Destination Booking

Destination Booking

Jasmin Kagerbauer, Nico Hollenstein, Gabriel Hinze

Intro

Mountain Tourism today finds itself in a situation where it doesn’t have another choice than catching up with technology. The industry has always been one of the most dynamic but the 4^th industrial revolution that we are currently living changes the game drastically because it applies to services and the way we purchase them. It is no big news to say that the vast majority of people book their vacations via eTechnologies. (travelweekly, 2012) Smart organisms called OTAs or Metasearch engines saw it coming, took advantage of the situation and simply aggregated the supply on centralized platforms on which customers can now book everything related to their tourism needs. However, there are good and bad sides to everything. While OTAs and such companies provide smaller players such as hotels or DMOs with awareness, bookings and a so-called “billboard effect”, they also charge very high commissions. Their popularity gained such a level that it is now hard to survive in the market without them and especially in Mountain Tourism, an area which shows a slightly slower progression towards new technologies. So how to catch-up, to be up-to-date and to compete with these powerful online platforms?

Online Marketing and Sales

Destination Booking encompasses 3 steps: first, the targeted customer group has to be aware of the business and what it sells. Second, the product has to be interesting, hence well described. Third, the product has to be sold, and therefore needs a booking engine.

Awareness

Advertising in the streets is more or less a safe investment (if we assume it’s worth doing it), ads are like graffitis they’re on the walls and no one can decide whether they want to see them or not. On the contrary, ads on the internet can easily be removed from one’s eyes by using AdBlockers. Accordingly, online Ads have had to use camouflage in order to survive and still sneak into a browser. Therefore, ads look and feel exactly like the content of the website on which they are shown. Thanks to that method, people will see your ad without knowing it is one, which should increase CTRs.

Another up-to-date way to make people aware of a company is to let people be the content producers of your website. The ski resort Mayrhofen provides us with a very good example: they hired a couple of influencers to create content promoting the ski resort but based on the experienced they had there. These articles have then been published through blogs and relevant related websites. This way, they reached not only targeted customers through the followers of the influencers but also the people visiting the mentioned related websites. In the end, it is not comparable with any other advertising strategy: it is experienced based and the content is actually good an enjoyable to read. (Mayrhofen Hippach, 2017)

Product

No one will ever buy anything online without having information about it, that is why any product needs a description and pictures.

Pictures

A picture is worth a thousand words! OTAs propose now professional photographers to accommodation providers, which rise the quality of what is found online. Therefore, this is not a field where cutting costs should be applied, it is the other way around. The aesthetic of a place has great influence on the expectations of its atmosphere and hence on the purchase decision.

Text

When talking about accommodation, statistics showed that the optimal number of words for a description is in between 1500 and 2500 words accompanied with 25 to 30 pictures. About the structure, the first paragraph has to be catchy, of around 400 words, to include the USPs and 3-5% has to be composed of strategic SEO keywords. Following comes a summary about the situation, the type of accommodation, the description of the accommodation, the special amenities and last but not least information about the offer and the host.

Now having a description and pictures of the product is still not sufficient to create conversions. The availability is very important because yes today’s customer is shy or lazy and doesn’t want to send emails to ask about it.

Booking engines and their success factors

So what are the real success factors of effective online sales platforms? By conducting a market research, it is possible to gather the most relevant practices of the field. However, it is important to also dig into other fields than tourism because many other industries are by far ahead. Subjects that must be studied include online sales and technologies, customer behaviour and online booking platforms (OTAs).

The market research study done by SpeeduUp declared 24 factors of success. Out of them the study named several examples for best practice in tourism. These factors include social media activities, the attractiveness of the products and mobile solutions or co-operations. However, the most important factor is to build a booking tool that is user friendly. In other words “user first” should always remain as the main motto. Unfortunately, most of the time the general motto is “concept first”.

So what exactly is the user experience on online sales platforms? First it starts with the most crucial aspect and the question: is the content relevant and up-to-date? In practice, the content often stays the same for weeks or even months and a lot of sales platforms respectively destination portals are filled with more or less the same content and information. Does this make sense? No! The sales platform should provide visitor with countless and actual reasons to stay at the destination.

Booking.com generates many complaints in the hotel industry because of their dominance in the market. (Makay, n. A.) However, the complaints fail to consider the OTA’s major disadvantage. They are not able to create attractive price bundles or packages because they are not aware of the hidden secrets of a destination. On the other hand, booking.com is truly a technological perfection when it comes to keeping the visitors on their website. The fact that all relevant information is available and comparable on one page is their strategic advantage.

Even in a digital world, personal contact can be a key element of a great customer experience within a booking process. For sure, it is a question of capacity to give potential customers access to 24/h live assistance, which was impossible until now. Today OTAs have found a way to make it possible by implementing efficient chatbots that act as live assistants. Therefore, it gives even more reasons for the visitors to stay on the website and use it to ask the chatbot any questions they could have.

Another way for smaller businesses to compete with OTAs is to integrate a review section within their own websites. It provides other users with a statement of trust and hence should increase conversions. Other practices such as announcing “best rate guarantee” should also be applied. However, that statement is losing trust value as it is overly used.

Whatever you do on your digital sales platform, do it consequently to create and cover the whole customer journey. In the end, the fusion of perfect design, outstanding usability and state of the art technology should lead to a unique successful and competitive destination platform with one major target: boost your direct sales.

Next steps and future trends

But what is new in this fast changing technological world? One innovation are the technologies Google offers. For example, if you google “weather Zürich” the weather forecast automatically appears. You can also get information about a person that way. If you google ‘how tall is Barack Obama’ his height and heights of people associated with him will appear.

Many specialists accord to say that in the future websites are going to be extinct. Every bit of information and the whole content will be gathered by applications that aggregate, index and crawl the content. Both of these major trends have a common thread, which is the so-called structured data. Structured data, collected on schema.org, was an initiative by the four major players in the search engine market Google, Bing, Yahoo and Yandex. “Schema.org” defines syntax, semantics and vocabulary of websites.  Thereby ensuring that search engines can better read websites, meaning that they can extract the content out of them, understand it and directly respond to users’ requests. (Google Search, 2017)

Those new developments certainly sound interesting and we will soon discover what else the future of technology and eCommerce has to bring!

Sources

Google Search. (September 2017). Google Search. From Introduction to Structured Data: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/guides/intro-structured-data

Makay, D. (n. A.). Hotrec. From Dominant online platforms gaining market share in travel trade: http://www.hotrec.eu/newsroom/press-releases-1714/dominant-online-platforms-gaining-market-share-in-travel-trade-no-signs-of-increased-competition-between-online-travel-agents-unveils-european-hotel-distribution-study.aspx

Mayrhofen Hippach. (Dezember 2017). Mayrhofen Hippach . From Aktivitäten in Mayrhofen-Hippach: https://www.mayrhofen.at/erlebnisse/aktivitaeten/

travelweekly. (August 2012). travelweekly.com. From  http://www.travelweekly.co.uk/articles/41280/80-booking-holidays-online-finds-study

E. Watkins, “OTAs Make Revenue Gains in Online Travel Bookings.” [Online]. Available: http://duettocloud.com/otas-gain-market-share-online-travel-bookings/. [Accessed: 11-Dec-2017].

L. Fox, “Broken down, how OTAs are eating hotel business.” [Online]. Available: https://www.tnooz.com/article/OTAs-taking-hotel-business/. [Accessed: 07-Dec-2017].