There are so many discussions today about Internet Marketing, Social Media, Reputation Management, etc. All and more which are highly relevant, but what about getting back to the basics?

Do you and your team consistently make good 1^st impressions with your guests?

• When was the last time you rushed around the front desk to open the door for a guest?
• When was the last time you stooped down to a 3 year old child level and handed them a colouring book and crayons with a genuine smile?
• When was the last time you had breakfast with your guests, and took the time to ensure that they were having a pleasant stay?

Remember, 1^st impressions can “make or break” you and it’s often what you’re remembered by. If your competitors are making similar efforts, then what can you do to be remembered by? Break yourself apart from them. If you represent a brand, don’t rely solely on the franchise and let it hide your personality. Allow your true colours to shine outside of that uniform. If you represent an independent hotel, then even more reason ensure that every 1^st impression is immaculate.

1^st Impressions don’t necessarily come natural to everyone, and it can’t really be trained, but there are some basic principles.

When you greet a guest, don’t just smile because your General Manager made it mandatory, smile because you really mean it.

Last impressions are just as important. When departing a hotel, would you prefer to have someone wish you a nice day? Or would you prefer them to wish you and your family a safe trip and say that they look forward to seeing you again?

Consult with your team, both executive and non-management, and develop and implement a “1^st Impressions” strategy. Follow-through accordingly and ensure that positive impressions are made on every opportunity to connect with your guests.

Getting back to the basics will increase your repeat guests” & referral opportunities, and consequently reduce your reliance on GDS & OTA Bookings, and positive reviews on Trip Advisor will increase. Live by it, and the rewards in your efforts will have a positive ripple effect through your online marketing efforts overall.

The post Make a lasting impression on your guests appeared first on RoomKey PMS.

Beginning immediately, Magnuson Hotels will begin installation of Roomkey, the world’s first fully web-based hotel property management system.

Magnuson reports that hoteliers will benefit from one consolidated operating system that unites front desk, reservation system and brand into one low cost and easy to use mobile and Internet dashboard.

All Magnuson Hotels GDS and OTA reservations will automatically download to the front desk, so remote and mobile devices can access rooms sold, occupancy, source of booking and ADR all in one place. The system supports over 500 interfaces including PBX, Keycard, POS and credit cards.

“Upon completion of a global search, is was amazingly clear there was no other choice for a PMS partner with the innovation and technological supremacy than the Roomkey team headed by Charles Ku,” stated Thomas Magnuson, CEO Magnuson Worldwide. “Hoteliers can count on many powerful and low cost advancements in the near future from our partnership.”

About Magnuson Worldwide.
Magnuson Worldwide, headquartered in London UK and Spokane, WA is the world’s largest hotel services organisation. Magnuson Worldwide’s holdings include Global Hotel Exchange, GDS1, PMS1, Magnuson Hotels, and Magnuson Marketplace. www.magnusonworldwide.com

About RSI International Systems Inc.
RSI International Systems Inc. is the world’s first provider of cloud-based Property Management System software and related marketing and online support products and services to the global hospitality industry. The Company’s guest-centric, integrated processes provide a unified data view enabling its customers to better leverage online customer acquisition, and better manage and retain guests once acquired. The Company’s headquarters are located in Vancouver, Canada and its shares are listed on the Toronto Stock Exchange Venture (“TSXV”). For more information please visit www.welcometorsi.com

The post Magnuson names RSI exclusive PMS provider for 2000 hotels. appeared first on RoomKey PMS.

Content Marketing Defined:

Basically, content marketing is the art of communicating with your customers and prospects without selling. It is non-interruption marketing. Instead of pitching your products or services, you are delivering information that makes your buyer more intelligent. The essence of this content strategy is the belief that if we as businesses deliver consistent, ongoing valuable information to buyers, they ultimately reward us with their business and loyalty.

Content Marketing is being used around the globe by some of the most creative, cutting-edge hotel brands and management groups.  Small and large independents alike are now creating and executing a content marketing strategy designed to drive revenue.  Why do they invest so much time into this?  Well, its seems to work.  Really well!

It’s become quite obvious to most marketers that they can’t reach their customers through the same mediums they used to.  DVR’s allow us to skip through TV commercials, print is more popular with recycling bins than any particular demographic, and consumers have become so good at surfing for information that they can simply filter out any banner or display ad they see.  This is where the influencers and leaders in this industry have seen an opportunity.  If it’s so easy for consumers to search and find information, why not help provide that information for them with the idea being that when they are ready to purchase, your brand loyalty is already established.

If you go back and read the definition above, there should be one piece that really resonates.  If you as a hotel “are delivering information that makes your buyer more intelligent” , you have instantly created credibility and separated your brand from the constant bombardment of direct selling or spamming the consumer receives on a daily basis.

Content marketing is any marketing format that involves the creation and sharing of media or content in order to acquire customers. The basic idea is to provide information or entertainment that the consumer will find valuable but stops short of moving into any specific or direct sales pitch. The consumer will keep coming back as long as the content stays fresh and interesting to them without the feeling of a “hard sell pitch”.

To see the value of this approach, ask yourself a few simple questions.  What if your consumer actually looked forward to receiving your marketing material? What if they not only looked forward to your marketing material, but they spent 5 -20 minutes consuming it?  What if they found that information so valuable that they felt it was necessary to share with their friends or colleagues. And what if Google loved all that activity and rewarded you with more visibility?

Consumers will look forward to receiving your marketing materials if you take the time to develop a well thought out Content Marketing plan.  If you don’t already have a CM strategy, what are you waiting for?

The post Content Marketing. The future of Hotel Marketing, or already the present? appeared first on RoomKey PMS.

In my last post I talked about the rise of tablet-based search and the impact it was having on occupancy and how guests research and book rooms. This week I came across a great article that puts some more meat on the ‘guest-evolution’ bones.

Google (along with market-researchers Ipsos and Sterling Brand) did some research looking at the new multi-screen world that today’s consumers have created. Supporting the notion that businesses need to present a consistent experience across multiple touch points, they reported that “approximately  90% of our media consumption behavior,  4.4 hours each day, is spread across all four device types (smartphones, tablets, PC/Laptop and TV).  The average daily time spent on the respective devices is 17 minutes for Smartphones, 30 minutes for Tablets, 39 minutes for PC/Laptop  and TV is still king (but just) at 43 minutes.       

The point of the article was this; is your content providing a consistent user experience across all the digital delivery platforms that your prospective guest might try to access your content? Bear in mind that user expectations and objectives may be different from device to device. On their PC, they may do a deeper dive into your detailed site, offering, location images and activities etc. On a Tablet they may be surfing through looking generally at availability and pricing. On their Smartphone, they’re on the highway, now looking with intent for a room to book for tonight!

And hence the link to occupancy improvement. Allowing the guest to pull up and do what’s required of your site on any device they choose may be the difference between them competing the final booking with your hotel, versus on that’s more… accommodating  (sorry, pun intended).  Estimates say that the average booking cycle involves 17.5 travel sites and 10 hotel website visits over an average of 6 days, 18 hours before a new guest completes a final booking . There’s much more likelihood of not increasing your occupancy if you’re not accessible and easy to convert with when your prospect is finally ready.

We know that the modern consumer has changed. Unless we’re of the wired generation, or we read a lot, we may not realize just how much they’ve changed. The quote from author William Gibson may capture it best:

“The future is already here – it’s just not evenly distributed.”

The post Increasing Hotel Occupancy from Today’s ‘Connected Consumer’ appeared first on RoomKey PMS.

I’ve written previously about the increasing impact of social and mobile on consumer behaviour in general, and of course in the travel space in particular. More data came out last week with a report in Mobile Marketer on the effects of the continued rapid adoption of tablets.

The headline that caught my eye was “Tablet Paid Search Overtakes Smartphones in Q4”. Originally authored by Marin Software, the report stated that

“During the fourth-quarter of 2012, paid search spend on tablets eclipsed smartphones for the first time.”

Specifically, what they saw was that “advertisers significantly increased their investment in paid search on tablets last year, with spend share growing from 4.8 percent to 10 percent in 2012.”

I know; you’re asking yourself why should I care about online advertising spend moving around a bit? The answer is that it’s just one more indication of consumer (‘guest’) behavior shift. As referenced in an earlier post, it’s not the tech itself, it’s what people are doing with it that impacts your occupancy (positively or negatively).

Here’s the shift. The share of Google paid-search clicks from mobile devices rose from 14.2 percent to 23.4 percent last year. Paid search ads are those ads you see at the right and on top of your results page when you search in Google. Google can see, and reports to all of us who monitor our websites and ads via Google Analytics and AdWords exactly what platform, device and even operating system it came from (so yes they know if we’re still on Windows 98 or IE 3).

They also report on when you search and by what keywords (what you entered in the search box). Google had earlier reported that they could see patterns indicating people searched during the day on their desktop computer, over lunch on their smartphone, and in the evening on their tablet. Sound familiar? It’s often not even that distinct. How many times have you found yourself in an email conversation that you started on your desktop, and did portions of on your smartphone and/or tablet…seamlessly answering the next message on whatever device you happened to have in your hand?

The takeaway is that today’s ‘Connected Consumers’ have become device agnostic. They expect to be able to find and interact with your website on any appliance they happen to be using. They expect to complete their booking the same way. If your website and booking engine aren’t ‘responsive-design’ to enable them to resize to display and work properly on a smartphone or tablet, it’s probably costing you bookings.

Responsive-design, and using search engine optimization (SEO) to make your website as ‘findable’ and useful as possible are now pretty much table-stakes. With Smith Travel Research (STR) showing that a minimum of 37 percent of an average hotel’s revenue comes from online sources (OTA’s, Brand.com and GDS), it’s imperative to be visible in as many places as your potential guest may be.

The key learning from the ‘tablet’ advertising stat I started the post with is that savvy advertisers move dollars with consumer movement. The spike in paid search volume on tablets (part of the “mobile” category) is a clear indicator that this platform is now hitting an inflection point. If you’ve been putting off evolving your website and booking engine to be responsive-design to capture mobile guest bookings… no time like the present to give this serious consideration.

The post Tablet Adoption Changing How Guests Search (and Book)! appeared first on RoomKey PMS.

We are excited about this for a few reasons: 

1. Native tracking in Facebook removes the need for work-arounds,
2. It adds an extra data source to validate your results against web analytics,
3. You can now use impression-based optimized Cost per Impression (OCPM) to deliver ads to people who are most likely to convert.

Conversion measurement of Beta tests using optimized CPM have shown that these ads reduced the cost per conversion by 40 percent compared to CPC ads using the same budget. ~ source

How Facebook Conversion Tracking Works

Using the Conversion Tracking Pixel Tool, Facebook advertisers can generate a snippet of javascript code to place on your booking confirmation page. Whenever a guest who has seen or clicked through from your Facebook ad books a stay at your hotel, it registers the conversion in the system.

Static vs Dynamic Goal Values

Facebook allows you to assign your conversion goals with a dollar value. That value can either be pre-set when you create the tracking pixel, or dynamically entered based on the reservation dollar value.

Static Goal Values - These are pre-set when you create your tracking code and are useful for secondary conversion events like email sign ups or if you use a lead generation form for Conference or Wedding Events.

Dynamic Goal Values – While it takes more work to implement, with dynamic goal tracking you pull the actual booking total into your tracking code so you know exactly how much the guest has spent with your hotel.

Knowing the actual dollar value your hotel campaigns generate is huge in determining the ROI of your program.

3rd Party Booking Engines

To set up Facebook conversion tracking you are going to need to work with your booking engine to fully implement the code. Of course you should already have web analytics in your booking engine to truly understand the booking funnel, so this should not be a difficult request.

Facebook Optimized CPM (OCPM)

When you add in conversion tracking to your Facebook campaigns, it gives you an option to switch from cost per click (CPC), to cost per impression (CPM), with the goal of Facebook optimizing your campaign based on a cost per acquisition number. They are touting the stat that this will reduce your cost per conversion by up to 40% compared to conventional Facebook ads running CPC.

1. We don’t have access to a whole lot of data as yet to really prove whether this is true for all marketers, or if this is an outlier stat.
2. Facebook is also tracking conversions on a View Thru basis. So while your ad may be displayed to a user, did they truly see it?

Facebook is not short of inventory when it comes to pageviews. My concern here is that they can blast your ads to a wide audience and attribute any conversions to your campaign. While no attribution model is perfect, this is a fuzzy logic when viewed from a Facebook perspective.

It’s still early days and we will keep you all updated with results & tips for improved campaign performance as we use the tool.

The post Facebook Conversion Tracking for Hotels appeared first on RoomKey PMS.

I found this quite interesting, not just because we think they have a great name (they are a totally separate company), but because of what we think the hotel industry seems to see in them.

You’ll recall that just about this time last year (Jan. 11^th) six of the largest hotel chains in the world unveiled a joint venture online hotel search platform. The collaboration by Choice, Hilton, Hyatt, InterContinental, Marriott, and Wyndham is led by former Pegasus founder John Davis III.

The reaction to their arrival in the marketplace was immediate and extensive with all manner of pundits and commentators weighing in on whether they would make it, how they would market themselves and whether they could get the traction required to make a dent in the very well established OTA’s.

Much of that discussion has been covered in great detail other places so I’ll limit my comments to why I think the hotel industry at large is so intrigued with Roomkey.com, and why they seem to be rooting for them to succeed. When you boil it all out, I think there are probably 3 underlying reasons:

1.       The trade sees any pushback on the established OTA’s as a positive:

As observed in a previous post, the degree of change that would occur as the OTA’s became embedded in the travel ecosystem was probably not fully anticipated. Certainly the level of influence they would come to wield vis a vis hotel pricing was not likely foreseen. As often happens when new technology takes hold, consumer behavior begins to change and in the case of the OTA’s, that behavioral change came at a cost to the hotel industry. As things have evolved, it wasn’t just commission costs either, which leads us to the second reason for the interest in Roomkey.com.

2.       Roomkey.com is essentially a “direct” channel:

Because it’s owned by the founding hotels themselves (though others have since joined), it’s their inventory that goes into the system and that’s presented to guest prospects when they search. It takes searchers from Roomkey.com to the brand.com website of the properties themselves, and as such provides a number of customer benefits including:

• The hotels’ lowest rates guaranteed,
• No hidden fees or penalties,
• Guests earn their loyalty points & rewards.

Realizing that they needed scale, the founding hotels collaborated to gather eyeballs, not unlike the competitors do in an ‘Auto Mall’ concept; it attracts a motivated customer, then it’s just down to a brand decision. Ultimately, Roomkey.com is less expensive than the incumbent OTA’s, and the guest is coming direct to the brand via a ‘friendly source’.

Which leads in to the 3^rd reason I think the trade is interested in how Roomkey.com makes out.

3.       Roomkey.com puts the hotels back in control of both pricing and their customer relationship (with a side order of Brand for good measure)!

One of the bigger ‘unintended consequences’ as the OTA’s took hold, was that hotels slowly but steadily ceded more and more control of not just pricing, but worse still, their customer relationship. Rate parity agreements undermined their ability to manage their own pricing, and with it, significantly eroded the positive linkage between brand and price. The consumer’s ability to instantly shop and compare competitors (and those properties that a hotel would NOT consider a competitor), severely undermined the perception and importance of brand distinctions, and the ability to charge for the difference.

Meanwhile, on the customer relationship front, with the OTA’s inserting themselves in between the hotels and their customers, it became clear over time that the ‘ownership’ of the customer relationship had moved from the hotel, to Expedia, Booking.com and others. With that realization, and the knowledge that the hotel’s themselves had been entirely complicit in the shift, came the desire to do something to ‘repatriate’ lost customers, their loyalty and the lifetime value they represent.

Many may see Roomkey.com as a first strike in that direction, which likely accounts for at least part of the significant interest in how they fare.

Founder John Davis is quoted as saying that just 5% of the traffic that gets to brand.com hotel websites converts to a booking (we’ll deal with conversion another day).  Whether Roomkey.com can up the amount of ‘direct’ bookings to its founders remains to be seen. What’s far more intriguing as they enter Year 2 though is to see if they have given form to hotelier’s angst over letting control of pricing and customers get away, and created a sense of urgency about finding ways to repatriate customers, reassert control over pricing and put value back into their Brand.

It seems that in 2013, hospitality will continue to reflect the ancient Chinese proverb… “May you live in interesting times”.

The post Hotel Industry Watches Roomkey.com Effect on Direct and Price appeared first on RoomKey PMS.

In the coming weeks and months we’ll explore various elements but today “social” is in the spotlight. They say “what’s in a name”. Have you noticed the evolution of what particularly marketing and business people call social these days? It started out as social “networking” (what people did with it). Then the marketing folks showed up and we called it social “media”. Then it became social “business” and now the market simple calls it “Social”.

One key thing to remember is that the people who are on social, never set out to do business. Hence the difficulty of ‘monetizing’ social. (Well that and the privacy thing but that’s a whole other can of worms). In seeking ways to help hoteliers cut through the considerable clutter, and get to something ‘actionable’, we like the concept of social ‘review’; those social validation sites like Trip Advisor and others that have a direct impact on your business.

While also hard to quantify, you can see the ‘smoking gun’ for yourself by looking at traffic rankings in Alexa. Check out Expedia, Booking .com and Trip Advisor and pay particular attention to the Clickstream tab. It will show you Upstream and Downstream sites visited immediately before and after. You’ll see a relationship between Google, travel sites and Trip Advisor amongst others. There’s ample empirical evidence that guest prospects are searching, checking sites, validating in Trip Advisor, then going back to hopefully book!

We call it social “review” and think that its low-hanging fruit for getting your arms around ‘social’ in a way that’s actionable, manageable, measurable and has a direct effect on occupancy and ADR.  More on social review later but for a high-level overview of social in general, check out the Social Trends Report.

The post Role of Social ‘Review’ like Trip Advisor Exposed appeared first on RoomKey PMS.

For hoteliers of course, this is nothing new. Whether it was wars, SARS, economic meltdowns or whatever disaster de jour, change has been the norm since at least 2001. And while we came to realize that something was always going to affect travel, nobody was really quite prepared for the systemic changes that have been brought about by the Internet, and its companions, Social Media and Mobile.

Time was, guests came to you one of two ways; they (or their travel agent) called and reserved, or they walked in the front door. ‘Distribution’ has of course been radically altered in the Internet Age. And, while it’s easy to lay it at the feet of “the tech”, that misses the point, and hence a clue to a partial solution. The following quote from the subtitle of Clay Shirky’s 2007 book “Here Come Everybody” provides some insight into what’s happening, and thus some clues as to how to begin to manage it:

“Revolution doesn’t happen when society adopts new technology, it happens when society adopts new behaviors.”

Travelers have adopted new behaviors. It’s not the technology per se, it’s what they’re doing with it. Whether checking for a hotel on Expedia, then Trip Advisor, then pinging their friends on FaceBook, or checking out your branded website on their mobile phone or tablet, your guests come looking for you different ways, and in different places. And like it or not, when they come looking, you need to be there waiting for them. You need to be found, and you need to be relevant.

RoomKey went cloud-based long before anybody was calling it that so we understand both today’s technology, and more importantly, what people are doing with it. Because we’re hoteliers too, we understand that the only way to grow your business is 1) to steal share from the guy up the road, and 2) to protect more margin on every transaction. We understand that when you boil away some of the seeming complexity and moving parts of the hotel business, it all comes down to occupancy and ADR. Those two things flow from customers, and we have some pretty relevant experience with them as well.

The hotel business is not the first industry to deal with discount challenges. You already know that typically the customer you acquire with price, will be lost the same way. Industry research has shown that volume lift generated with discount rarely pays back the lost margin. Frequently it also devalues your existing clientele while slowly trading them down for a lower value customer. Fred Reichheld, the author of “The Loyalty Effect” referred to this as ‘adverse selection’. All of this is utterly consistent with the experiences of other industries facing similar volume and margin challenges.

What these industries found is that ultimately, the way you acquire and retain better customers is with a quality product , at a fair (not cheap) price, and great service. In other words… the basics. The catch is, you still have to get it all in front of today’s ‘connected consumer’.

So the bad news is… there’s no Silver Bullet. But the good news is… that you can proactively manage the challenges of identifying, engaging, acquiring, retaining and growing more, and more profitable guests! And we can help.

As we move into 2013, we will use this space to listen,  discuss and inform. We’ll share our perspective as hotelier’s, and we’ll share the knowledge we bring from outside the industry to provide some added perspective. Our objective will be to try to lay bare some of the issues, and to present approaches that can help. Mostly we’ll try to simplify and make more manageable some of the seemingly intractable changes all of us are dealing with. We’ll seek to be a voice of reason and trust.

Happy New Year! It’s going to be a great 2013!

The post Happy New Year! Bring on 2013! appeared first on RoomKey PMS.

The Tasklist offers accountability to items being completed and also provides a nice reminder to the Front Desk Agents.  We all get busy and being focused on our guests is always priority number 1, however, some things can get missed.  It also gives the Front Desk another form of communication (we can never share too much information with each other) as they can add any comments to the items on the list:

To use this feature, checkout the detailed instructions on pages 40 – 57 on the following manual: https://www.welcometorsi.net/downloads/nanoRep/LogBook/LogBook.pdf

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