Mobile has been a force in hospitality for a decade. Levels of traffic on mobile are rivaling or outstripping desktop for many hotels, and mobile payment options are coming into full force.
However, cross-device marketing and booking is still a challenge. Mobile and desktop require different strategies, and customers interact with hotels and research differently on each – but your goal is still the same, and theirs is too. The trick is to marry the two in your marketing while respecting their differences.
Below, Skift reports on a study on the latest in cross-device marketing, and Mike Murray of TripCraft speaks on the importance of mobile hospitality.
We’ve also included a piece on winning group business with your visuals, and news from the UK on challenges for independents and drops in ADR in the wake of Brexit.
How Cross-Device Marketing Is Changing The Way Brands Engage Travelers
Advances in cross-device marketing orchestration are shifting how brands engage consumers on a more personalized basis across their entire customer journey by delivering the right content in the right channel at the right time.
The Mobile Journey: A New Perspective on Mobile Hospitality
It has been ten years, and it’s time that we adopt a new perspective on mobile hospitality—seeing it as a journey, a process.
There are now hundreds of capabilities, none of which stand alone, all dependent on one another and on legacy systems. Mobile hospitality is an evolving platform of increasingly important stature. It is an essential aspect of delivering reservations, marketing, and guest service, and hotels benefit from treating it as such.
3 Ways Visual Hotel Marketing Can Win Group Business
We’re entering a new era of hotel marketing: the tools we used just a few short years ago no longer suit the digitally-savvy, visually-driven generation today. So when it comes to closing more group business from meeting and event planners, taking a more visual approach to hotel marketing is one high-impact area where properties can influence more closed deals. With the meetings, events, and conventions industry crossing over the $117 billion a year mark, it’s no wonder that competition between hotels in booking this business has increased ten-fold.
UK Hotels: Independents are Fighting Back
Nearly two-thirds of hotel openings in the provinces last year were in the budget sector, according to estate agency group Knight Frank. In London, approximately half of new hotels were deemed to be budget properties.
This, it suggests, “is evidence of a structural change taking place and an underlying shift to greater branding and the hotel market becoming less fragmented” – code for emphasising that independent hoteliers are the ones under increasing pressure. The number of independent hotel rooms is estimated to have declined by some 40,000 during the past decade, according to veteran hotel industry consultant Melvin Gold.
Nonetheless, independent hotels are still a key force in the UK hospitality world. According to Gold’s analysis, the independent sector accounts for a majority of the market – albeit only just.
UK Hotels Report Drop in Average Room Rates
Hotels in major cities across the UK have seen a drop in average room rates in the first quarter of the year.
Liverpool suffered the steepest drop of 14.3% followed by Bristol (down 11.7%) and Leeds (down 10.7%) with only Reading seeing the same rates as last year, remaining at an average of £103.
London showed a small decline from the same period last year but an improvement from the last quarter of 2016, latest data from HRS – Global Hotel Solutions reveals.
