restaurants in town are the ones within their walls, hotels will assume that their guests want to go out to eat. Technology will enable them to offer "smooth" ways to get into the best places simply by virtue of being a recognized guest. Today's traveler is not willing to wait until arrival to arrange dining through a concierge. They expect that this ought to be possible as part of the initial booking process.
This will lead to what I have described as the "Guest Ownership Potential" of the brand. Why should hotels be satisfied with simply booking beds? Why not make staff the travel planners for an entire business trip or vacation? When you combine beds, food and transportation, the only missing element for a complete vacation is sightseeing, a hurdle an in-house hotel planner can easily address.
Hotels have always said "Oh, we don't want to be travel agents." Of course they don't. No sane person would. But technology makes it more feasible for the hotel to control an entire visit from airport arrival to departure.
• Convert through context -- This is where technology really shines. Contextual offer placement is the new battlefield. We are well into understanding how to match the psychological mindset of the potential hotel room purchaser with the specific time and context in which to launch an initial pitch, deal or reminder.
The technology can tell a hotelier when a guest likes to go online and be "caught in the act" searching travel sites and making plans.
If the potential guest meets certain profiles and has true potential, a deal or perk designed to create immediate action can be fired at him. Technology now enables sellers to design profiles of any Internet user, creating a model of the kind of offer that is most likely to appeal to a particular guest.
Some of us will be more likely to be seduced by lovely sunset photography, while others might better appreciate a photo of a fistful of cash subtracted from the room rate. But knowing us and our needs is something you can expect hotels will be doing better and better with each passing day.
The hotel industry will never willingly allow large portions of its inventory to be controlled by OTAs again. In fact, they will use multiplatform technology to create myriad reasons why consumers will go to their sites for the decision-making process. How "smooth" an experience that can be remains to be seen.
The travel consultant needs to do far more than mimic this approach. Agents need to have information that is more honest and more helpful than anything being offered on hotel platforms. The agent needs to have professional property-evaluation reports covering downside issues no hotel site will mention. The agent needs to offer flight tracking and service amenities that will never be replicated online and make certain that the hotels it supports do specific things upon a guest's arrival to support the agent/guest relationship. These are some tall marching orders, and they require a bit of a contrarian approach to click-and-book technologies, no matter how smooth they might appear.