Today we’re taking a two-fold approach: firstly, what’s going on with Booking.com and Triptease? Here’s the insider scoop, including Triptease’s skyrocketing success and Booking.com’s legal overtures.
Secondly, we’re focusing on hotels’ reputations online. How are you managing your reviews, your tweets and your social profiles? In today’s world of near-instant communication, many guests have come to expect swift attention on these platforms.
Here’s a guide to leveraging those guest interactions to your advantage, a checklist to maximize your return on social in 2016, and a piece on reputation management that’s absolutely packed with useful resources.
Booking.com Threaten Legal Action against Triptease
Booking.com, the OTA behemoth with a reported 700,000+ properties under contract, appear to be threatening legal action against Travel SaaS start-up Triptease. Triptease are the provider of price comparison tool ‘Price Check’. Price Check allows hotels to show a price comparison of their direct rates versus three OTAs (Booking.com, Expedia.com and Hotels.com) within their own booking engine. They claim it has resulted in an increase of up to 35% in direct bookings for their clients.
Booking.com claims in emails to their hotel partners that Triptease’s price widget is a) “unlawfully accessing Booking.com’s data” and b) providing misleading and inaccurate information. What do you think?
Triptease Touts Price Check Accuracy
Just as the controversy with Booking.com broke, Triptease was proclaiming the accuracy and usefulness of their price check widget at the Phocuswright 2015 conference in Florida.
Triptease claim that they will have driven $1 billion a year in incremental revenue for their partners by the end of 2015, with their price accuracy “close to 100%.” They drive revenue by bringing transparency to the market and “evening the playing field.”
2016 Checklist to Maximize Engagement and Revenues from Social Media
Social media and travel go hand-in-hand. 65% of adults now use social networking sites (Pew Research Center), and a growing portion of them are utilizing social media before, during, and after traveling. As traffic and activity on these platforms continue to grow, hoteliers have even more opportunities to reach their customer segments and generate revenue.
The possibilities for hoteliers in the social media space are more exciting and accessible than ever before. Are you prepared to leverage these opportunities and maximize revenues from social media in 2016? Here is a checklist to help you on your journey.
Get Your Guests to Work for You: Leverage User Generated Content
When trying to boost direct bookings, one of the best things you can do is create a strong reputation for your hotel. This can be achieved very effectively by creating a strong, branded search and social media presence and designing a clean, beautiful website.
However, there’s an additional way to build your brand that’s hugely effective and has the added benefit of enhancing your reputation. Best of all, it helps drive conversions up to fill your hotel.
This is User Generated Content (UGC). The classic advice is still true: nothing beats word of mouth advertising.
Online Reputation Management: Why and How to Revitalise Your Online Presence
93% of the people find reviews important when determining which Hotel they want to stay at. 53% of the people surveyed would not book a hotel without reading a guest opinion about it. That’s pretty serious.
So today, we’re going to give you a getting-started guide to online reputation management. We’ll take you through what it is, why it’s important, and how it can help your hotel. We’re also sharing a few of our favourite resources to get your hotel’s online presence on track.
