Ep 3 Hotel SurvivalGuide - Online Travel Agent Lie - 04:07:2017

Opening we reflect on the first 2 episodes: Lessons learned from this: 1.We fully understood and made best use of traditional methods 2.We used a wide range of marketing channels to achieve our goals 3.We mainly had to pay up front and hope for results 4.It was difficult to measure results Podcast 2: We looked at the Birth of Digital Marketing and Online Travel Agents Lessons learned 1.‘Pay on Results’ model was born 2.Changed travel booking behaviours 3.We have not taken the time to understand digital marketing like we did traditional methods 4.We learnt the difference between traffic you control and traffic you own The main section cover 'the online travel agent lie' Online Travel Agents and Comparison sites would have us believe that they are the only option available, if you want to be successful in a digital world. They would like you to believe that they sell your rooms for you. Due to their large investments, Online Line Travel Agents and comparison sites have become dominant forces online. They would have us believe that they are the only option available, if you want to be successful in a digital world. They would like you to believe that they sell your rooms for you. This maybe pedantic but they do not sell your rooms, they sell everyone’s rooms. By that I mean even if I visit Booking.com and type a specific hotel in, they will still show that hotel alongside competitors. They are also compare prices. Online Line Travel Agents are like coach trips. You and all your competitors get on a coach and the coach takes us to your potential guests. When we arrive at our destination we all get out. You and all your competitors get out. What happens is people start to barter on price. Comparison sites only make this problem worse. Both channels also take advantage of Facebook Re-Targeting and Google Re-Targeting. This means that when someone visits an online travel website they are tagged. The online travel agent records everything about what the viewer was looking for and then will show a variety of options to them in other windows. In Facebook, they might start showing a range of hotels that matched my search. This was all fine in the early days when commissions were 5% and you had a wider range of marketing channels. Now costs are rising, competition is fiercer and commissions are around 20%. We must find alternative methods to fill our rooms and increase revenue per available room. We must leverage and diversify the channels we use. Contrary to what OTA’s would have you believe, they is a wide range of options. There are more free options than ever before, but these take time. Paid for advertising is cheaper than ever and available to suit all budgets. Set up correctly, even the smallest of properties can take advantage of all the same Facebook Advertising the OTA’s use. Although most OTA’s play mainly in Googles paid for advertising. OTA’s take a big advantage of FB’s tagging option, which they call a PIXEL. They use this to show adverts in people’s news feeds after they’ve visited them. Organic Social Media provides a level playing field. Finally we cover some specific actions you can take to improve revenue.