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The development of technology has made it easier for the traveller to book hotel rooms by the website. The number of online websites that provide services for the hospitality industry is on the rise.

According to Quinby and Jain (2012) (which research the OTA market in Australia, China, Japan, India, Indonesia, Malaysia, New Zealand, Singapore and Thailand), the Asia Pacific’s online travel booking on 2011 is estimated to be US$ 1,6 billion/year and predicted to rise 30% to 40% on the next periods

In the hotel industry, the internet has had a big impact on the evaluation of the distribution channel, which pushed the industry from a traditional operation (offline) to an online operation system

VIZERGY, a leader in hotel Internet marketing, recently won two Interactive Media Awards (IMA) for website designs, including the highest honor of Best in Class.

The awards are a testament to the company's evolving and leading website design principles that factor into all of their clients' websites.

VIZERGY's design team adheres to the latest industry design and usability standards, as well as best practices determined by the team's years of award-winning experience. Along with professional images and search engine optimized copy, VIZERGY's client websites include bold calls to action, prominent booking engines, social media integration, layered imagery, shadows and more.

A computer to be used for web design should have a large hard disk and Random Access Memory, high processing speed and large storage capacity to be able to process the large video files.

Two servers are needed, the hardware and software servers which are important for web hosting. The relevant software for instance Dreamweaver and Microsoft front page need to be available before any progress can be made in construction of the site.

It is important to have a good antivirus or software that prevents the website from external threats.

If hotels want to succeed in a digital economy, hotel managers and marketers will need to embrace the key principles of e-commerce and apply them to their hotel websites. These principles include user experience, conversion triggers, and the travelers’ booking journey.

One of the first major principles of e-commerce for hotel websites is perfecting the user experience. This isn’t just about having a pretty website—it’s about how the user utilizes and interacts with your website.

Mobile bookings have increased tremendously in the last few years, making it crucial to have a mobile-friendly website and booking engine.

With 57% of all hotel bookings made online and 97% of all travelers searching for a place to stay using the Internet, the importance for hotels to adapt best ecommerce practices is more important today more than ever.

1. Use High Res Photos

No guest in his or her right mind would book a hotel without seeing photos of the property first. Beautiful photos is a deal breaker when it comes to almost all hotel bookings. Make sure that you use high res photos on your hotel website and make sure that you upload new ones regularly.

Here is a summary of the trends in three online distribution channels used in the hospitality industry: websites, Global Distribution Systems (GDS), and online travel agents (OTAs).

The Internet has made marketing more measurable and accountable with different metrics and analytics that show the contribution of marketing to the bottom line. The most critical measures of marketing are the customer acquisition cost (CAC) and the customer lifetime value (CLV), which at times can be difficult to understand and quantify.

The CAC is the price a hotel pays to acquire a new customer, which can have a significant impact on RevPAR performance and asset value growth. The CLV is a prediction of the value a business will derive from its entire relationship with a customer.

Sabre Hospitality Solutions has designed essential applications and products that will push your Internet Marketing program to a higher level of performance.

Beyond the realm of consumer searches, Deep Web technologies may eventually let businesses use data in new ways. For example, a health site could cross-reference data from pharmaceutical companies with the latest findings from medical researchers, or a local news site could extend its coverage by letting users tap into public records stored in government databases.

new site includes many new features, such as an interactive map, trip planner and searchable events calendar

The site also offers continuously updated listings of county restaurants, accommodations, shops, events and attractions.

Local tourism and hospitality businesses and attractions are invited to provide and update their own listings through an interactive feature on the website.

Attacks against the hospitality industry to gain payment information continue. There is a growing threat to all e-commerce websites called Web-based or Online Skimming. These attacks infect e-commerce websites with malicious code, known as sniffers or JavaScript (JS) sniffers and are very difficult to detect. Once a website is infected, payment card information is “skimmed” during a transaction without the merchant or consumer being aware that the information has been compromised.

Today two industry cybersecurity organizations, PCI Security Standards Council (PCI SSC) and the Retail and Hospitality ISAC, joined forces to highlight this growing threat.

By exploiting vulnerable plugins, brute force login attempts (credential stuffing), phishing and other social engineering techniques, the hackers attempt to gain access and inject malicious code.  “These attacks are either directly into e-commerce websites or often into a third-party’s software libraries that merchants rely upon.  These service providers may not be aware of the risk they create for their customers if they are not focused on security and the potential threats targeting them

The global EMS market is forecast to grow at a CAGR of 8.42% during the period 2016–2020

Event management software is an investment with a definite return.

Event management software provides detailed analytics of every digital aspect of your event starting from the event website, event app, registrations, ticketing to overall feedback.

Angelsmith recently released the results of a survey of more than 500 people to find out how they influence the dining decisions of others and in turn how their personal restaurant choices are made. The findings revealed that even though nearly half (48.9 percent) of survey respondents seek information from trusted friends first, more than eight of 10 (80.1 percent) respondents go on to do additional research after receiving a restaurant recommendation.

nearly 8 out of 10 (79.5 percent) of survey respondents reported influencing their friends, family, and co-workers.

This subset of 15.3 percent of respondents, reported that they were ‘always asked’ for restaurant recommendations from friends.

HeBS digital Blog Archive for the ‘Online Travel Agencies (OTAs)’ Category The OTA Billboard Effect or the Lazy Man’s Approach to Hotel DistributionMonday, August 1st, 2011 The following article is Max Starkov’s latest contribution to the “Successful eMarketing” blog on HOTELS magazine’s website The existence of the so-called billboard effect is not a new marketing phenomenon. It has existed long before the online channel became a reality. As confirmed by many studies, any marketing exposure by a hotel produces a billboard effect:  when you launch a banner advertising campaign; when you purchase a full-page ad in the New York Times travel section; when you launch a paid search campaign on Google, etc. The OTA Billboard Effect Lately Expedia reps have been aggressively using a new Cornell Hospitality Report, namely “Search, OTAs and Online Booking: An Expanded Analysis of the Billboard Effect” to convince hoteliers that they should use Expedia in order to generate more bookings from the hotel’s own website due to the so-called “Billboard Effect.” The Cornell Report, based on data from Expedia and InterContinental Hotel Group (IHG) from 2008-2010, is a continuation of a previous report on the subject, heavily supported by Expedia. The report’s analysis determined that when an IHG property was listed on the first results page of Expedia, this created an increase of between 7.5% and 14.1% in bookings for the same property on IHG’s own brand website. In other words, this is a confirmation for Expedia’s billboard effect, which hoteliers should take into consideration when griping against the 25% plus merchant OTA commission. When these “billboard effect bookings” are taken into consideration, Expedia’s commission “would effectively be reduced to single digits,” states the Cornell Report. Hoteliers, rejoice! We have found the perfect recipe for success: we do nothing as far as marketing the property website is concerned. Instead, we plaster Expedia with our sales promotions and wait for the travel consumers to come to our own website and book. As discussed, the billboard effect is not strictly an OTA territory. In my view, the Cornell Hospitality Report is a one-sided research project, very proactively supported by Expedia, similar to the first report on the billboard effect published in 2009. Cornell, the finest hospitality institution in the U.S., should know better than to come up with this half-baked “scientific” research, which does not account for the complexities of hotel distribution as well as the “digital information cloud” we all live in and the resulting marketing and distribution channel convergence which directly affects the purchasing habits of today’s hyper-interactive travel consumers. This report makes conclusions that do not take into account, among many other things, the following: Complex Travel Planning Patterns in Hospitality Many surveys show that people are shopping around on a number of hotel and travel websites before narrowing down their search. Typically in hospitality, these sites include a hotel search on a search engine e.g. Google (65% market share), an OTA website, TripAdvisor, the hotel’s own website, etc. Therefore jumping from an OTA website to a hotel branded website and vice versa is at least partially due to particular travel research patterns unique to the users and not due to the so-called billboard effect: Step 1: “I always search on Google first where I identify a property I like” Step 2: “I go to Expedia and see what the rate for this property is” Step 3: “I visit TripAdvisor to read my peer reviews for this hotel” Step 4: “I visit the hotel website and book if I like the location, rate and what I have read and seen about this hotel”

E-Marketing, also called Online Marketing, Internet marketing, I-marketing, web marketing, etc., plays an important role in maintaining hotel revenue as well as occupancy. Several aspects like Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), Social Media Optimisation (SMO), Search Engine Marketing (SEM), Email Marketing , Portal Marketing, Mobile App, Mobile Website, Website Maintenance, Future E-Marketing v/s Offline Marketing have been touched upon in this article in order to give an insight into the strategic importance and role E-marketing can play.  

Future of Online Marketing v/s Offline MarketingGrowth of online marketing was low in the initial years due to inhibitions, but it is now growing with extraordinary pace as the confidence of Indian buyers is increasing gradually. Seeing the current behaviour of Indian buyers, online experts estimated that the trend of online marketing will become a basic phenomenon among buyers in coming years. The present and future e-marketers are keeping their eyes on the Indian market trends and studying the consumer behaviour for creating best and attractive deals potential clients.

Portal Marketing: Another form of online revenue sharing consists in people working together and registering online in a way similar to that of a corporation and sharing the proceeds. A third form of revenue sharing on the Internet consists of enticing Internet users to sign up and create content by offering a share of advertising revenue.

A recent study of 2,000 people conducted by Guestline, looked how people book their hotels and the factors involved in room cancellations. It was found that over a quarter of people take into high consideration the quality and detail of a hotel's website (such as photographs and information) before making a direct booking online1.

Investing money into your websites simplicity in all stages of the guest journey will help acquire traffic, increase conversion rates and drive more people to book direct. The simplicity of website use (including less re-directs) will result trustworthiness of the potential customer. Hotel management may also find reporting efficient with less redirect windows to consider.

An investment in secure payment gateways protects the data of hotel guests, and the hotels credibility. For example, if a guest was to see the wrong value on an invoice, they may become wary of how secure that hotel's payment system is and look elsewhere. A secure payment gateway also checks in advance whether the credit card exists and is covered which could reduce chargebacks. This way, the hotelier can make sure that the booking via the credit card is genuine and at the same time protect the guest's data.