A new post on the Keen website looks at 66,000 bookings from 6 million visitors, making bookings at 45 hotel and resort properties in 8 countries in Asia Pacific, to work out which visitors are the best hotel customers from a technical viewpoint. Key takeaways are the importance of tracking visitors to your site, testing across browsers and operating systems, and why visitors with large screens are so important to you.
Anthony Green – June 2010
Interesting release from PhocusWright, giving some insights into the minds of leisure travellers who prefer to book offline.
The biggest reasons for customers booking offline are personal service (33%), the feeling that they would get a better price booking offline (21%), and a belief that they would get better customer service if something goes wrong (16%).
Despite the US focus of this survey, all these factors will be familiar to ecommerce and revenue teams in Asia. Read the rest of this entry »
Read an interesting post on Hotel Blogs — Most hotel websites look the same, try to be different — which comments on Seth Godin’s assertion that hotel websites all look the same.
Interesting point. Leaving aside the bigger point that hotels are struggling to innovate in their core product and brand offerings, innovation with travel sites is hard. In the early years of the internet, it could be argued that innovation was high — when the marketing department controlled the sites, and looked for the Wow! factor, often through Flash and lots of graphics. The result was a bit of a mess, and sites that didn’t necessarily generate a lot of revenue. Read the rest of this entry »
Saw this earlier today, a great implementation of a mobile site from Mandarin Oriental. They’ve moved beyond the standard, stripped-down mobile site, to give something that has a lot more branding, with a clean design and great images.
The home screen is simple, focusing on finding a hotel. Read the rest of this entry »
The Sydney Morning Herald is reporting that Jetstar is planning to rent iPads, preloaded with content such as videos, e-books, magazines, games and music on domestic flights at $10 a time.
An interesting idea, which makes me wonder how suitable the approach would be for hotels. Any worries about guests walking off with the iPad could be taken care of with a deposit. For upscale hotels, iPads are already becoming a popular value-added service. For budget properties, iPad rental is both a potential revenue stream, and a more cost effective way to implement an advanced multimedia service (cheaper than adding a system made up of TVs, computers, DVD players, etc).
It will be interesting to see how this will be approached in the 2- and 3-star world.
Anthony Green – June 2010
Email me
Linkedin
Follow Me
a.nthonygreen 